Ken Lewis

'60s British pop trio the Ivy League consisted of members John Carter, Ken Lewis (previous members of Carter-Lewis and the Southerners), and Perry Ford. All three members were session singers who possessed high-pitched singing voices, forming the group in 1964. Although an initial single quickly disappeared from sight, their second single, "Funny How Love Can Be," turned out to be a surprise U.K. Top Ten hit. Further hits followed, including "That's Why I'm Crying" and a cover of "Tossin' And Turnin'," the latter of which hit number three on the U.K. charts. The original trio managed to only release a single full-length album, 1965's This Is the Ivy League, before both Carter and Lewis left the group a year later…

Although volume four of RPM's Dream Babes series of 1960s British girl group sides gets further into obscure flops than its predecessors, there's barely any drop in the quality, which remains good, though hardly great. And as with most of the rest of the songs on this series, the production's better than the singers or the material. That's not to say there aren't some pretty good cuts on this 22-song anthology, some of them explicitly derivative of the American girl group sound (like the Chantelles' cracking "I Want That Boy," a cover of an obscure U.S. single by Sadina), others taking a pop-soul approach, others mixing in some British beat music.