Part of a Concert Review from The Wall Street Journal
January 6, 1999 —by Anne Midgette

NEW YORK—Standing around the mikes in a recording studio taping a radio show, still bleary from jet lag at the start of their American tour, the members of the British vocal sextet the King’s Singers come off like choirboys who have spent their leisure hours watching too much “Monty Python.” When the sound engineer asks each member to test his mike, bass Stephen Connolly puts on a Donald Duck voice.

“There’s something wrong,” pipes up baritone Gabriel Crouch, at age 25 the youngest and tallest in the group. “This mike is making Stephen sound like a duck.” Stephen quacks again, clears his throat as baritone Philip Lawson tunes the group on a pocket harmonica, and launches into a chorus of “Jingle bells, Batman smells.”

“Stephen’s been with the group 10 years,” complains countertenor David Hurley,“and every year he still thinks that ‘Batman smells’ thing is funny.”
Boys will be boys. Still, the King’s Singers have taken a boys’-choir-based sound and turned it into an instrument that’s produced more than 60 recordings and commissioned some 200 works of (more or less serious) modern music in the group’s 30 years of existence. You could say that they pioneered “crossover” before “crossover” became de rigueur on the classical vocal scene...

But for all their flexibility, the Singers never stray far from their choirboy roots, in terms of their sound as well as their humor...

The King’s Singers represent something of a foolproof recipe for success in today’s music world. They are young, affable and funny, and they produce music that is at once interesting and easy to listen to...