An interesting and entertaining documentary on Liverpool born-and-bred pop-soul band The Real Thing who had a good measure of U.K. success in the late 70's and also a mini-revival in the mid-80's. Their story is to!d in traditional film-biographical fashion, relating their story from back-to-front, with archival footage of the band"s beginnings and commercial breakthrough with comments from the still-extant band members (sadly, one group member Eddie Amoo died just after making his contributions here), friends, associates and admiring contemporaries.
The group's roots in fact go all the way back to the original Merseybeat boom of the early 60's when Eddie Amoo was in a highly regarded but commercially unsuccessful all-black Liverpool-born vocal group The Chants which leads to some almost inevitable Beatles-related anecdotes, which despite some pictorial evidence to the contrary, sounded a little apocryphal to me. It might have been nice for someone to have contacted Paul McCartney to contribute a cameo interview to add a little credence to some of these early 60's memories.
The group proper formed in 1972 and garnered initial success by winning popular TV talent show of the day, "Opportunity Knocks" but sadly there's no existing footage of their appearances. Lasting success finally arrived for them in 1976 with two cracking pop-soul songs presented to them by the outside songwriting team of Gold and Denne, "You To Me Are Everything" and "Can't Get By Without You" but the group was keen to record their own material and spurned a third surefire hit from the same team to record a change-of-pace ballad of their own. Although that song, "You'll Never Know What You're Missing" made the charts, it didn't do as well as its predecessors and perhaps some momentum was lost. Certainly they were never quite as popular again, although they did have their moments.
Their later highlights included one more big hit, the "Star Wars"-inspired "Can You Feel The Force", considerable success in the mid-80"s albeit with remixes of their earlier hits and in particular the recording of their ground-breaking, critically-acclaimed social-commentary album "4 From 8" even if wasn't successful at the time.
Of course, being a rock documentary, there are inevitably downsides to the story too, the biggest of which involved one of the band members struggling to beat a drink and drug addiction and eventually being sacked just before committing suicide through a drug overdose. In addition, there was their misguided decision to play Sun City in South Africa with their old benefactor David Essex. You also have to wonder how they got through what Neil Sedaka called "The Hungry Years" before they were able to benefit from playing the nostalgia circuit which they apparently still do today. One positive element I was pleased to see was that this one time a group actually revered their manager, (who did indeed name them after a Coca Cola advert) and so didn't have any hard-done-by grievances to report on that front.
There are big claims made for the group by their supporters here as regards their significance to black culture then and now and I'm not going to argue with them. The black Beatles they weren't but they all seemed like decent guys and fairly modest and humble about their achievements.
In the end I'd probably agree that they were a well named group.
