Eddy Amoo, of soul band the Real Thing, at home in Liverpool. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer. The real thing is right here on the scrubbing floors level of the nitty-gritty work of getting a tiny little family unit to function properly. The Real Thing, a Liverpool based vocal group, had its origins in the Merseybeat boom of the 1960s. Lead Singer Chris Amoo was a former band member of The Chants. ![]() The Real Thing - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)The search to discover what happened to the actor who played. The Real Thing: soundtrack to the Toxteth riots . But there was another song on the summer breeze in 1. Catharine Street at the edge of the riot zone, in the so- called . A special Liverpool 8 song which would, many years later, become a huge hit for Phil Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire, Courtney Pine and latterly Mary J Blige. Yes, in the age of Auto-Tune, Celine Dion is the real thing. THE REAL THING is a short documentary about custom hot rod builder BODIE STROUD and his re-imagining of a classic Mustang by way of an extremely rare and powerful. Buy The Real Thing: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter's Notebook on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders.
But not many people in America (nor many in England either) know that . Even fewer know that it was composed by the same band . But the Liverpool 8 anthem by the same group, written beforehand in 1. But before it had been composed, Eddy and Chris Amoo, the brothers at the band's core, had already written an epic three- part eulogy to Liverpool 8, of which . When it was released after the two disco anthems, says Eddy Amoo now, more in bewilderment than bitterness, . Eddy arrives indoors from the garden, bare- topped and sodden with rain and sweat after an evidently strenuous workout; he is scarily fit for a man in his 6. They say every picture tells a story . I'm a Liverpool 8 kid from a mixed- race family . We grew up in Tennyson Street, which has been knocked down now, and race was never an issue. I didn't even know I was black until my mother finally got us a flat in Myrtle Gardens. We were the first black family in Myrtle Gardens, and that's when I started to be called a nig- nog. The boys thought it was cool, or funny, the thing to do. Because pretty soon the same boys were coming round to ask my mum, 'Is Eddy around?'. Only one day, just as the blade landed in Eddy's grasp, . I saw it all in slow motion, and I still can: I looked around, and everyone had gone. Arrested and charged, Eddy was, he says, . And in there, everyone was 'Hey bro, doesn't matter what you do, you're here for life, so you might as well have a laugh'. But I thought, 'Is this going to be my life? I got the break, while my friends learned their politics in jail. I teamed up with my mates, and we formed the Chants. I asked who was playing, and my mates said it was a band with this funny name, the Beatles. When they played, I was gobsmacked . Then Paul said, 'Come on stage with us tonight'. So we came back that evening, only by then Brian Epstein was there, and he said, 'My group doesn't back anyone.' But they went into a huddle, and John Lennon insisted, like, and we did it, played with the Beatles. Amoo recalls going to a concert by Tamla Motown stars including the Supremes and Stevie Wonder touring Britain, but playing to sparsely filled halls. I was about 2. 6 when Shaft came out, and at last we had a real black hero . When his younger brother Chris founded the Real Thing in 1. Eddy was not only coaching them musically but offering them . Soon he joined the band himself. They launched their career by coming under the wing of the legendary soul manager Tony Hall, and pairing up with David Essex. When the Amoo brothers wrote the . But soon after he had composed what is in retrospect the anthem of black British ghetto soul, continues Amoo, . The record company wanted something commercial, they wanted a hit. So we did it, to shut them up basically, get them off our back, and it got to number one. I saw the whole thing as a big digression, but David Essex took me aside and said: 'Too late, mate, they're not going to let you stop now.' And hey, who doesn't want to be number one if you come from Liverpool 8? Since which, by some cruel twist, . We still have our public. We still play a show at the Liverpool Philharmonic every two years, we sell it out, we do 'Children of the Ghetto' and they go wild. But on the great stage, we're a ghost band ? Why should the song that finished them illuminate the careers of Phil Bailey and Mary J Blige? It is a conversation comprising theories, but no real answers. And yes, I do dare to have this feeling that if we'd put that album out and we came from Chicago it would not have finished our careers. In Britain, it's different for some reason. It's always 'we'll do this for the Africans, we'll do this for the Muslims', or whatever, and fine. But the black British: it's 'oh, they're OK, they'll be all right'. It was like that in 1. Why is it that there simply is not a voice in music and the arts for the black British? It's not racism like the National Front, in your face . It was an online form, so it had these computer options: 'Black African, Black West Indian, Black Other, Rather Not Say'. Actually, she's Liverpool- born black: so she's African, West Indian, Irish and Portugese. I said: 'Put that you're Black British, love.' And she said: 'It's one of those computer forms where you have to choose an option, and it's not there, so there's no way I can be that, Mum'. People who had become politically intelligent the hard way, politically knowledgeable. And when it happened, part of me thought . It's come to this, and this is what it takes'.
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