Liverpudlian quartet the Real Thing, who tackled prejudice and challenged the pop status quo in the 70s, are the subject of Simon Sheridan’s fond and vital documentary
One day in 1972, a pop picker called Tony Hall was driving through Piccadilly Circus when he noticed a Coca-Cola billboard. He had a brainwave. The four promising black soul singers he was managing would have to change their name. No longer would they be called Vocal Perfection – a gift to hostile critics. Instead they became the Real Thing. Today, Coke’s rights department would shut that rebrand down before you could say “I’d like to teach the world to sing”.
Weeks later the Real Thing won Opportunity Knocks, and in 1976 became the first black
British band to get a No 1 hit with You to Me Are Everything. Everything: The Real Thing Story (BBC Four) travels back in time to the year when the quartet – Chris Amoo, Dave Smith, Kenny Davis and Ray Lake, later joined by Chris’s brother Eddie – supplied the soundtrack to the hottest summer in living memory. The heatwave only ended when Downing Street ordered sports minister Denis Howell to bust a rain dance in Birmingham. For black British people, though, that summer song meant so much more, especially when it was performed on Top of the Pops. In the 1970s, DJ Trevor Nelson recalled, the band was the antidote to the primetime unreality of the Black and White Minstrel Show and racist slurs as TV
comedy punchlines.