The Real Thing are pleased to announce that for the past few months they have been busy filming a new feature-length documentary about their long and eventful career in music. Shot entirely on location in Liverpool, London, Bristol and Brighton, the movie features interviews with all the band members – Eddy Amoo, Chris Amoo and Dave Smith – as well as Ray Lake’s widow Gail – and includes illuminating contributions from many of the band’s famous friends, fans and fellow musicians.
The documentary tells the inspirational story of four working class boys born to immigrant parents in one of Liverpool’s toughest neighbourhoods. The streetwise quartet from Toxteth wrote and performed their own songs, and became Britain’s most enduring black soul and funk act ever. With a string of hits, they dominated the international charts throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with iconic songs like ‘You to Me Are Everything’ and ‘Can You Feel the Force’. But the group’s meteoric success was also tempered with racial prejudice and personal tragedy.
The band members have always been proud of their Liverpudlian roots, and their self-composed 1977 album ‘4 from 8’ celebrated their humble beginnings in the L8 postcode. The collection’s best-known track ‘Children of the Ghetto’ chronicled the group’s humble origins and has gone on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement, covered by the likes of Philip Bailey and Mary J Blige. The new documentary features never-before-seen material from the group’s archives, and amazing footage of them performing live on stage.
‘Everything – The Real Thing Story’ charts the rise of Liverpool’s musical pioneers, who fought discrimination to become the biggest-selling black group in UK pop history. This is a tale stranger than any fiction – an untold story of home-grown pop, painted against a backdrop of politics, funk and race, where four proud black boys took on the world, and changed British music forever.
‘Everything’ will be released in 2019. More info to come!