Gig review: The Real Thing at Leeds City Varieties Music Hall
Stalwart 50 years on from their chart-topping breakthrough, the Liverpool soul favourites see their half-century catalogue offered up with lissome friction and velvety heft.
1976 left its marks on the British national consciousness; drought and Double Decker, Concorde and Callaghan, the Selby Coalfield and the Sex Pistols. So too did it bring The Real Thing to the summit of the pop charts through You to Me Are Everything, solidifying its brothers Chris and Eddie Amoo as more than just Opportunity Knocks breakouts and backing hands for David Essex.
For a brief summer, they were ubiquitous; the era’s best-selling homegrown black group poised for soul posterity.
Fifty years on, the road may have not been paved with gold. But Chris and fellow founder Dave Smith remain stalwart beneath the band’s moniker, flagbearers of a bygone era still celebrating their stateside-infused invocation of Motown funk.
Now into their mid-seventies, the pair land in Leeds for a celebratory engagement of light entertainment proportions; as the onetime home of The Good Old Days, the City Varieties Music Hall is fittingly suited to their throwback mood.
With a chunky Toxeth accent that spins on a dime to butter-whipped tenor, Amoo carries himself with the seasoned patter of a stage pro – skills perhaps also toned by a second career as a dog trainer that earned Best in Show at Crufts back in 1987.
Even if he has lost a little of the weight behind his range, there remains a velvety heft to flex. Can’t Get By Without You, still timeless in its Withers-esque rhythm chassis, feels particularly potent; Children of the Ghetto further ticks the tempo down on an already unhurried R&B lament into something more emotively plaintive, as a tribute for absent friends.
There is no Eddie, who passed in 2018, nor the late Ray Lake, far longer departed. These kinds of fragile bereavements naturally hum beneath the melodies; age, life and the past encroaching on an uncertain hourglass future. But for now, Amoo and Smith remain determined to soldier on, their crack band determined to enliven their legacy with lissome friction.
Can You Feel the Force still offers up the same brass-smash disco fever it did half-a-century ago, replete with a delirious outbreak of Saga-age dance moves in the aisles; You to Me Are Everything proves so delightful that the duo encore it immediately after for an acapella singalong that catches on the key chain.
“I do forget the words sometimes,” Amoo quips. No matter. The Real Thing have enough love to keep them in mind.