The Real Thing

May 1980's Greatest Hits album arrived just a few months too early to claim absolute completeness -- the band's final British chart single, "She's a Groovy Freak", would be released that November. Nevertheless, it rounds up everything else that any casual Real Thing fan could wish for, drawing from a sequence of nine Top 60 smashes that wholly justified the band's claim to be Britain's best-selling Black group of the late 1970s.



It is a fascinating journey. The joyful "You To me Are Everything" and the sincere "Can't Get By Without You", from the group's debut album, still luxuriate in the air of absolute freshness that Real Thing brought to the British soul scene upon their emergence in 1976. Thereafter, although the strength of their singles declined with their chart positions, picking up only when 1979's "Can You Feel The Force" hit the Top 5, both "Love's Such a Wonderful Thing" and "Raining Through my Sunshine" certainly pack as much melodic punch as the quartet's earlier work.



Of course Greatest Hits has since been utterly superceded by subsequent CD collections, most notably the Children of the Ghetto anthology. Nevertheless, it remains a handy bite-sized introduction to the band. ~ Amy Hanson, All Music Guide