Singer who took Liverpool back into the pop charts
Eddy Amoo’s band The Real Thing gained fame in the disco era, but he was proudest of his songs that carried a message
It bears, at first, all the hallmarks of 1970s Motown. A guitar strumming funk responds to a Rhodes piano played with a delay effect. The mood is slow, sultry, soulful – it looks to lead into an all-American romantic ballad.
But it does not. “Children of the Ghetto” is as Liverpudlian a tune as any by The Beatles. Written by
Scouse natives Eddy and Chris Amoo about the rundown neighbourhood of Toxteth in which they grew up, the song, released in 1977, came to represent the struggles and dreams of Liverpool’s impoverished minorities. In the summer of 1981, as riots broke out and Toxteth burned, “Children of the Ghetto” was the insurgent anthem that echoed around the city, giving the protestors hope.
Eddy Amoo was proudest of his work when it drove for social justice and spoke to his roots. But that is hardly what he is best known for. The Amoo brothers’ band, The Real Thing, gained national and international popularity in 1976 with its single “You To Me Are Everything”, which spent three weeks at the top of the UK singles chart. That song was the only number one hit he would ever get.
But even though its recording success was short-lived, The Real Thing left its mark on British music, spearheading a new generation of socially minded black artists and putting Liverpool, which had lost the pre-eminent status it enjoyed in the 1960s, back on the map. Sung by others, “Children of the Ghetto” would also become a popular protest song in America.
Edward Robert Amoo was born in 1944, the son of Robert, a Ghanaian seaman, and of Moya, a Liverpudlian of Irish and African descent. Growing up with little in Liverpool 8, the postal district that covers most of Toxteth, Amoo played with Irish, Welsh, African, West Indian and mixed-race children, and spent countless nights walking Stanhope Street, one of the area’s main thoroughfares, sometimes getting himself into trouble.
Racism, he said, only really became apparent to him when his family moved to a more affluent part of the city. “I didn’t even know I was black until my mother finally got us a flat in Myrtle Gardens,” he later said.
Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s was awash with different musical styles, a by-product of the port city’s openness to the world. In the bars and at dances, calypso and jazz mixed with doo-wop, rhythm and blues and rock’n’roll, while at home, Robert played highlife, a musical genre from Ghana. Amoo soaked up all these influences, though at first he wasn’t interested in making music himself.
At 11 he went to the Empire theatre to hear Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, an American rock’n’roll vocal act, and was transfixed. That and a brief incarceration convinced him to spend his time in a more worthwhile manner – with music. He joined his own teenage band, The Shades, which was soon renamed The Chants, and together they rehearsed in Stanley House, a social club in Toxteth that had a football pitch in the rear yard. After games, players would go inside and listen to the band sing doo-wop acapella. “We had no sort of interest in getting into the business,” Amoo later said, “but it was something to take us away from the fighting, the street thing.”
That changed one afternoon in 1962, when the Chants sang at a session in the Cavern Club. The Beatles, who had just released their debut single “Love Me Do”, were there. So impressed with The Chants’ performance were The Beatles that they decided to back the band that very evening at the club. Their manager Brian Epstein protested – the Beatles, he thought, should back no one – but the band did it anyway, and the Chants were mesmerised. For Amoo, there was no turning back after that.
Dressed identically in black suits and skinny ties, or in dark trousers and cream-coloured mandarin jackets, the Chants’ five band members started touring and recording. They produced consistently catchy songs and were plugged on television by The Beatles, who had not forgotten them. Still, sales were low, and after 13 years they split. “We came to realise that it wasn’t going to happen,” Amoo said.
Undeterred, the younger Amoo brother, Chris, decided to follow Eddy into music, and in 1970 he formed The Real Thing, which took its name from a Coca-Cola ad campaign. The band appeared on the talent show Opportunity Knocks; eventually it would also be on Top of the Pops.
Soon Amoo joined its ranks, trading in the soft harmonies and slick stage aesthetic of 1950s-inspired doowop for the exuberance of 1970s disco. The crowds loved it. In 1976, their single “You To Me Are Everything” went to number one, while “Can’t Be Without You” reached number two.
The Real Thing had become an international sensation – Liverpool’s first since the Merseybeat days. Never before had an all-black British band reached such heights.
But Amoo did not much like the jaunty tunes that made him famous, calling them a “big digression” from the “message songs” he longed to write. “I started to feel that I wanted to really project what had happened to me and the people that I’d grew up with in my songs,” he later said.
That was when The Real Thing released 4 From 8, an album to explore the four band members’ experiences of living in Liverpool 8. The album ended on a Toxteth triptych: “Liverpool 8”, “Children of the Ghetto” and “Stanhope Street”.
In “Children of the Ghetto”, the Amoo brothers revealed more of themselves than they had ever done. They wrote:
There’s no inspiration To brighten up the day So out of desperation I would like to say: Children of the ghetto Keep your head To the sky
The song became a Liverpool favourite. Eventually it would be covered by Philip Bailey, of Earth, Wind and Fire, feature on Spike Lee’s 1995 film Clockers, and become a go-to track for Mary J Blige when performing live, making it a popular protest song and earning the Amoo brothers considerable royalties.
But the album as a whole flopped. “It didn’t have that commercial edge you need,” Amoo said. “It was a naïve album.” Its overtly political message divided the band’s fans and, eventually, “’Children of the Ghetto’ finished us,” Amoo said.
The Real Thing was already in decline in 1983 when the band came under heavy scrutiny for its performance in Sun City, a South African resort that many international artists were boycotting, in opposition to Apartheid. Amoo called it “the greatest mistake we’ve ever made in our career”. When they returned to the UK, a regretful Amoo wrote: “Sun City is an Afrikaner’s paradise in a black man’s nightmare.”
After that, Amoo’s celebrity slowly waned. When he appeared in the identity parade segment of the BBC’s popular music programme Never Mind the Buzzcocks in 1999, the panellists failed to recognise him.
Still, The Real Thing continued to perform live in the decades that followed, mainly singing updated versions of their old hits, often to thunderous applause. The band was due to take part in a tour celebrating 40 years of disco when Amoo died. Amoo remained committed to Toxteth, setting up in 1988, with Chris, a property development company focused on rejuvenating the dilapidated buildings they had known as children. Their efforts have saved local churches and architecturally varied townhouses that contribute to the area’s distinct character, but that might otherwise have been torn down.
Amoo himself lived near Sefton Park, behind Toxteth, in his later years. On the wall of his office hang an old photograph of The Beatles alongside the Chants and local politicians, signed by Paul McCartney in memory of “great times”.
He remained fit into his sixties, saying his line of work required it. By then he had hung up the slick suits and flared trousers of his performing youth, but retained his signature big apple caps on stage, as well as his high-pitched singing voice.
Though he had some regrets about the way his bands’ legacies may be perceived, he generally did not take himself too seriously, sometimes finding it hard to keep a straight face during interviews.
Still, to the end, Amoo remained deadly serious when it came to Britain’s social ills. A little under a year ago, he compared his early days in Liverpool to the country’s divisions today: “Back in 1962 we couldn’t go into town unless we went mob-handed, because if we did, there’s a chance we’d be beaten up. We were typical angst-ridden teenagers competing against other teens who probably had the same problems as ourselves, all battling for the same piece of the cake. A bit like Brexit – Brexit came about because working-class people didn’t like the deal.”
This social conscience of Amoo also at times inspired goodness in others. He once paid a £100,000 bail for Stephen “The Devil” French, a then violent criminal from Toxteth who was engaged to one of his daughters. French later said that if anyone else had stood bail for him, he would have absconded as soon as he was on the outside. “But, of course, I couldn’t do that,” French said. “I couldn’t let Eddy down.” French turned up for court.
Amoo is survived by Sylvia, his wife of 54 years, and by their four daughters. Looking back in 2011 on the artists that inspired him in his youth, Amoo said: “We were empowered from
America by people like Curtis Mayfield and by What’s Going On. I was about 26 when Shaft came out, and at last we had a real black hero – not just a passive idol, but someone who was off the street and could make a difference. That was what he, too, tried to be.
Edward Robert ‘Eddy’ Amoo, singer-songwriter, born 4 May 1944, died 23 February 2018