How to collect Real Life

I've usually built a post around featuring a song, and had a video or audio file link embedded in the post. I'm doing just a "normal" post today, though, because I've been listening to a lot of Real Life. I hadn't exactly forgotten about Real Life, of course, but I also hadn't thought about them in many months if not even a couple of years now until accidentally stumbling across a "Send Me An Angel" YouTube video. I've spent a fair bit of time reacquainting myself with them. Or him, I should say; for a number of years now, Real Life is just David Sterry, the vocalist, sometime guitar player, main songwriter and general front man for the group from the beginning. He's still on friendly terms with at least a couple former bandmates, at least to hear him talk about it, but he's the only one still doing it.

As I said in my last post, the original output of the band is somewhat limited. And sadly, much of what they've done over the years is now out of print and difficult, if not impossible, to still find. This was true even when I was attempting to run down their stuff in the late 80s. Depending on how you count it, Real Life have had six albums of original output, starting in 1983 and the most recent in 2020, which isn't a lot. But they've also had a number of other tracks released here and there as exclusives on various compilations of previously released material, and honestly, those compilations have been more readily available for a long time anyway.

The original Real Life release was Heart Land in 1983. It has ten tracks. It wasn't available for a long time, but you can now get it pretty easily as a streaming or mp3 album from Amazon, and you can listen to it on YouTube readily enough. I couldn't get it in 1988-90 or so when I was looking, but most of the tracks on it are available on the two compilations that were available at that time. Four tracks are not, three of which are definitely worth getting. Three other tracks are on the compilations, but not in the exact mix or version that you got on the Heart Land album. This was especially noticeable on the two songs that were hits; "Send Me an Angel" and "Catch Me I'm Falling". The latter was just a shorter album version than the compilation version which otherwise sounded very similar, but the "Send Me an Angel" version was more different. The 1983 version wasn't available for quite some time.

Flame was the next release. Although it never even got a CD release (at least in America) at all that I can see, it did, apparently, get an vinyl and cassette release. I never saw it, though. There's nothing on this album that isn't available on compilations, except for the song "Take My Breath Away" (no relation to the Berlin song of the same name) and I think the album version of "Let's Fall in Love" might be a bit different than the compilation version, but not substantially so. There are also ten tracks on this one.

Down Comes the Hammer was next, and while not exactly a compilation, it had a lot of pre-released material on it. Out of nine tracks, only three were new. I never saw this released anywhere either, and it never got a CD release or a digital release of any kind, but everything on it is now available somewhere else at least, although one or two tracks (like "Night After Night") will have to be bought on a used CD. Some of the versions on this are alternate versions; the "Send Me an Angel" track is the "Master Mix" EP version, for instance, a label exclusive remix EP. Since both Master Mix and Down Comes the Hammer aren't available easily, that's dicey, but in general, I find alternate versions less compelling than actual different songs.

When I was looking for Real Life stuff in the late 80s, it was the two compilations released in 1989 that I found available. Other than the 1983 version of "Send Me an Angel" (which could be found on various movie soundtracks, I'll note) and four other Heart Land songs and one Flame song, between the two compilations you could get everything on those first three albums already, sometimes in multiple versions (like for "Bleeding Babies") and the '89 version of "Send Me An Angel" was quite a bit better than the 1983 version anyway (in my opinion, of course.)

Curiously, the first of those compilations, "Send Me an Angel '89" has gone out of print, and then been re-released again as Send Me an Angel: Best Of. In doing so, nine of the ten tracks (and the track order) is completely unchanged, but "Night After Night" has been replaced with a radio version of "Let's Fall in Love." This makes "Night After Night" unavailable in any digital format, and "Let's Fall in Love" available in two versions. While this was probably a smarter move for an actual Best Of compilation, it's a little unfortunate because now one song isn't available, and the other is available in two similar (although obviously not identical) versions. Given that both of the compilation CDs are only ten tracks each, they probably should have gone with a longer tracklist that has some bonus tracks or alternate versions or something. From the entirety of the 80s, there are only six tracks that aren't available on one of these two ten track compilations. We've got two versions each of "Send Me An Angel" and "Let's Fall in Love." It wouldn't have killed them to bump the track count up to 15 on each of those, given us a the original album versions of "Send Me an Angel," "Let's Fall in Love" and "Catch Me I'm Falling" as well as the other six missing songs, and maybe a single-release b-side or remix to round it out.

Both of these compilations are still readily available, at least in the re-released state for the first one, on Amazon as CDs or as mp3s/streaming. They're both available on YouTube, and I believe also on Spotify and iTunes.

Lifetime was released in 1990. Also ten tracks. It has the minor dance hits "God Tonight" and "Kiss the Ground" as well as some non-hit excellent tracks (in my opinion.) It's also mostly been readily available and in print since its release, at least in digital/streaming if not CD form.

Happy was released in 1997. It has ten tracks, but every release of it that I've ever seen includes two bonus alternate version tracks. It has been out of print for some time and is difficult to find; luckily for me I've had a CD version of it since sometime in the late 90s. It's a more grungy, 90s sounding album, so it's not my favorite, but it does have a few standout tracks.

Imperfection was released in 2003 on the American great synthpop indie-label A Different Drum. That label is now defunct, and the album is, as near as I can tell, completely unavailable. You can't even find bootleg YouTube uploads of most of the tracks on it. It's just completely AWOL. I didn't pick this one up, more's the pity, because now I don't know how I even could if I wanted to. While the album itself had 11 tracks, it had a bonus disc 2 with 11 additional remixes and alternate versions. Mostly of tracks from the actual Imperfection album itself, but there was also a remix of "God Tonight."

In 2009 Real Life released 80s Synth Essentials which is difficult to find on CD, but you can buy as mp3 or hear streaming easily enough. It's mostly an album of cover songs, done solely by Dave Sterry (his band was down to just him at the time) and released on Cleopatra Records. Apparently, when Cleopatra proposed it to him, which they sought him out to do so, the only thing that they asked was that he pick songs that weren't too obscure, and that he not do something so radical with them that they weren't recognizable. In general, I'd suggest that the covers have a bit of a light touch. Sterry said that there were a few other tracks that he'd liked to have done, but couldn't make versions of them that sounded good, either because the vocal range was too wonky, or something else, including (unidentifed) tracks by Alphaville, The Cars, and Iggy Pop. This CD has 15 tracks, but only 12 of them are covers. There's a new version of "Send Me an Angel", although it's not remarkably different than the '89 version, as well as two 1983 versions; the 1983 album version and 12" version, tacked on as extras for the fans.

Finally, in 2020 Real Life released Sirens, the most recent release. It only has six tracks, but one track is really five songs in one, so it follows the very traditional ten-song format that most of the Real Life albums have done. I just got it recently, so I'm not yet ready to comment on it other than so far I found only one song to be kind of a dud. Not a bad ratio. I'm going to break up the long track into it's constituent songs and have them as mp3s on my phone in that format rather than all jammed together. My Amazon mp3 download has one title for the entire track, but discogs gives subtitles for each of the constituent songs: "Sirens (Sirens - Siren's Song - Hole in My Sole - Out in the Solar System - Melt)"

The complete and total unavailability of anything from Happy or Imperfections is of course disappointing, as is the somewhat difficult availability of a few tracks from the 80s. Then again, sometimes the post-80s output of a band that's pretty iconic to the 80s is often not seen as nearly as essential. I got Happy fairly early, and while there's nothing wrong with it, I often feel kinda "meh" about it. So much so, that I didn't buy Imperfections when I had the chance to get it easily, which I now kind of wish that I had. But with only one or two exceptions, all of their 80s output is now pretty readily available, and I include Lifetime in that even though it was released in 1990, because culturally it's still very much an 80s album. If you really want to track down "Night After Night" pretty much the only one to track down that might be a little difficult.

I'll note that for whatever reason the album version of "Catch Me I'm Falling" on the version of Heart Land that's available now is not actually quite the same version as available on the original album, which seems (I believe) to be identical to the original 7" version of the song. If extremely similar alternate versions are your thing, you'll have to track down the out of print original album release, or the original single. And by original, I mean the Wheately label single released in Australia; everyone else got the 4 minute version instead of the 3 and a half minute version, for some reason. But the original American release had the three and a half minute version; the current version, however, does not. The original original version, if you can find it, is a fair bit different and worth checking out. You'll probably have to get an Aussie import, though, or play a bootleg YouTube copy or something.

EDIT: I see, actually, that Imperfections is available on bandcamp. I'll pick it up later today, and then see what else is kicking around on that account. Looks like a double album version of Happy is there too, with loads of remixes, from what was once the bonus disc 2 remix album Happier.

Catch Me I'm Falling by Real Life

I've actually posted this song before, but it was a long time ago, and I notice that the YouTube link I used is now dead. Kind of by accident I stumbled across Real Life online again just a day or two ago. Of course, it's not like I didn't already know Real Life; I've been a big fan for a long time. I've often said that they're my favorite Aussie band, and a truly under-rated band of the 80s overall. But are they really that under-rated? Maybe that's not entirely fair.

Real Life have sometimes (and not unfairly) been characterized as a one-hit wonder, referring of course to "Send Me an Angel" which is their most memorable song, the one that seems to always get referred to, and the one that they continue to tinker with, re-release and include on compilations. And this is the sense in which I wonder if Real Life is truly under-rated, or if maybe they're... well, appropriately rated. The reality is that Real Life's output hasn't been all that much, and at some point in the early to mid-90s, David Sterry, the vocalist, ditched what was left of his band anyway, and went semi-solo, with a new guy and friend doing keyboards for him. This was probably a mistake in most respects. Their output was never all that high to begin with, and by far the most memorable tracks of the 80s were all on the first album, Heartland (1983). Real Life formed when Sterry answered an ad in a music magazine by Richard Zatorski. Sterry was a part time vocalist, guitar player and song-writer, and Zatorski was a keyboardist who wanted someone who help him put tracks together. After a short time playing a few gigs with a drum machine, they recruited a couple more band members; a regular drum player and bass player, and that was the line-up for Heartland. See; Heartland has most of the best tracks Real Life would do during the entirety of the 80s. Their follow-up in 1985, Flame isn't a bad piece of work, but few of the tracks on it would be considered memorable, or made any impact for that matter. 

Which is admittedly too bad, because tracks like "Let's Fall in Love" or "Face to Face" or even "One Blind Love," "Cathedral" or "The Longest Day" or "The Legend" all have something to recommend them. But they aren't anywhere near the same level of notability as "Send Me An Angel" or "Catch Me I'm Falling."

After that, Real Life lost Zatorski, who apparently left the band due to management pressure, went to law school and now is a practicing attorney in Melbourne. The band picked up a new keyboard player, but release three compilation albums in a row attempting to find an audience again, with a new song or two thrown in, like "Babies" written by outsiders (actually, the same songwriting duo who wrote "Obsession" and who recorded it before Animotion did, curiously. Just a small trivia moment. 

"Send Me An Angel" had been picked up for use in a few movie soundtracks, and started getting more attention. It was re-released in 1988 as a single, and actually charted better (in America, I mean) than it had in 1983. This remix/remake was repackaged with a different name in two slightly different versions on 1989's Send Me an Angel '89. This was widely available in the late 80s when I was actually in a position to pick it up, so I did. Loved it. Of course, it starts off with their three best tracks, "Send Me An Angel", "Catch Me I'm Falling" and "Face to Face." The second side starts out with an extended intro version of the "Send Me an Angel '89" version, and then gives us... well, a number of less memorable tracks. They're not bad, but its clear that the album leans heavily on its best work right away. 

I had this on cassette, but I noticed that there was also another fix-up compilation of theirs readily available, called Let's Fall in Love which leads off with... "Let's Fall in Love." It has an alternate version of "Babies" or "Bleeding Babies" compared to the other compilation, but otherwise, contains much of the rest of the 80s output of the band that the first compilation didn't. There's some good songs on it, but it's obviously not quite as memorable as the first readily available fix-up.

Then at the very end of the decade, 1990, they released a club thumper "God Tonight" and the first actual new album in years, Lifetime. I really quite like Lifetime as a New Wave dance music album, but it's hard to argue that it was obviously written to be a bit more club friendly and less mainstream commercially accessible than Heartland had been. After Lifetime, Sterry ditched the rest of his band (or they left), teamed up with George Pappas to give us the more late 90s time capsule industrialized synthpop album Happy. Which I also like in many ways, but it's even less commercially accessible. Then again; what are you gonna do when the 90s was deliberately nasty for my good old synthesizer New Wave bands, and most of them, if they chugged along at all, did so with depleted line-ups, and often on indie labels, because mainstream wasn't having it anymore. Most of them experimented with a grungier, more industrial sound too during this era, although by 1997 when Happy came out, regular synthpop sounds were starting to become more mainstream again if "Believe" by Cher or Ray of Light by Madonna is any indication.

It was at this point that I kind of lost Real Life. I've never listened to Imperfection even though it was released by A Different Drum (I actually wasn't all that interested when they trotted out some older 80s icon to release something new, and preferred their own independent artists during much of the late 90s and early 00s.) More recently, Real Life has self-released a new album called Sirens which I also haven't heard, but you can buy it as an mp3 from Amazon, or listen to it on Spotify. They call it "progtronica" or something like that, and it starts off with a nearly 17-minute concept/story track like the old 70s prog rock guys like Styx used to sometimes do.

Somewhere in there I replaced by old Send Me An Angel '89 cassette with the CD The Best of Real Life. This is sometimes billed as the same album re-released, but that's not exactly true. It has a wildly different cover art and trade dress, even though it's the same label, and one of the second side tracks is swapped out for a radio version of "Let's Fall in Love." In general, I'd suggest that that's a decent move, since "Let's Fall in Love" was a better track than "Night After Night"—except that I already have "Let's Fall In Love" on another compilation, and that one's still available. They really kind of sank any reason to pick Let's Fall in Love the compilation up except for completion's sake, since most of the tracks on it are the more forgettable half of what was released on Heartland and Flame while the Best Of, (which isn't really, because it only has the 80s stuff, not anything from Lifetime) has the more memorable half.

Finally, in 2009 Real Life re-released "Send Me An Angel" again with a new version. This is a pretty good version, but it's not really so significantly different from the '89 version that it's worth picking up for just that. I actually think it's a slightly better version, by a very slim margin, but given all of the nostalgia I had for the '89 version, I'm still more likely to turn to it. It was packaged with a cover album, though, of a bunch of 80s New Wave songs, and this is actually a really fun album that I do not hesitate to recommend at all. So, you'll get the 2009 version of "Send Me an Angel" along for the ride, which is fine because it's a great version of the track.

Anyway, enough I guess. Go check them out on YouTube or Spotify if you haven't. You can't get all of their work there; some of it is just plain hard to find and has been since I started looking in 1987 or so, but what is available is probably most of their best work anyway.

Lost by Camouflage

While I actually have all of the Camouflage albums (and a fair number of the singles and remixes) kicking around somewhere, I don't even have a vinyl player anymore, and I don't have them "at hand" where I can locate them without a substantive effort to figure out where they are. You don't need to anymore, of course, because you can play pretty much their entire body of work on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcc7ZHFTKUW4lbGP_f24bNQ

I'm in the middle of a playthrough of their entire body of "main" studio albums, with a handful of singles and remixes thrown in, although not the focus, in order, starting with their first album, Voices & Images and ending with their most recent (although now no longer so recent) Greyscale. They really are a good band. In fact, although I've never had the same emotional attachment to them that I had to Depeche Mode, or in some regards, even to De/Vision, most of their work is better than anything Depeche Mode has done in at least twenty years, and at least as good, if not better, than most of De/Visions. Although I've got to give De/Vision credit for having enough sheer volume that their number of good tracks is probably higher. Camouflage have had eight studio albums, and two Greatest Hits compilations, spread out from the late 80s until now. So, in other words, more than thirty years. 

Part of the reason that I don't have as much of an emotional attachment is that while I really liked Voices & Images, it did struggle in some ways because of the execrable English to make me take it quite as seriously as I'd have liked to. Later, their Methods of Silence album was somewhat more mediocre, without any tracks that stood out as prominently as "The Great Commandment" did ("Love Is a Shield" I know for sure I had on 12" vinyl, and probably still do in a box in my basement, but it simply wasn't as good of a song, and the remixes didn't grab me either.) Meanwhile was even worse, with really only one song that I (admittedly) really love a lot: "Heaven (I Want You)" and a bunch of other completely forgettable tracks. The next two albums either came out while I was out of the country not really listening to music, or they didn't have US releases and I didn't hear them until long after the fact. 2003's Sensor brought me back into the fold. It didn't have a US release either, but getting import CDs in 2003 was quite a bit easier than it had been in the 80s and 90s. Sensor is, in fact, such a great album that I think it might have a shot at being among the very best synthpop albums I've heard since 2000, even now (although I admit the scene has become large, indie and fragmented enough that I hardly hear everything that comes out anymore.) It's gloriously dark and sensual, in much the same way that Depeche Mode's work was at their peak, although a bit more "fuzzy" and grimy sounding. Track #6, "Lost" is one of my personal favorite songs from anyone ever, actually—highly recommended.

I haven't posted anything on this blog in a long time, and when I last did I was really diving into early hardstyle and hard trance. I still like those genres quite a bit, of course, but my older, more pure and deep love of darker synthpop has kind of taken over more again. It's time I posted an homage to the kinds of songs that I started this blog to talk about in the first place. 

Meanwhile (no pun intended) I'm struggling to get through my chronological listen-through right now, in the latter half of Meanwhile. It's not exactly painful, but it is certainly forgettable.