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.
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