https://tinyurl.com/comeandseetherealthing
In 1966 Johnny Young scored a national number #4 hit with a cover of The Beatles tune "All My Loving" which later became Johnny’s signature song. While promoting this song on an East coast tour he met and struck up a lifelong friendship with Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees. Hot on the heels of winning a 1967 Logie Award for “Best Teenage Personality” Johnny relocated to London and moved into a flat with Barry. It was thru the encouragement of The Bee Gees that Johnny began dabbling in song writing. The Carnaby Street scene put Johnny in a good frame of mind, and it was in January 1968 (back home in Oz) that he wrote “The Real Thing” as a reaction against the Coca-Cola jingle “Coke Is The Real Thing.” Johnny was practising “The Real Thing” back stage in a dressing room during taping of TV pop music show Uptight! when pop producer Ian “Molly” Meldrum chanced to hear it. Ian Meldrum predicted the song a hit and insisted that Johnny cut a demo of if for an artist he was currently managing, a young groovy dude with golden tonsils by the name of Russell Morris….
As 1967 turned into 1968, Russell Morris left his job fronting Melbourne rock band Somebody’s Image and took band manager Ian Meldrum with him. One day, Ian played Russell a demo tape of a Johnny Young song titled “The Real Thing,” which Johnny envisaged as a slow acoustic ballad in the style of The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Ian, of course, had other plans. He immediately set up a collaboration with studio engineer John Sayers to magically transform "The Real Thing" into a heavy studio masterpiece. He enlisted the services of The Groop as backing band, with vocal contributions from Danny Robinson (Wild Cherries), The Chiffons Maureen Elkner, Sue Brady and Judy Condon, and guitarist Roger Hicks from Zoot — who came up with the song’s distinctive acoustic guitar intro. The tape started rolling with sights set on the average 3-minute pop song, but the arrangement and production developed fortuitously because once the 3-minute point had been reached The Groop just kept on playing, which impressed Ian and John no end so they just kept the tape rolling. This jam inspired additional sessions in which an extended 'outro' was created by editing various sections together and combining them with additional voices, instruments and sound effects. There’s a swirling psychedelic collage of deliberate edits and Jamacian dub 'dropouts' of the backing track, as well as Ian Meldrum's heavily filtered voice reading aloud from the product disclaimer on an Ampex recording tape box: “Buyer Beware!” The final edit was flange processed, which is two identical copies of the recording played together but slightly out-of-phase with each other, producing a rich 'swooshing' sound effect around the music. There’s also a children's choir singing toward the end sourced from an archive recording of a WWII Hitler Youth singing "Die Jugend Marschiert" (Youth on the March). And if that ain’t enough, the song concludes with the choir shouting "Seig Heil! Seig Heil!” and the cataclysmic sound of an atomic bomb exploding.
All this from an affronted reaction to the Coca-Cola commercial “Coke is the real thing” - #farout
