The Number Fortys: Real Life - "Send Me An Angel"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either), and here concludes our introduction.

This surprisingly muscular piece of synthpop came from Australia's Real Life. It's possible their Australian-ness supplied the muscles. Apocryphal stories abound about how Aussie bands in the 70s/80s had to pay their dues playing to bars full of thick-necked dudes in white tank-tops throwing cans of Fosters at them or something. Regardless of how true the stories are (I'm pretty sure the Go-Betweens mostly played art colleges), it certainly explains how AC-DC, Midnight Oil had a certain toughness in their music. The first two examples are (I hope) obvious, but don't sleep on INXS. There's a toughness in their music that you don't find in say, New Order. Here's their song Guns In The Sky (it's a 7).



Most New Wave artist subject matter--and Real Life is extremely New Wave sounding--revolved around two major subjects: nuclear annihilation and/or sex. Real Life picked the latter on this one (Modern English picked both on "I Melt With You," which came out in 1982 and never cracked the Top 40 in any country; it's a 10). Send Me An Angel is about a person who is desperately longing for love. Even as he tells us he Don't know what to do, he also gives us advice Don't tell a lie / Don't be false or untrue (I give this advice a 7; while it's important to have a relationship based in honesty, sometimes a partner will ask what you're thinking and it's better to keep it to yourself). There a weird line about If  a girl walks in and carves here name in my heart / I'll turn and run away. Which, is he's speaking literally, is good advice. Otherwise, it maybe just suggests the sexual confusion--of preference, of pressure--that embodies adolescence.

Who the fuck knows? This song didn't become a sorta hit (it went on to reach #29 in the US) on the strength of its lyrics. Send Me An Angel possesses an intensity that's rare for chart-sniffing synthpop. It's propelled by a bassline of eight notes that wouldn't sound out of place a few later on a Pixies record. And then there's the popcraft, those four notes after he sings the title line during the chorus that sounds almost celestial, and is the kind of touch that wouldn't be out of place in an ABBA song.





 With its encouraging cries of Don't give up and promises that You can be lucky in love make the song an It Gets Better message decades before the movement, or the internet existed. Send Me An Angel probably saved a few lives back in its day, and that's no small feat.

Also, it's fun to take the word angel, in song about angels, and change it to angle. Here's my favorite song about angels. It's by Half Japanese, and it's an 8.



Real Life had a drum machine they named Gloria. Echo and the Bunnymen had a drum machine named Echo that they replaced with a human named Pete de Freitas. de Freitas died in a motorcycle accident in 1989; I give his crash a 0. But I give the song, and its Phil Manzanera-esque guitar solo (New Wave is unimaginable without Roxy Music) a 7.

THE NUMBER ONE

Paul and Michael were still at #1. We covered it last installment, but I just want to add that the ensemble acting in this video is pretty damn fine, especially by Linda.