Johnny Young wrote the song for his and one of Meldrum's friends, singer
Ronnie Burns. Young originally envisaged it as a slow acoustic ballad in the style of
The Beatles' "
Strawberry Fields Forever", but when Meldrum heard Young playing it backstage during a taping of the TV pop show
Uptight, he was determined to secure the song for Morris, reportedly going to Young's home that night with a tape recorder and refusing to leave until Young had taped a
demo version of the song for him. In collaboration with studio engineer John Sayers, Meldrum radically transformed "The Real Thing" from Young's original vision of a simple acoustic ballad into a heavily produced studio masterpiece, extending it to an unheard-of six minutes and forty seconds in length and overdubbing the basic track with many additional instruments, vocals and sound effects. According to Sayers, the song's innovative arrangement and production developed fortuitously during the recording of the backing track at
Armstrong's Studios. The track used 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. Guitarist
Roger Hicks from
Zoot composed and played the song's distinctive acoustic guitar intro, and Billy Green (now known as Wil Greenstreet) played electric lead guitar and
sitar. "The Real Thing" was originally only intended to be the standard duration for a pop single at that time—around three minutes—but once that point had been reached in the recording session, the backing band continued to play. Impressed by what they heard, Meldrum and Sayers kept the tape rolling until the band eventually 'broke down', thereby capturing an extended ten-minute 'jam' based around the chord changes of the chorus. This inspired Sayers and Meldrum to create an entirely new arrangement; and, during additional sessions, they created an extended outro for the song by editing various sections of the studio 'jam' together and combining them with additional voices, instruments and sound effects. The final product was a swirling psychedelic collage of music and sound effects which included deliberate edits and instrument drop-outs of the backing track (anticipating the Jamaican
dub experiments of the 1970s) and an ominous spoken-word "buyer beware" message (suggestive of the
LSD trip experience) which was Meldrum's heavily filtered voice reading aloud from the product disclaimer on an
Ampex recording tape box. The final edit was further processed by applying the then-novel studio effect known as
flanging, in which two identical copies of the recording were played together but slightly out-of-phase with each other, producing a rich 'swooshing' sound effect around the music. The children's choir singing toward the end was sourced from an archive recording of a WWII
Hitler Youth choir singing "Die Jugend Marschiert" (Youth on the March) and the song concludes dramatically with the children's choir shouting "Sieg Heil!" immediately followed by the cataclysmic sound of an atomic bomb explosion. The single is reported to have cost A$10,000, a typical budget for an entire album at the time, making it the most expensive single then recorded in Australia. "The Real Thing" became a national number-one hit for Morris in mid-1969 and is widely considered to be one of the finest Australian pop-rock recordings of the era. "The Real Thing" was added to the
National Film and Sound Archive's
Sounds of Australia registry in 2013. ==Track listing==