John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez is perhaps most famous for being Madonna’s re-mixer (and for a short time, her boyfriend) in the early 80’s.

He is credited with having worked on her 1983 self titled debut album, including the singles Everybody, Borderline and Lucky Star.  He was also the producer for Holiday. But anyway, that’s enough about his knob-twiddling for others, what about his own singles?

Well admittedly, there was probably a wee bit of knob-twiddling on his own work too. However, in this respect, it was knob-twiddling in a making-his-own-noise kind of way (that’s enough knob-twiddling, Ed.)

He used guest artists to provide vocals – in a way that probably first became the in thing in the late ’80s.  The Real Thing was guested on by Steven Dante, a British Singer / Songwriter who himself had a list of credits primarily for working with others.

I haven’t noted when I bought this single, but it was released in the w/e 26th September 1987 so I’d imagine it wasn’t long after.  It was a smoulderer, never quite catching fire, on the UK Singles Chart, entering at number 51 before rising to number 13 where it spent 3 of its total of ten weeks.