The Remarkable Real Life Story Of 'Send Me An Angel', The Aussie Song That Hit The US Top 40… Twice

Is this the greatest Australian New Romantic song of all time?

Forty years ago this week, Real Life’s Send Me An Angel entered the American Top 40.

Just 21 Aussie acts cracked the US Top 40 in the ’80s. But only one band did it twice with the same song. More on that soon.

In 1983, when Send Me An Angel was riding high on the Australian charts, American radio programming whiz Rick Carroll was in Sydney, working as a consultant at 2SM. He fell in love with Angel, took it back to the US and started flogging it on LA’s KROQ, a struggling station that he’d transformed into a hit-making machine.

Real Life would soon have an American record deal and a Top 40 hit. David Sterry’s days of driving a taxi were just a distant memory.

The Real Life story can be traced back to a Saturday in 1980 when Sterry’s friend spotted an ad in The Age: “Keyboard player looking for guitar player.”

“It was the one moment where everything changed,” Sterry says.

He called the number, and a musical partnership with Richard Zatorski was forged. Their initial gigs featured a Roland drum machine they affectionately called Gloria. But when they played their demo tape to Little River Band guitarist David Briggs, he told them: “It’s un-Australian not to have a drummer.” So, they said goodbye to Gloria, and Danny Simcic joined the band. With Allan Johnson on bass, they did gigs as A Private Life but changed their name to Real Life when a Sydney band named Private Lives threatened legal action.

They built a following supporting bands such as INXS, The Church, Mi-Sex and Midnight Oil. But times were tough. Zatorski and Johnson worked as waiters at the Hilton to supplement their meagre music income while Sterry drove a taxi. Often, he’d finish a gig, walk out the back door, jump in his taxi, drive around the front and pick up some confused punters. “Huh, weren’t you just on stage?”

“We were starving and broke,” Sterry recalls. “We desperately needed to write a hit record.”

And then an Angel appeared …

“I was sitting in the back of Richard’s old Ford Falcon on the way to a gig at Phillip Island,” Sterry starts the story. “It was a hot summer night in February 1983, and there was a strange glow in the night sky. It was a Wednesday.

“We had lots of songs but needed an undeniable single. The way we worked was Richard would give me cassettes of music he’d written, and I’d add words and melodies.

“Sitting in the back of the car, with my Walkman plugged in, I was listening to his latest piece and from the classic opening keyboard riff, I knew he’d really nailed his part, and it was up to me to get my bit right. For me, as soon as I’ve got a title, I’m three-quarters finished, and the words ‘send me an angel’ popped into my head.

“As we got closer to the gig, there’s a part of the road where you can see across the bay. When we got there, we found out what the strange light in the sky was – Lorne was on fire.”

It was Ash Wednesday. The bushfires killed 47 people in Victoria and 28 in South Australia.

David finished the song at home the following day in less than 20 minutes. “It was so good, I thought I must have ripped it off.”

He played the rough demo to Zatorski and Real Life’s sound man Ross Fraser – who later found fame as John Farnham’s producer – in the Grainstore’s tiny band room before their next gig. “Richard was really pissed off about the lyrics – ‘Why do you always have to be so negative?’ But Ross loved it and thought we should demo it.” 

The demo session, at Richmond Recorders, saw Fraser add the chorus handclaps, which became a big hook. “I’d never seen our manager Glenn Wheatley look so happy as when he played that demo.” Real Life returned to the studio to record the final version, with producer Ross Cockle adding Lisa Edwards’ angelic vocal. 

Send Me An Angel rose to number six in Australia and was a hit all around the world, except in the UK. It was also the only Australian song to top the NZ charts in 1983. It peaked at #29 in the US, #2 in Switzerland, and #9 in Austria, and spent four weeks at number one in Germany. Sterry remembers fans camped outside the band’s hotel in Cologne.

Send Me An Angel turned up on the Teen Wolf Too soundtrack. And Real Life performed the song on American Bandstand.

Fun fact: Molly Meldrum was late for his first Madonna interview because he was presenting Real Life with Countdown Awards for Best Debut Album and New Talent in 1984 in New York, where the band was playing with Eurythmics.

Legendary producer Mark Opitz (The Angels, Cold Chisel, INXS, Divinyls) loved Send Me An Angel. “I thought it was a new American band when I first heard the song.” He met David Sterry 23 years later, at an Adrian Belew gig. “Fuck, man,” Opitz remarked to the singer, “Send Me An Angel, what a great track!”

“Well,” Sterry replied, “if you liked it so much, why didn’t you produce it?”

“Huh?”

“We asked Wheatley to ask you to produce it, and he said you weren’t interested.”

But Opitz never got the Angel call. “I would have loved to have produced it,” he says. 

In 1988, Quincy Jones did a remix of New Order’s Blue Monday, which sparked an idea in Sterry’s head. “At lunch with our record company and management, I wondered out loud what a new Angel mix would sound like.” The label enlisted Nigel Wright from the English jazz-funk band Shakatak, and the remix took off. The ’89 Angel was even bigger than the original in the US, reaching #26.

Send Me An Angel was the only Aussie song to twice enter the US Top 40 in the ’80s (Moving Pictures’ What About Me came close, hitting #29 in 1982 and #46 in 1989).

Sadly, the song’s new chart peak coincided with the passing of Rick Carroll, the radio programmer who championed the track – he died of AIDS complications in July 1989, aged 42. But his passion helped Send Me An Angel become a hit around the world with an enduring legacy.

“What really amazes me is the amount of times it’s been covered,” Sterry smiles. “There are dance, metal, punk, goth, jazz and rockabilly versions. We’ve even made it onto a Gregorian chants album.” 

Italy’s Netzwerk did a Eurodance version in 1992. And Paul Oakenfold did a thumping trance version.

Norwegian industrial rock band Zeromancer covered the song in 2001. And America’s Deadstar Assembly delivered their industrial metal take in 2002.

American band Thrice gave Angel the punk-pop/alt-metal treatment in 2005.

Sterry loved Jessica Mauboy’s 1920s version in a strip club in Underbelly: Razor. And he also enjoyed Inverse Phase’s chiptune version.

Grammy-nominated American band Highly Suspect did a haunting cover of the song on their second album, The Boy Who Died Wolf.

Australia’s Pseudo Echo also paid tribute with their version, which stayed close to the original.

And Thomas Anders, from the pop duo Modern Talking, did a German version. 

Real Life followed Send Me An Angel with the equally poptastic Catch Me I’m Falling, which Sterry wrote after he dreamed he was falling. It also cracked the US Top 40.

And the band’s 1990 single God Tonight was a Top 10 hit on the US dance charts.

Forty years on, it’s undeniable that Real Life helped broaden Australian tastes, introducing a smorgasbord of vegies to our meat and potatoes ’80s rock diet with their synthesizers, exotic hairstyles and adventurous outfits.

Pop was a bit of a dirty word during pub rock’s glory days, though some fine local material was produced. But some great pop bands have been seemingly overlooked or forgotten.

Men At Work, Models, Mental As Anything and Icehouse are in the ARIA Hall of Fame, but the Hall has so far snubbed Real Life and contemporaries such as Pseudo Echo, Kids In The Kitchen, I’m Talking, Eurogliders, The Reels, Machinations and Wa Wa Nee.

Despite international success, David Sterry remains a modest pop star. Shy and self-effacing. But of Send Me An Angel, he acknowledges, “I guess it’s a pop classic. I never get tired of singing it. It makes people happy all over the world and gave me a life I never thought I’d have.”

And there’s still life in Real Life – they released an acclaimed album, Sirens, in 2020, and Sterry continues to tour the world.