Eddy Amoo – Ecam

In the mid-1970s a young, struggling musician had reached rock-bottom and all but given up writing songs when music publisher Tony Hall changed the course of his life. Eddy Amoo, a singer-songwriter with The Chants, was persuaded by his brother Chris to join The Real Thing. Amoo suddenly found fame and fortune with number one single You To Me Are Everything in 1976 and used the proceeds to make his first and most important property purchase – the home in which he has lived ever since.
‘The first thing I wanted to do was get my family somewhere better to live, to move us out of the ghetto,’ he says. Born and bred in Liverpool 8, Amoo has more right than most to describe it as a ‘ghetto’ even long after the 1981 riots. He can also claim considerable credit for the area’s recent facelift. Through a series of pioneering property developments over the course of nearly three decades Amoo has helped redefine people’s perception of Toxteth. ‘When I was a kid my mother was forced to take our entire family to live in a cellar – where I slept with my brother and sister in a cupboard – because it was the only way she could get the council to rehouse us,’ he recalls. ‘So when we started to look at property in the heart of Toxteth I understood I had a chance to change people’s lives.’
‘If you’re black in Liverpool it’s well nigh impossible to make any headway in business. You have to fight and fight hard.’
Amoo’s mother, who was born in the Mount Pleasant workhouse (to an Irish mother and Ghanaian father), instilled in him a strong and positive will to succeed. ‘I didn’t know any difference between white or black until my early teens because she just didn’t make an issue of it,’ he says. ‘I learnt not to let race become a rock on your back. Too many black people let their blackness become a rock instead of it being a spur to give them the determination to achieve their aims. I’m lucky enough to have married someone who believes as strongly as I do about that.........