Remembering David Soul
You ruled my world in 1977
We’ve all got to die, and even worse, we have to watch our beloved icons disappear one by one.
David Soul was my first love. I was eight, and “Don’t Give Up On Us” was the first single I owned. I memorised his crooned words, both forwards and backwards, and tried to teach them to the neighbourhood kids. It was such a pretty song — the most romantic thing I’d heard. The string glissando at the end was, to me, the thrilling blast of a train’s horn on arriving in London (cos I’d been there once, and it must have sounded like that)(1).
Then, in exchange for my tonsils(2), I acquired Playing To An Audience of One, my first ever long playing vinyl. It’s an album with a mellow country-ish soft rock vibe, with the orchestral bits and bobs going off all over the place — strings here, brass there, then a banging little two second piano solo; in truth he was going for a broad audience, little kids and grandmas and anyone else in between. One song was a lament about all the bad booze the devil had made him drink, the next was about the joys of guzzling cocktails in New Orleans. He was covering all the bases.
That’s what I was listening to in 1977, when the big kids were putting glue in their hair and sticking the Vs up at the Queen, though actually most of the teenagers round where I lived were…
