1977 David Soul: Don't Give Up On Us

If I was too young for Telly Savalas and Kojak in the seventies, then I was the right age for Starsky & Hutch, oh yes. And I loved it. Saturday nights weren't complete without me wishing I was in a red Ford Grand Torino, haring round corners and piling into cardboard boxes. Great stuff. But fan that I was, I never had much time for Soul's singing career. Dear me no.

Probably the most inappropriately named vocalist in history, Soul may have roughed up the bad guys on screen but his singing voice is the weak, flat drip of a leaky tap - constant and annoying.* To be fair (I suppose), 'Don't Give Up On Us' would offers nothing for any vocalist to get stuck into - as wet as it is, it's impossible to wring anything out of it's terminal 'let's try again' blandness. It threatens to get tough on the 'I really lost my head last night' middle eight, but that in itself leads nowhere, certainly nowhere where you give a toss to find out what happened, and even when it does give the opportunity to aim for the stars on the closing 'thhrroouugghhh', Soul bottles it by reaching for a note that makes it sound like he's apologising for wasting everybody's time. Which is apt because that's exactly what he's doing. The tinker.

* More than this, I can't hear anything by David Soul without imagining Billy Howard sticking a fork in his leg through frustration at writing 'King Of The Cops' in 1975. There's enough material here for him to have wrung a good five more verses out of.