New Year's Day, 1977. The first Top of the Pops of the year, and the man in front of the camera is the blond one from the cop show, the quiet one, standing almost perfectly still and singing straight down the barrel of the lens while Legs and Co dance behind him. If you knew that face at all, you knew it from the passenger seat of a Ford Torino, and you had no idea he could do this.
David Soul was born on this day in 1943, in Chicago, the son of a Lutheran minister, and he grew up partly in Berlin where his father was posted after the war. He was a singer before he was an actor, and that is the fact the whole story turns on.
In the mid sixties he turned up on American variety television as The Covered Man, performing folk songs in a ski mask, refusing to give his name, betting that the voice on its own would be enough to get him a record deal. It got him a television career instead. There is something very likable about a young man that certain he had the goods and that wrong about which door they would open.
By 1975 he was Kenneth Hutchinson on Starsky and Hutch, and the part fit him the way very few parts fit anybody. Paul Michael Glaser played Starsky loud and physical. Soul played Hutch quiet, dry, a half step slower, and the show worked because the two of them believed each other.
What made it last was never the car chases. It was the two of them sitting in a parked Torino talking like men who had known each other a long time. Most of what people actually carry from that show is not an action beat at all. It is a tone of voice.
The show made him famous across two continents at once, and it made the thing he had wanted since the ski mask suddenly easy. Private Stock Records put out a single called Don't Give Up on Us in late 1976. By the middle of January 1977 it was number one in Britain, and it went to number one in America that April.
He was thirty-three years old, on the biggest music program in Britain, at the top of the chart, in the middle of a hit television series, and he sings the whole thing standing almost still. The song is a plea and he refuses to oversell it. That restraint is the same instinct that made Hutch watchable next to a partner who filled every room he walked into.
He was far from finished with the charts. Silver Lady went to number one in Britain later that year, and Going in with My Eyes Open and Let's Have a Quiet Night In both reached the top ten. He put out four albums between 1976 and 1979. For about eighteen months he was at once one of the most recognizable faces on American television and one of the biggest-selling singers in the United Kingdom, and that is a very short list of people.
In a lot of houses those two things arrived through different pieces of furniture. The face came through the television in the front room. The voice came out of a clock radio, or a car dashboard on the way somewhere, or a portable in a bedroom with the door shut. Plenty of people had both going for a year and never once put the two together.
Starsky and Hutch ran four seasons and ninety-two episodes. Soul directed several of the later ones, and that is where you can see how much of the show's quiet was his doing. He went on to Salem's Lot in 1979, to a long run of television films through the eighties, and eventually to Britain for good. He took British citizenship in 2004, worked London theatre, played the title role in a West End production of Jerry Springer: The Opera, and kept recording.
The song stayed with him for the whole of his career and he never seemed to mind. He would sing it in small rooms fifty years on and give it the same straight reading he gave it on that stage, no irony and no distance, the same man who put on a ski mask because he wanted somebody to hear the voice.
Three minutes is all it takes to see the whole of it. A television star who was really a singer, standing very still, letting the song do the work.
Happy birthday to David Soul, born August 28, 1943.
There's a good stretch of Starsky and Hutch over on Amazon. We make a small share when you go through us. That keeps a couple of people and a houseful of cats in business.