DAVID SOUL – "Silver Lady"

I must admit that I was floundering around for something to say and couldn’t find anything. It’s a nice song, perhaps a song that belongs to a decade earlier, and as far as the girls of 3F2 were concerned, David Soul (oh, those three identical flat vowels!) could sing Three Blind Mice and they’d rush out and buy it.

I do like the trenchcoat-and-fedora feel of it, pulled tight against the autumn winds (Indiana being as flat, cold and windy Holderness only a lot more of it)

Maybe David Soul was meant to be the Bill Bixby of pop. The video for “Silver Lady” depicts him wandering dolefully along an empty, unspecified American highway, trying without much enthusiasm or success to hitch a ride, just as David Banner was invariably obliged to leave that week’s town under cover of night. He has walked out on his Other, has drifted into shameful degradation (“Seedy motels and no-star hotels/Still, I had to learn”) and is now begging to be taken back and redeemed (“But honey you’re my last hope/And who else can I turn to?”) and the strings duly swell up like a curtain of diesel behind him as he launches into his strained choruses.

The imagery of “Silver Lady” could sound entirely different if, say, Nick Cave had been handling lines like “The Indiana wind and rain cut through me/I’m lost and alone/Chilled to the bone.” Cave would alternately growl and scream those words, and perhaps it required the genuine vocal talents of a David Cassidy to make the song work. The music is, shall we say, reluctant disco – it actually foreshadows, among other things, Frankie Valli’s “Grease,” but its arrangement is hampered by inopportune grandiose piano, bleats of oboe and a totally inexplicable banjo plucking away in the right channel. Soul gamely gives it his best shot, but it’s soon clear that he has the kind of second-string pipes you might hear aired in a big band novelty number like “Your Father’s Moustache”; he cannot summon any real desperation or urgency, so finally sounds vaguely irked, the dust of the just-missed Greyhound bus streaking around him, knowing there’ll be another one along in five minutes.

There’s not much going on here. The single doesn’t even show off his averagely decent voice (at least, not the way that ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ does). The arrangement is flatly lush, in that classic session-musician way. The bleak urban landscape is decisively uncaptured in the way the song is put together and sung. The chorus always seems to me disappointing, as if the song promises rather more, but I think it’s the wall of backing singers that kills it, rather than the structure of the song itself.

This has become a certain kind of indie kid/student’s ironical favourite in a kind of “oh ha haaaa, I see what you’re doing there…” kind of way.

This song didn’t crack the top 40 in the US so I don’t think I’ve ever heard it! I most certainly did hear the US #1, Meco’s “Theme From Star Wars” however, and I had to sing the next one, sadly, at my sixth grade graduation ceremony the following year; but then it was a monster hit that suited the purpose and there was no escape.

Most of Indiana is flat and rural, with the occasional tornado to liven things up (just as my home state has earthquakes & alas fires – it’s always something).

#9 – really? I’m surprised – this is one of the ones I’d never heard before the project started. Now, the next one — (*chokes on furry paw*)

And let’s not forget “It sure brings out the love in your eyes” which is…

So, two hit albums, a bunch of fairly consistent hit singles, all top ten (apart from one which JUST missed), but once again it’s the actor curse, where someone has to offer them some bit part in a movie and the whole singing thing suddenly becomes less important. (see also Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals)

“It sure brings out the love…” was on the Record Mirror singles review page the day the guest reviewer was Bob Geldof. His verdict: “It sure brings up the puke in my mouth.”

“Silver Lady” was definitely the pick of Soul’s singles output, atmospheric and (within his often-noted limitations) well performed. The swirling buildup of “the Indiana wind and rain” is especially nicely done. Back then I used to compile a “points chart” based on the simple system NME used to use, awarding 30 points for number one down to one point for number 30 each week, and David Soul was by a distance the 1977 points champion. Unusually, the acts in second and third place – Boney M and Showaddywaddy – didn’t have a number one that year.

A decade or two later he was something of a professional Anglophile, turning up on an amiable BBC2 show I forget the name of, where he brought together old foes to kiss and make up. One bizarre line-up had him sitting outside a country pub with Joe Gormley, former head of the NUM, and Derek Ezra, former head of the National Coal Board, reminiscing about the strife of the early 70s. Very odd to see Hutch in between those two.

I was thinking last night about how 70s American cop shows gave us chart toppers like David Soul and Telly Savalas and wondered why something like The Sweeney never produced a pop single… then I remembered Denis Waterman. I know it was a different show, but still.

Re 9: DJP will be appalled with me when I say that I’ve just been listening to this on the second ‘Guilty Pleasures’ album!

It certainly goes on a bit.

I love ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. This has none of the impetus, the sense of necessity, of place, of yearning, of charm of that performance.

It’s one of those songs which you can really imagine what the promo film must have been like, DS walking through deserted landscapes, troubled but in a handsome way, with a series of close-ups for the chorus, DS’ eyes soulfully looking directly into the camera/viewer/listener, imploring us to take him back in an adorably psuedo-sincere expression.

The song isn’t quite good enough to carry this off.

Better than bottling it up.

‘The Sweeny EP’ featuring ‘Leave It Out, Guv’, ‘Shut It!’, ‘Savvy?’ and “Put ’em Away, Luv’. I can see how that could work.

Not forgetting the immortal double A-side:

“He’s Just A Little Toerag Like His Father”

b/w

“Can We Get Morecambe And Wise For The Police Christmas Ball?”

Does anyone remember Backstage Pass by McGuinn, Clark & Hillman – a record that takes all of its 70s FM orch-pop cues from Silver Lady? If I play Silver Lady (which I often do), then I have to play the MC&H tune – and from there, it’s not too great a leap to Van Morrison’s Wavelength and, inevitably, Rumours and, maybe even Spirits Having Flown.

This is where my memory of the charts began (I’m sure I heard I Feel Love and Angelo (though that was probably on some awful light entertainment programme) at the time but have no memory of Way Down from that time). I certainly remember this though, and even to this 5 1/2 year old with little knowledge of pop music of any kind it seemed so dull, while the chorus was maddeningly stuck in my head seemingly for months (hence my being secure in the knowledge that i remembered it at the time).

Unfortunately, my stupid new e-mail address, which I set up around the time that I first found this site, won’t accept incoming mail so I wasn’t able to receive the password so I could log in and register a vote, so from this point on I will give one and this I give 4.

Personally, I find this one tedious. 3/10.