Tired of drifting, searching, shifting

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

18/09/77 : Playing To An Audience Of One - David Soul

I remember Mr Soul being pretty popular around this time (and, even despite my tender age, being somewhat confused as to why) but it's got to be quite a few years since I heard anything from him.  I just thought "is he even still alive?" and was somewhat surprised to see he died last week at the age of 80 - let's hope I don't feel the need to be too rude about him!

Hmmm - I don't feel the need to be too rude, but I also don't feel the need to be too complimentary.  These are very average songs performed, at best,  adequately - he has a decent enough voice in a narrow range, but he unfortunately feels the need to push those boundaries far too frequently.  I was reminded of Leo Sayer's album at times because, like Leo, it feels like Dave doesn't really know what it is he wants to be doing - I think he'd really like to be Glen Campbell, but he also aims for Leonard Cohen (weirdly) and Cat Stevens at times (and plenty others I'm sure).  It's dated rather than terrible, but it felt very average to me - I seem to recall "Silver Lady" was very successful, but I've no idea why.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on his second week of a 23 week run (which seems astonishing) but at least this was as high as it got.  The top five this week were the Diana Ross best-of, Jean Michel Jarre, Elvis Presley, A Star Is Born and the Connie Francis best-of and the highest new entry is a Frankie Laine best-of (#42) closely followed by the slightly different Motörhead (#43) - and that's all we've got on that front this week.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album - never mind, eh?  His entry is quite interesting - he's obviously best known as Hutch, but I'd forgotten he was also in Magnum Force and Salem's Lot.  "Silver Lady" was indeed successful, getting to #1 in the UK as did "Don't Give Up On Us" (from '76), which also got to the top in the US.  He obviously did well for himself, but probably didn't have as much money as he hoped for, given that he was married five times - he was obviously a sucker for punishment!

"Customers also listened to" Berni Flint, Tony Christie, Dean Friedman and Linda Martin - I've heard of Tony but that's it out of that lot for me.  I had, of course, heard of Dave beforehand - it's really hard these days to remember how famous he was back then, but he REALLY was.  And, on the available evidence here, I have absolutely no idea why - it must have been Hutch's cardigans that pulled in the ladies.

11/09/77 - An enjoyable and interesting "not my kind of thing"
25/09/77 - A real-life, actual WOMAN!