Those days when Soul music was a real scream

Imagine it’s a March Saturday in Bradford. About 8.30pm.

You’re crammed into St George’s Hall, next to a thousand hysterical, screaming, teenage girls clamouring to get closer to their idol who’s stood only a few feet away on stage.

A few bedraggled fans have fainted and are being heaved unceremoniously from the throng by the burly bouncers employed to repel the sea of seething teenage hormones.

Heady days indeed for any performer.

But it isn’t The Beatles or Stones on stage. It isn’t even The Osmonds, David Essex, Adam Faith, Alvin Stardust or any other flavour-of-the-month pop star up there absorbing the adulation.

Welcome to the world, circa 1980, of David Soul - the biggest star in Britain.

The Starsky and Hutch star was at the peak of his popularity and halfway through his four-album reign at the top of the charts when he played the city in 1980.

Understandably the 58-year-old can’t remember much of his Bradford experience when we speak - after all it was just one pit stop on a nationwide whirlwind tour - but he remembers the era well.

Sitting in his car en-route to rehearsals for his latest role, the laidback star seems happy to reminisce about his days as the nation’s number one heart-throb. He said: “Oh, yeah, I must have played Bradford in one of my solo concerts - I played everywhere - all over the country. They were pretty crazy days.”

The “crazy days” were a far cry from how it all started for David Richard Solberg, born August 28, 1943. An American of Norwegian descent, he spent his early days in the desolate surroundings of post war Berlin with his father Dr Richard Solberg - a Lutheran minister and adviser to the US High Commissioner on refugees.

In fact, when he returned to the American Midwest aged 13, pop idol status seemed the last place where the young Solberg would eventually find himself.

After graduating from high school the athletic youngster even turned down a professional baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox to follow his father to Mexico where he studied political science at the University of the Americas.

Teaching seemed the natural career progression, not chart pin-up stardom.

But a few chance meetings in Mexico would set David on the road to fame and fortune.

He began playing guitar in a folk band to make ends meet and the rest, as they say, is history.

“No, fame and fortune wasn’t on the cards at all but I had to pay my way through school,” he remembers.

“I ended up playing music when I was down in Mexico. When I returned to the Midwest nobody else knew these songs that I’d been playing so I became a kind of folk singer.

“Basically the folk singing was a means to an end to pay my way through school. I never went out to become a star - it just sort of happened.”

“If you go out thinking like that you’re going down the wrong road. That’s the difference between today and those days when I started. Today people just go out wanting fame but in those days it was much more pragmatic.”

Much like the singing, Soul never set out to make a career as an actor but says events conspired to give him his big break.

“It was purely by chance. An actor friend of mine became involved with my first wife and one day, let’s say, he couldn’t go to work,” he chuckles menacingly.

“Somebody had to play his part so I did it. He got my wife and I got his job. Fine, take her, I said!”

“Funnily enough the part was called the Pugnacious Collier which I suppose was quite apt.”

“I never had a goal. I never really set out to be an actor - it wasn’t a question of thinking next year I’m going to be a star it was just a matter of finding a job and seeing that through to the end and then looking for something else. Of course, when you do something it opens doors to other opportunities, but there was no grand game plan - it was one thing at a time.”

Of course, “one thing at a time” lead to a small part in Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force where Soul was spotted and picked to play Ken Hutchinson in one of the most successful detective shows of all time - Starsky and Hutch.

Once he teamed up with Paul Michael Glaser as David Starsky the duo with a dubious taste in undercover knitwear soon ruled TV ratings around the world - and Soul was launched into the stratosphere of superstardom.

But rumours that the duo are about to be revived starring Ben Stiller and Brad Pitt as part of Hollywood’s current fascination with remaking kitsch Seventies shows doesn’t meet with Soul’s approval.

“It’s not something I’ve got anything to do with,” he says somewhat testily.

“It’s different to what Paul and I wanted to do - where we’d get the two characters back together after 30 years to give a kind of closure to their relationship.

“That would be something for all the fans, they’ll all be 30-somethings and 40-somethings now, who grew up with and built a relationship with Starsky and Hutch.

“What they want to do now is to take a trademark and market the hell out of it. The whole thing is about marketing. People aren’t treated as people anymore. They don’t want to develop a relationship with their audience, they just look at them as consumers.

“I’m not going to say anything pejorative about it but it’s not the way I’d do it.

“Hey, they’re going to do it whether I like I or not so who cares?”

Right now Starsky and Hutch remakes are the last thing on Soul’s mind. When we speak the star is busy immersing himself in a new production of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, which arrives at the Alhambra on Tuesday.

The thriller, which was made into a movie starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve in 1982, stars Soul as frustrated writer Sidney Bruhl whose writer’s block is threatening to ruin his career.

When a brilliant script lands on Bruhl’s desk from one of his students (played by Casualty’s Gerald Kyd) murder and deception raise their ugly heads.

Soul said: “It’s interesting - it’s a play within a play within a play. It’s got a brilliant script but it’s difficult to talk about it without giving away the end!

“The opening lines of the play pretty well sum it up - it’s a juicy murder in act one, some interesting developments in act two and a fantastic climax in the finale.”

Soul promises an exciting, edge-of-the-seat, night out for fans coming to see him at the Alhambra next week - we will have to wait and see if they will still be pulling hysterical teenagers out over the barriers at the front.