Songwriter Tony Macaulay talks about his hit “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby”
Songwriter Tony Macaulay discusses his hit “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby” with NSAI CEO Bart Herbison.
British songwriter Tony Macaulay has a catalogue full of hits. But his number one hit “Don’t Give Up on Us” is, according to him, his absolute favourite. Maybe it’s the way it came about, maybe it’s the person who sang it, and maybe it’s the fact that with its unconventional chord structure it seemed a bit of an outlier that ended up going straight to the top of the charts.
Bart Herbison, international executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association, recently met with Macauley to discuss the creation of the 1977 hit, sung by hunky “Starsky and Hutch” star David Soul.
“I wrote the first few bars on guitar, but it’s a piano song,” Macauley said. “A few days later I went home and played piano and the chords were beautiful. I got the first 12 bars down. It’s a 12-bar melody, but it’s structured like a 32-bar song. (Sorry. We say bar, you say bar.) So I had kind of a rough lyric, but my first thought was you can’t dance to it. It’s not a verse-and-chorus song. It seems to have its own formula. It doesn’t have the highs and lows of a good verse-and-chorus song.”
Macaulay admitted that he liked the idea of the song, but he didn’t know what to do with it. One day the second verse came to his mind and everything started rolling.
“I was walking through the park with my dog and I remember when I finished the second verse, which I thought was really sweet because it paid off and it fit together as an idea. I remember kneeling on the ground singing it to my dog and several people walking by thinking, ‘That poor man should be in a mental institution.'”
Maybe it was that certain something that the song was missing when he sang it to his dog.
Out of the blue, Macaulay’s manager at the time called him and said, “I’ve got David Soul.” Soul was one of the stars of the original 1970s series “Starsky and Hutch,” which was arguably the most popular television show at the time. As Herbison put it, “That show ran from 1975 to 1979, I think. His (song) went to number one in 1977. There couldn’t have been a hotter actor in the history of the United States to record that song.”
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The producers had recorded an album of Soul, but they needed a single. Macaulay’s song wasn’t even finished. There was no demo. Macaulay said no one except his wife – and his dog – had heard it. Macaulay jumps on a plane to Los Angeles and writes a third verse on the way to Soul in the recording studio.
“So when we were asked to do the vocals, David had never sung a song like that in his life,” Macaulay recalls. “He didn’t know how to do it at all. So it was quite a task to get him to sing quietly. I said, ‘Play it. Breathe. Lots of breath. Get really close to the microphone. Don’t overdo the vocals or you’ll ruin the mood.'”
They filmed Soul’s performance and Macaulay flew back to London to mix the song. He is exhausted. He hasn’t slept and says he can’t hear anything good about the song. “Now all I hear is what’s wrong with it,” he added.
“Now I never want to listen to it again. I go home and go to sleep on Monday night and sleep until Wednesday morning. I was so tired that I slept for about 35 hours or something. I get up, turn on the radio and the third or fourth record is ‘Don’t Give Up on Us.'”
It turned out that the London recording studio was next to the BBC offices.
“From the time I started writing it to the time it was published was about ten days. From the time I finished writing it to the time it was published was a week. I think it entered the charts at number 14, went straight to number one and stayed there for a month.”
About the series
In partnership with the Nashville Songwriters Association International, the “Story Behind the Song” video interview series features Nashville songwriters discussing one of their compositions. Full video interviews with all of our interviewees can be found at www.tennessean.com/music.
