Simon says… farewell

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before.

Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three decades. By the 1980s, the Stones had become just a touring machine. McCartney was adrift. Doubtless someone will mention Bob Dylan, but no one was coming into the Slough branch of Boots in 1987 suggesting that we stock up on Peggi Blu’s Blu Blowin’ after hearing her work on Dylan’s Empire Burlesque. By contrast, Simon had been at the forefront of the 1960s folk revival (and its successor, folk-rock). He had crested the wave of the soft-rock singer-songwriter boom in the 1970s. And Graceland saw him way ahead of the game in incorporating African music into American pop.

If the years since have been less commercially fulfilling — just five solo albums in the 32 years since Graceland, with a sixth to come in the autumn – they have not been a sad artistic stultification. Paul Simon has refused to sit still, a trait he brought to bear in Hyde Park at the last of this year’s British Summer Time faux-festival shows, billed as his final UK appearance. That said, his refusal to be predictable caused occasional problems when playing to 60,000 mildly pissed people outdoors, many of whom would have doubtless come for the usual reason people go to big outdoor shows: to hear the hits and sing along.