Midway through last night’s show at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena, Paul Simon paused to reflect. “I wrote this one at the station in Widnes, or Warrington,” he said of “Homeward Bound”, one of the most moving songs ever written about the trials and tribulations of life on the road. “Whichever one keeps getting the plaque stolen.”
He was right the first time: Widnes railway station is widely accepted to be the place he penned the song in 1966, before he was recognised as Paul Simon the multi-platinum megastar, or even the Simon in Simon & Garfunkel; the duo’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., had just flopped, and he was on his way back to his adopted hometown of London as he continued to try to forge a career as a singer-songwriter.
Six decades later, at 84, he is still on tour, eight years after claiming to have retired from live performance. After what was ostensibly his farewell tour in 2018, he began to lose his hearing – and, upon arresting the decline with the help of his doctors, decided to head out on one more tour, one billed as “A Quiet Celebration”, where pop and rock numbers would be eschewed in favour of a subtler, softer run through his catalogue.
Simon in 2022. His vocals are palpably diminished and he cannot hold a note the same way anymore (Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty)So far, so reasonable, except that when Simon arrived on stage 15 minutes after his scheduled stage time, there was an audible waver in his speaking voice. Said wobble translated to his singing voice; put simply, Simon is an old man, and he sounds like it. His vocals are palpably diminished, not just from the days when he was commanding audiences of hundreds of thousands at free concerts in Central Park, but also from that so-called farewell tour eight years ago. He cannot hold a note the same way anymore.
This means that anybody hoping to hear faithful renditions of his biggest and most buoyant pop songs, like “You Can Call Me Al”, were disappointed. But it also imbued the show with real resonance. It was a two-set affair with an interval, and in the first part, Simon and his ten-piece band played his last album, 2023’s Seven Psalms, in its entirety. Recorded as he wondered whether his hearing was in terminal decline, it is a quietly beautiful reflection on faith and mortality comparable to David Bowie’s Blackstar or Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker – a swan song that looks the reaper straight in the eye.
It was relayed live in one fell swoop, as one 35-minute suite without breaks, in a manner that was thoughtful and affecting, especially when Simon’s wife, Edie Brickell, lent her vocals to the last couple of songs.
In the second half, Simon answered the audience who came expecting hits, whose general consensus on the concourse during the interval was that Simon might be past it. His second set opened with “Graceland”, the title track from his 1986 exploration of African sounds. As if to underline tonight’s themes of transience, he later identified fretless bassist Bakithi Kumalo as the only surviving member of the band he put together for that record.
Simon and Art Garfunkel, whom he met in elementary school (Photo: CBS/Getty)The musicianship was crisp, even when Simon’s vocals faltered. A languid take on “Train in the Distance” was suffused with bluesy melancholy, while the opportunity to hear original drummer Steve Gadd play his iconic drum riff on “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” – a shuffling beat that has had an indelible impact on modern hip hop and R&B – was a genuine treat. Amid the better-loved tracks were indulgences on Simon’s part – take your pick from “The Late Great Johnny Ace” or “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War” for the evening’s most meandering storytelling diversion.
But there were moments of profundity, too – points where Simon’s tired vocals lent the songs a little extra poetry: “The Boxer” and its tale of a browbeaten fighter still standing against the odds was a case in point. After encouraging an ovation for his band, he closed the show with a powerful solo take on “The Sound of Silence”, a reminder that isolation and a lack of community spirit are issues that predate smartphones and social media by decades.
Simon cannot go on forever. Time waits for no man, and there are subtle signs that apparently immortal contemporaries of his are also reaching the end of the road; Bob Dylan, also 84, closes his shows these days with “Every Grain of Sand”, a devotional piece about faith and redemption, while The Rolling Stones have just announced a new album without any reference to live concerts, amid rumours that Keith Richards, of all people, no longer wants to tour. Perhaps these old timers are no longer raging against the dying of the light. Instead, “A Quiet Celebration” felt like Simon seizing the opportunity to say goodbye on his own terms.
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