Feeling My Age

Art Garfunkel was on typically modest form when interviewed by Rebecca Jones for the BBC yesterday. But then he has much to be modest about…

AG: I’m just thrilled to have this singing voice that’s been with me since I was five years old, I mean just thrilled that God was so generous with me. It’s extremely elevating – it gives you one foot on earth and one foot in the heavens – and it’s my life to be so lucky.

RJ: You say you’re lucky but hard work must have played its part as well…

AG: Well yes, when you say that I think it was a million and a half hours in the recording studio where it’s not quite right enough – and this makes perfectionists like me and like Paul Simon very driven and kind of crazed. It’s an absolute flavour of love – of love and madness.

RJ: Do you listen back to your hits?

AG: There are times if my confidence is low (when) I remind myself of my past achievements and I put the earphones on and I listen to how Scarborough Fair flows.

RJ: So what made those songs so good?

AG: Well Paul Simon is one hell of a writer and he plays magnificent acoustic guitar, but I sing pretty well and I taught Paul how to harmonise with me and I helped create a very palatable sound between the two of us. So you get a fascinating combination: rock’n’roll that swings, where the lyrics make you think.

RJ: Do great singers get the respect they deserve, do you think?

AG: No they do not. It’s the age of the singer-songwriter, ever since Dylan. Well what happens to wonderful singers – you know, Sinatra didn’t write those songs of his. Read more…

Used to listen to Still Crazy in the mid seventies late at night in my room on repeat – Paul Simon at his most sublime and melancholy. Thinking about it after actually meeting my old lover on the street last night. Sure enough we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers too. Still crazy ? Probably. But alive – a lot of our other friends from GLF London of 1974 didn’t make it.

To tell you the truth he was there with me when I came a cropper on the street yesterday. Only then did he admit he’d just taken a tumble himself an hour earlier – measured his length down a flight of hotel stairs in Kings Cross. Thankfully he escaped pretty much unscathed. After a fifteen minute lie-down to get over the shock he’d been fine.

Listening to Still Crazy After All These Years three and a half decades later the daft thing is how young we actually all still were. Along with Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell etc Rhymin’ Simon provided a soundtrack for our generation to mourn the passing of our youth even while we still had it. “Time, time, time see what’s become of me” he wrote  on Hazy Shade Of Winter at the age of – what – 26 or 27.

What we should have said to ourselves at that age was: this is the youngest you’re ever going to be for the rest of your life – better make the most of it. Bit then of course exactly the same thing applies now.