October 13, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

American singer-songwriters Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel -- despite their differences still the best-selling duo of all time -- are both 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, October 13, Graphic News:  "Can you imagine us years from today", they sang more than four decades ago, in the clear, haunting style that became their unmistakable sound, "sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy." Graceful lyrics from Old Friends, a track on their fourth album, Bookends, released in October 1968. But, as they both reach that milestone -- Paul Frederic Simon on October 13 and his one-time classmate from elementary school in Queens, Arthur Ira Garfunkel, on November 5 -- the old men depicted in the song are unlikely to be sitting side by side, their artistic preferences having long since taken them on divergent paths. They did famously share, if not a park bench, then a stage, in Central Park; a reunion gig for their fellow New Yorkers at the end of the summer of 1981. Half a million people turned up to witness the pair perform an unparalleled back catalogue, from their first real hit -- The Sound of Silence -- to the title track of their last studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, which has sold over 25 million copies worldwide since its appearance in 1970. Garfunkel's pursuit of an acting career -- he'd won a part in Mike Nichols' film version of Catch-22 that same year -- meant Simon had been left to finish the LP alone, a situation he recounts in the track, The Only Living Boy in New York, with its opening line: 'Tom, get your plane right on time'. In their first incarnation as high school buddies in the 50s, when their influences had included the very popular Everly Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel had called themselves Tom and Jerry.

Separation had come, initially, when the boys went on to different colleges, Simon to study English literature and then drop out of law school, Garfunkel to gain a Masters degree in mathematics. But both were caught up in the burgeoning folk scene of Greenwich Village and, after meeting there, worked on songs for an early, unsuccessful album, Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m., which came out in 1964. Simon then split away to tour the UK, playing in provincial folk clubs -- he met the Kathy, of Kathy's Song, at one in Brentwood, Essex -- and penning the classic hymn to homesickness, Homeward Bound, while stranded overnight at the railway station in Widnes, Cheshire. He released The Paul Simon Songbook in 1965, the first of his many solo albums, including, 20 years later, the massively successful Graceland (1986) which featured the Zulu band, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Garfunkel's career post-1970 combined acting and recording, notably the 1975 album Breakaway, with its distinctive cover version of I Only Have Eyes For You, which reached No. 1 in the UK singles chart -- a feat he repeated four years later with Bright Eyes, a Mike Batt song used in the 1979 film, Watership Down. Success was tempered by tragedy shortly afterwards, when Garfunkel's longtime girlfriend, Laurie Bird, committed suicide in their Manhattan apartment. He went through periods of depression in the 1980s, aspects of which are chronicled in his 1989 poetry collection, Still Water, and took up long-distance walking.
 
Reunion tours have continued, the diminutive Simon, at 5' 3", sharing the spotlight with his 6' 0" co-star, whose range as a tenor gave a soaring quality to Simon's best-remembered anthems -- such as the reworked ballad, Scarborough Fair, forever now associated with Dustin Hoffman and a red Alfa Romeo Spider in the 1966 movie, The Graduate. "Without Arthur's voice, I never would have enjoyed that success," Simon has said. "We were always able to sing and blend well together; that's our gift. But aside from that, we're really two different guys."
/ENDS