Church youth group ) guitar player, and hitting adolescence he began to learn to play his way through all the early Paul Simon songs up until ‘Bookends’, and he played them well. Barrie learnt to play the guitar way before I did he was our sort of local (ie. And at around the same time one of my best friends, Barrie, (where are you now, Dr./Professor of Soil Science?) was becoming a huge Paul Simon fan. I saw and heard John Rogers Prosser singing and playing it in school one day and I felt straight away the kind of yearning beauty that the song possessed. This is a sort of studenty song, backpacking across the country with that youthful sense of quest and curiosity to discover the real nature of what they’ve taken for granted, to discover the concepts and the reality behind the geographical materialism – ‘we’ve all come to look for America.’Īnd for me this is a sixth form song. … Before we launch into ‘Let us be lovers/ we’ll marry our fortunes together’ let’s acknowledge this is a young person’s song, the irony of the opening line perhaps being that romantic youngsters have only their poverty and idealism to share, their only ‘real estate’ in their bags. We sang along, snatches of ‘Homeward Bound’ and ‘For Emily.’ and even ‘Cecilia.’ But when this one came on, my heart did a little jump and began to melt (two quite contradictory metaphors of course, but there you go.) Just hearing those harmonised hums that begin the song takes you to a younger you, doesn’t it? Driving to Bath recently, we allowed the iPod to run us through all the Simon and Garfunkel tracks it contained – and it suddenly became something of a sentimental journey, because listening to Simon and Garfunkel seems very much an activity which is rooted in the past.
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