Reviews for Working for the Man Playing in the Band

April 21, 2022 Post a Comment

T here may be 50 ways to get out your lover, but Paul Simon, it seems, requires 15 people to prise him abroad from his love of touring. The huge stage for the first night of the UK leg of his Homeward Bound farewell bout is crawling with ninja-level musicians. Many of them also sing, giving ascent to a woods of microphone stands and – further into a 26-song set list – a South African-inspired 10-office (approximately) harmony on a knockout rendition of Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.

This tour is taking the star, 76, on a strange foray one concluding time before he steps back from a six-decade career. It's non defunction though: Simon announced a new album, In the Blue Light, revisiting 10 classic tracks, for release on 7 September.

Conspicuously, good day tours often end up as misselling scams, just Simon is the sort of upstanding tunesmith whose honesty you hate to question. This night he reminisces about the time he played a working men's society in northern England in 1964: "This is probably my last gamble to do it," he quips. "'Shut oop'!" he quotes, in a brusque accent that wavers gamely between Liverpool and Yorkshire, "'You've 'ad your fun, you lot've played bingo, now shut up and requite the ah-tist a go'." On the question of n 5 south, he adds mischievously: "I shouldn't separate the nation, but it'due south ameliorate up here."

Inspired by that 1964-5 jaunt, and the platform at Widnes station "where the plaque keeps getting stolen", the song Homeward Bound pined for Simon'south then girlfriend Kathy Chitty back in Essex where Simon was based at the very start of his solo career, thanks to a welcoming folk club in Brentwood. Previously, an embryonic Simon and Garfunkel had plied their wares as Tom and Jerry, but Simon the solo artist very much began in the folk clubs of England.

Homeward Jump nailed homesickness with easy grace, and tonight, it is rendered almost unadorned in the encore. Merely information technology is difficult to foursquare the melancholy of the song with the enthusiastic, border-spurning innovator Simon somewhen became. His very earliest attempts at Brill Edifice hackery gave style to Simon and Garfunkel'due south triumphal folk-pop formula, of which in that location is a generous helping this night. At the reverse end of the fix list from Homeward Bound, the duo's hitchhiking vocal America kicks off the set nigh likewise brashly, a pro rendition whose gaudy soprano sax solo bodes ill for the two hours to come up. The next vocal, l Means to Leave Your Lover, falls prey to the aforementioned slickness.

Thankfully, these are 2 of only a few tonal missteps, with a back catalogue spanning one-half a century given arresting new arrangements and restless life. If farewells imply the prospect of greatest hits karaoke, Simon is emphatically non that kind of guy, and Homeward Bound is non that kind of bout.

He is also conspicuously not the sort of American who scuttles home from abroad, aghast at edgeless landlords and other exotica. The schism with Garfunkel – the frictions are detailed in Robert Hilburn's recent authorised biography – restarted Simon'due south solo career. The 70s and 80s brought a series of explorations featuring a United Nations of musical styles. Simon unfurls most of them in Manchester, from the reggae lilt of Mother and Child Reunion (1972), recorded in Jamaica, to the Graceland anthology's sonic jaunts to western and South Africa.

Other destinations include Brazilian drumming and Mariachi horns before we loop dorsum to Cajun zydeco on That Was Your Mother. Here, a percussionist plays a washboard tunic with scary metal gloves, someone pings a triangle, and the accordion blare prompts Simon into a nimble shimmy. Throughout, his artillery help him sing the songs when his fingers aren't playing them.

The packed stage at Manchester Arena last week. — The packed stage at Manchester Arena last calendar week. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Simon seems to glory in the lush sounds fabricated by the mob around him. Present and correct are old timers like bassist Bakithi Kumalo – he of the famous plunked solo on Yous Tin Call Me Al – and mutton-chopped co-lead guitarist Mark Stewart, on lath since 1999. Well-nigh missed is longtime Simon guitarist Vincent Nguini, a silvery-fingered mainstay since 1990 whom a Brazilian organized religion healer could non relieve from liver cancer concluding December. Simon has been quoted as saying his decision to terminate touring was influenced past the loss of his one-time friend. Nguini is replaced by Biodun Kuti, a Nigerian guitarist whose gifts are, thankfully, on a par.

Adding to the plethora of multi-instrumentalists (drummer Jim Oblon plays guitar, guitarist Stewart plays the maui xaphoon, a kind of bonsai sax, Mick Rossi interferes with the strings on his piano) are YMusic, a half-dozen-strong New York chamber group of strings and brass. Clustering effectually Simon for a couple of deep cuts, their input grows in relevance. René and Georgette Magritte With Their Domestic dog After the War (inspired, Simon recounts, by a snapshot in an art book he plant at Joan Baez's house) and Can't Run But (off Rhythm Of the Saints, 1990) find them playing tensile, abstract rhythms while Simon jazz-raps on top. Information technology sounds like digital R&B played as chamber music from circa 1718.

There are further revelations. The kid who got on the coach in America, says Simon, is the guy working in the carwash on Rewrite, 1 of the standout songs from 2011'due south So Beautiful Or So What album – one of a serial of "ghosts" that move through his songs. Here, Rossi'southward prepared piano shimmers out metallic arpeggios.

Controversially, information technology is probably the Graceland songs that sing the very truest tonight, their cocktail of joy and darkness best expressed by the multitudes on stage. You lot can't help just shiver at the line in a transcendent version of The Male child in the Bubble – "The bomb in the babe wagon was wired to the radio" – given what happened here last year.

And Simon's reputation as a soft-pop titan (compared to, say, a fellow traveller similar Leonard Cohen) does not concur up when yous parse sure songs. The Absurd, Cool River finds plenty to agonise nigh. "Sometimes fifty-fifty music cannot substitute for tears," it concludes, every bit Rossi finishes off the sentiment with apocalyptic jazz dissonance on the keys.

It all ends, as information technology must, with The Sound of Silence, the song that changed everything for Simon. He felt "estranged… awkward" about the hit since he gave it to "Artie" to sing. "I'm going to repossess my song," he says, and physically hugs it to him with his arms. Naturally, it is an offhand, almost Spanish rendition. Undersung from the stage, the backing vocalists in the crowd bellow the canonical version, creating a lingering harmony.