Peter Viney's Blog

Paul Simon
Homeward Bound: The Farewell Tour

British Summer Time series
Hyde Park, London
Sunday 15^thJuly 2018

SET LIST

America
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover
The Boy In The Bubble
Dazzling Blue
That Was Your Mother
Rewrite
Mother & Child Reunion
Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard
Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War
Can’t Run But
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Wristband
Spirit Voices
The Obvious Child
Questions For The Angels
The Cool Cool River
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
You Can Call Me Al

Encore
Late In The Evening
Still Crazy After All These Years
Graceland

2^ndencore
Homeward Bound
Kodachrome
The Boxer
American Tune
The Sound of Silence

BAND

The band across the stage

There are fourteen musicians.
Mark Stewart – guitar,  maui xaphoon (sax),  MD
Biodun Kuti- guitar
Bakithi Kumalo – bass guitar, 5-string bass guitar, electric double bass
Jim Oblon – drums, guitar
Jamey Haddad – percussion
Mick Rossi – piano, harmonium, Hammond, celeste, percussion
Andy Snitzer – saxophone, flute, synth
Joel Guzman – accordion

He includes the modern classical group YMusic in a sub set (some of whom play and sing backing on other songs)

Y Music:
CJ Camerieri – trumpet
Alex Sopp – flute
Hideaki Aormori – clarinet
Rob Moose – violin
Nadia Sirota – violin
Gabriel Cabezas – cello

It’s been a long, very hot day in Hyde Park, pushing past 31°C in the afternoon, and there’s no shade. The queues for food are impossible – 45 minutes long (fortunately we had had a vegetable paella at 1 p.m. and an ice cream at 3pm, but nothing after that). You can get tap water, but even queuing for a drink twixt James Taylor and Paul Simon looks impossible.  Hot, hungry, thirsty and tired. As Paul Simon is about to start, we realize that as people crowd in and fill the gaps it’s time to take our blankets from the ground and stand. We’re exhausted after eight hours mainly on our feet in what is extreme heat for England, but Paul’s full 2 hour 20 minute set is so magical that we survive the aches and pains. Yes, two hours twenty minutes. This is NOT the older artist coasting gently into retirement … we saw farewell tours from several, including Glen Campbell and Andy Williams. It’s always nostalgic, lovely but you have to admit the old voices are past 100%.  Not here. Paul Simon is on full power … my companion reckons the best we’ve ever seen him too. Paul looks good for another ten years to me.

This is the last concert of the Farewell Tour, and the biggest.  Well, allegedly. If you discount upcoming shows in New Orleans, Tampa and Sunrise, Florida in September, though I assume they will be to launch his new album In The Blue Light.

London is the city where his solo career started too (equally true for James Taylor earlier, who pointed it out). Truly Homeward Bound. Paul goes on in bright dazzling sunshine just before 8 p.m., facing West … he jokes that he’ll take his sunglasses off once the sun goes behind the trees. He does. The headline act at BST Hyde Park concerts always gets the sunset over their act; starting in sunshine, finishing in darkness. When Paul does the encore version of Homeward Bound a huge jet with pink vapour trail flies over us, heading west, just as he comes to an end. We stare up. You see planes all day, but this is the first we noticed and heard on this exact path. It’s a “Woe, heavy!” moment, or “No! He can’t have done!” Not even the perfectionist Paul Simon could have fixed that one. Let’s just put it down to glorious synchronicity.

The set list is fixed. I checked back on setlist.com and it’s standard through June and July. Then again, it’s just about perfect, so why fiddle about?

I thought he was slightly faltering on the first two songs, America and 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, jazzing over the lyrics slightly, though the long alto sax solo in the latter was a highlight. I wondered if Steve Gadd had stayed over from his set with James Taylor to watch them reproduce his drum part creation in Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.  No one has done more mega park events … whether Central Park or Hyde Park, but that sea of faces must still be initially intimidating. He’s doing an accent thing in announcements currently … Manchester reviews mention him trying Mancunian. I’m not sure that his touches of Japanese, Brazilian and Jamaican here were actually amusing … not that I have anything against doing accents, but it felt uncontextualized.

mid-set. Sunglasses off. Sunset is near

The Boy In The Bubble though was right, tight on form, and from then on he was in total command, assured, conducting as good a band as anyone can assemble. Only James Taylor and Leonard Cohen reach the same level of musicianship, arrangement and sound balance on a large stage. Joel Guzman shone on accordion.

You can tell pretty quickly what the outstanding song on an album is, and the first time I heard So Beautiful, or So What? It was Dazzling Blue … one of three songs from that album in tonight’s set. As ever it shimmered.

That Was Your Mother was a full on flat out Zydeco romp, upping the pace. We had a long fascinating intro to Rewrite. Paul explained how he came to start it with just a rhythm tapped on his guitar, then said the guy with the ‘job in the carwash’ was the same guy on the bus in America.

Mother & Child Reunion is hugely infectious … earlier Paul said it so many of the songs were based on a rhythm, so go ahead and dance. It was too tight packed for that, but everyone at least did a stationery backing vocalist shimmy throughout. Not quite reggaefied enough for me though. I’ve heard it lurch more! It always twins with Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard and that got easily the biggest shout of acclaim of the evening so far. I reckon the band are tighter with Puerto Rican rhythms than Jamaican ones.

Fuzzy iPhone pic of the side TV screen with sunlight on it, but it gives the workshop feel of Paul Simon with Y Music (+ Mark Stewart)

Then we come to the sub set with YMusic, young classical musicians, gathered around Paul as if in a living room (the back projection emphasized that). Mark Stewart joined them. It was subime and probably the reason we thought this concert excelled over others. Two violins, cello, clarinet, flute and trumpet. They worked parts of the main set too, but the next three songs focussed on them.

Rene & Georgette Magritte After The War was introduced with an anecdote about browsing the bookshelf in Joan Baez’s house and taking a book on Magritte from the shelf. His eyes fell upon the photograph, which had that subtitle. I saw earlier reviews of the tour which mentioned it as “an obscure number”. WTF? It is from Hearts and Bones, one of Paul’s greatest albums, and if I could only have Gracelandand one other album, it would be Hearts & Bones. I have a short playlist on my ipad that I select from before drifting off to sleep at night. Rene & Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War is on there, along with the title track. It may be my most played Paul Simon song of recent years. By which I mean a couple of times most weeks. Anyway, the YMusic backing reinvented it (and they play it with him on the forthcoming album, In The Blue Light).

Then they stay together for a totally reimagined Can’t Run But from Rhythm of The Saints. That album has been prominent in his work in the last decade, as after Graceland he had expected it to be equally mega. Well, it was #4 in the USA (Graceland was #3), and both were #1 in the UK. I guess at the time he was suffering critically (or “Rock-snobbishly”) from the negative kneejerk criticism of working in South Africa. Anyway, the album is being reclaimed. Another glorious treatment from YMusic.

On to the big one. Bridge Over Troubled Water. He said:

 “This song felt as if it came through me, as if I was a conduit for it. Then I gave the song away and I seldom sung it after that, so I had a strange relationship to it as if it wasn’t my song, but tonight, on my final tour I’m going to reclaim my lost child.”

Slightly unfair to Art Garfunkel, though I know what he means. When you write something, sharing credit is hard. The most praised unit in our first textbook Streamline English pre-dated meeting my co-writer. I’d say only one word was changed from my original, and yet we were both praised equally for it. On the other hand, Artie’s soaring voice propelled Bridge Over Troubled Water to its status as one of the most popular songs of the century. It’s also untrue that Paul Simon hasn’t done it and rethought it himself, sometimes quite radically, as with the Jesse Dixon Singers on Live Rhymin’. However, nothing prepared me for this sublime treatment, in a lower key, but with a trumpet part that drew tears for its sheer beauty.

Wristband followed. Fun. It gives him street cred for keeping up with the kids. Great lyric. Bakithi Kumalo moved to electric double bass which became the centre of the song.

Spirit Voices started with an elegy to the great Cameroon guitarist Vincent Nguini, who passed away last year. Nguini had been with Simon since The Rhythm of The Saints, and Paul Simon had thought they’d never be able to play those songs again.  Then he met Biodun Kuti from Nigeria, and the songs were back. Kuti had that immediate fluid African guitar style, playing beautifully.

In a reverse of the running order on Rhythm of The Saints,The Obvious Child came next. At least four drummers as usual.

He moved on to Questions For The Angels, the third number from So Beautiful or So What. The philosophy appeals to him, based on the writings of E.O. Wilson. I have to say it’s a song that I thought one of the weakest on that album. He’s sending me back to it with fresh ears, and it’s another coming in September on the new album.

It went into Cool Cool Riverwith Biodan Kuti’s guitar work highlighted on the TV screens, then back into Questions For The Angels.

Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

Paul has finished it his main set with Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes linked by a drum and percussion instrumental bridge intoYou Can Call Me Al for years. It gets everyone dancing. It’s fabulous. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  Mick Rossi took a long piano solo in Diamonds. We had a lot of singing along from 60,000 plus voices throughout the show, but here everyone started singing that punchy horn part and it grew and grew. Bakithi Kumalo stepped up for his two bass guitar solos.

The double, eight song, encore is normal for him.

The first began with Late In The Evening, as ever the lone survivor from One Trick Pony, an album I played to death at the time. Great rhythm, though no loud “whoop!” on I stepped outside to smoke myself a J, but then while cigarettes and vapes were allowed in Hyde Park, nowadays so very few smoke (though during James Taylor we had one of the only ones next to us – you forget what a face full of second hand smoke is like nowadays.)

Still Crazy After All These Years highlighted that perfect diction and phrasing of a lyric which is second to none. Around ten years back he had a very slight “slush” on live vocals when we saw him, but it has long gone.

Graceland was a huge crowd pleaser. The TV screens focussed attention on Bakithi Kumalo on 5 string bass guitar (maybe six?) propelling the song, and on the quite unexpected slide guitar addition by Mark Stewart.

The second encores: by now it was dark.

The second encore started with Homeward Bound and the stage projection had a collage of tickets and photos from his career starting with Widnes railway station in Lancashire where he wrote the song.

A lively Kodachrome took over with the full band rocking out.

Then we had The Boxer in its current sparse (but not unaccompanied setting).

Paul Simon only made the briefest reference to the ‘current situation’ in introducing American Tune which he took as solo acoustic guitar. He didn’t have to beat his chest and didn’t. We all get the image of the Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea …

He finished where he started with The Sound of Silence, slightly disconcerting as his new phrasing didn’t quite match the tens of thousands of us singing the lyric along with him so softly. It’s up on YouTube HERE. Odd it looks too steady for an iPhone, and also you can’t hear the crowd singing much – they were very clear round me.

Overall it was an excellent career retrospective. There was nothing from Surprise, which was, um, a surprise, though I’d say at least two songs on there, Another Galaxy and Father And Daughter are among his best 21^stcentury songs. We got Wristband from 2016’s Stranger to Stranger, the track it was promoted with. My favourite track on that one was Cool Papa Bell. Nothing from 2000’s You’re the One or Songs From The Capeman either. In general, it was the set most fans would have chosen. I did hear someone who had been hoping for I Am A Rock  on the way out.

We’d half expected a “surprise” guest, especially as Paul and James Taylor have recorded together on Wonderful World. It was not to be. I guess when a set has been curated and refined to this degree, there’s no room or inclination for a ‘bit of a jam’ through something.

I just wish I’d devoted more of the time I devoted to writing on The Band, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison to Paul Simon. He’s way the best live performer of the three, and the perfectionist lyricist and you always hear every word.

*****

SEPTEMBER 2018: Paul Simon has a new album In The Blue Light featuring ten of his favourite compositions re-imagined with YMusic, Wynton Marsalis, Bill Frizzell and others.

CONCERT EARWORM
Dazzling Blue, still playing in my head

OTHER PAUL SIMON REVIEWS ON THIS BLOG

• Paul Simon & Sting 2015
• Paul Simon, November 2016
• Paul Simon Nov. 2006
• Simon & Garfunkel 2004
• Paul Simon Oct. 2000

CRITICAL REVIEWS
Alice Vincent, Telegraph *****
David Honigman, Financial Times *****
Rick Pearson, Evening Standard ****