INTERVIEW WITH PAUL SIMON

The Daily Telegraph, October 29, 2000

Although he’s a master songwriter with masses of fans who snap up his records and breathlessly hang on every nuance of his lyrics and melodies, Paul Simon has never attracted fanatics. People do not stalk him, threaten his life, rummage through his dustbins or approach him wild-eyed in the street, claiming only he and they Know The Truth. “I’m grateful for it”, says Simon, with a sigh. “There’s lunacy and evil in the world, and if you’re not touched by it, you’re fortunate.”

During his ‘You’re the one Tour, 2000’: “Now I’m at this point in my life,” says 59-year-old Paul Simon, “this is what I know: I don’t know too much”.

He mulled this over in his suite at the Savoy the day after the first of three triumphant Hammersmith Apollo concert this week. Simon and his accomplished 11-piece band played an impeccable 150-minute set; I told him how much I had enjoyed it, along with everyone sitting around me. “I thought we played well,” he says. “I thought people liked it, but it was a little hard to tell.”

True. Simon’s fans don’t jump around, dance or yell, they simply applaud with restrained but deeply felt appreciation. He prefers it that way: “If I go to a concert, I don’t scream or leap if I love something. I just,” and he hugs himself, “love it”.

He thinks it’s all a matter of charisma, a quality he thinks he lacks: “I don’t believe in it, I have no interest in it. I find it incredibly boring. I hear complains that certain politicians have no charisma, and I think, thank goodness for that. I’m sick to death of it. I think it’s some chemical, visceral thing some performers have, people are attracted to it when they don’t know why, but it says nothing whatsoever about content.”

Simon agrees that Bob Dylan, with whom he toured America last year, had charisma to burn as a young man: “But he also had talent and content. So when you have that phenomenon, a gifted poet with the physical beauty of youth, it’s extraordinary. It produces a kind of mania.

“Look, Simon and Garfunkel were about as big as you could be. Only The Beatles were bigger. But were we charismatic? I don’t think so. But we couldn’t be more popular. And that came out of our music and our sound.”

Simon applauds Dylan, whose fans include a smattering of obsessives, for touring almost continuously: “He’s accomplished something valuable for himself. He’s demystified the whole thing. By being there all the time in public, Bob normalised things.” Simon prefers to live a low-key life without the trappings of mystique. “My dread is that someone’s going to write a serious biography of me. Some writers have asked, and I’ve said, no thank you. I don’t want people to know anything about me.”

Simon doesn’t look charismatic. Roly-poly and diminutive, he hides a balding pate beneath an ever-present baseball cap. Amiable if not exactly warm, and courteous without being ingratiating, he’s intriguing to interview, but not easy. Thoughtful and cagey, he challenges the wording and premise of certain questions before offering opinions in a slow, sing-song voice.

He’s 59, an age that in his business usually signifies that one’s best creative years are long gone. But Simon and his blistering band nailed that lie at Hammersmith this week. There’s further evidence that he remains at his peak on his new record, ‘You’re the one’. Unlike its predecessors ‘Graceland’, with its South African influences, and ‘Rhythm of the saints’, with its Brazilian rhythms, ‘You’re the one’ is a collection of 11 songs with no over-arching concept.

Yet some of these songs touch on aging, death and faith. It’s suitable subject matter for a man at his stage of life, but then Simon’s work has long been suffused by melancholy born of long experience. In concert it was a shock to hear ‘Still crazy after all these years’, ‘American tune’ and that paean to old age, ‘Old friends’. They sound more appropriate from him now than they did originally.

“Well, I had no business writing ‘Old friends’,”, Simon says. “It’s interesting that I did. It was written when I was in my twenties. I had no idea about old age.” He pauses to consider. “There’s something touching about the things you say when you’re young. Because you really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Even now, he rejects the idea of himself as any kind of sage. “Now I’m at this point in my life, this is what I know: I don’t know too much. Though, God knows, I talk on and on as if I do.”

What he does know is that the songs on ‘You’re the one’ came unusually fast: the complex ‘Darling Lorraine’, about the fluctuations of a long marriage, was completed in a day, and eight others took less than two. He attributes this to his conviction that a song’s sound and rhythm must be in place before its melody and lyrics. Fans who scan his words for autobiographical clues will be surprised that he had no advance idea what his new songs would be about.

“For most of my career, until ‘Graceland’, I’d write a song, then find the right rhythm and sound to encase it. If I did, I was pleased with the result. If not, a pretty good song just went away. It was frustrating when that happened. If you don’t get sound and rhythm right, it doesn’t matter what you have to say. Nobody’s going to want to hear it. You have to make a song enjoyable on a primary level.”

His task is made easier these days by contentment: “I’m saner than I’ve ever been.” This is partly because after two brief marriages (to Peggy Harper and actress Carrie Fisher) he is happy with his third wife, singer-songwriter Edie Brickell, whom he married in 1992. They have three children, aged seven, five and two.

“I wouldn’t say I’m serene,” he mused. “You can’t always be in a state of bliss. But even though I complain from time to time, I have no complaints. I’m happy and grateful for the particulars of my life.”

Only two subjects suggest otherwise. One is Garfunkel. Their often fractious relationship is clearly over for good: “I haven’t seen him in years,” Simon says brusquely.

The other is ‘The Capeman’, his 1998 musical that closed on Broadway after 68 performances and unprecedentedly venomous reviews. He now defends it at great length. “The critics said it was a crap, absolutely worthless,” he recalled. “I hadn’t experienced such personal attacks before. The media decided, let’s get this guy.” He sighs. “But we tried. In five years, it will come back, it’ll be all over the place.”

If ‘Capeman’ jolted his pride and self-esteem, his new record and his form in concert confirmed that Simon has bounced back. Certainly he knows what gives him satisfaction: “I think it’s this in my world: if you touch people, if they feel better, kinder, more loving because of that touch, that’s a contribution I’d be proud of. That’s more meaningful than having a billion screaming people who aren’t touched at all but anything but hype.”