The show follows a chronological progression through the S&G catalogue – from their first album in 1964, Wednesday Morning, 3AM (which made little impression), through those that made Simon & Garfunkel a household name – Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Time, and Bookends. Unfortunately, in this instance the background to the song wasn’t explained. I was impressed that, after ‘The Sound of Silence’, Clarke and Sterling gave us ‘He Was My Brother’, a less well-known song Paul wrote after Andrew Goodman, who was S&G’s friend and classmate at Queens College, was one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in June 1964. This was amply demonstrated by the video projection which formed the background to the songs, sometimes juxtaposing footage of the decade’s conflicts, war and assassinations with sharply contrasting songs such as ‘Scarborough Fair’. Tom and Jerry in 1957īy the early 1960s S&G were big on the New York folk scene, and their songs, though sweet and reflective, came to occupy a significant part of the soundtrack of a turbulent decade, even if their mood didn’t always reflect the tenor of the times.

They wrote their first song in 1956 while still in High School, and a year later had landed their first recording contract as Tom and Jerry (the show includes a performance of an early rock’n’roll number, ‘Hey Schoolgirl’). Joe Sterling as Art Garfunkel and Gregory Clarke as Paul SimonĪbly accompanied by a three-piece band, comprising Leon Camfield on bass, Adam Smith on guitar and drummer James Pritchard, between numbers Clarke and Sterling tell the story of Simon and Garfunkel’s early friendship, forged as they grew up in Queens, New York, just three blocks away from one another, attending the same schools. These guys are actors as well as singers and not only sound like S&G, but look like them (at least from the upper circle) and move like them, too, with Joe Sterling again particularly effective at capturing Art Garfunkel’s on-stage mannerisms, especially the way he placed his hands on the back of his hips. The stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic before the show To attempt to emulate S&G’s iconic harmonies is a difficult feat, but the two actor/singers do a remarkable job of faithfully recreating their vocal harmonies – with Sterling particularly impressive at nailing Art Garfunkel’s ethereal, choir boy vocals. Rather than acting out scenes from the duo’s past, the presentation format allowed the songs to become the main focus of the show.įrom the opener, ‘The Sound Of Silence’, it was clear that the evening would not be an embarrassment. The pair are played by Gregory Clarke as Paul Simon and Joe Sterling as Art Garfunkel, two musical theatre performers with a strong background in acting. It’s a sort of hybrid of a musical and tribute show, combining their music with a big screen projection of carefully-edited images and video clips that evoke the era and the trajectory of the duo’s own story. The Simon and Garfunkel Story narrates the duo’s rise to fame through the 1960’s, their eventual breakup at the height of their success in 1970, before culminating with their triumphant reunion concert in New York’s Central Park in 1981. The S&G album which is most clearly, in the words of rock journalist Bud Scoppa, ‘a meditation on the passage of life and the psychological impact of life’s irreversible, ever-accumulating losses’ is Bookends, which as a concept album concerned with age and the passing of time, in retrospect seems remarkable for having been released in that year of youth and rebellion, 1968: Yet, quite apart from the fact that so many of the songs written by Paul Simon during the S&G years were so bloody good, the fact is that nostalgia was built into a great many of these songs – a sort of ‘forward-nostalgia’ that imagines a future time when the singer will look back and recall present moments. It’s pertinent to note this fact when discussing a show that many would see – quite rightly, in certain respects – as an exercise in pure nostalgia. I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for longĪnd the leaves that are green turn to brown I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song

Think of this, from S&G’s first album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, in 1964: If he ever got back to the twentieth century, Paul Simon wrote in a recent song, he would ‘open the book of his vanishing memory.’ Listening to a succession of glorious songs from his catalogue in The Simon and Garfunkel Story at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall on Sunday night, made evident how many of Paul Simon’s songs right from the early days were concerned with the passing of time and the frailty of memories.

Famous simon and garfunkel songs