Birthday boys Simon and Garfunkel have had a partnership over troubled water

Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon of Simon (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI)

IT’S unlikely they will have a double birthday celebration together, but both Simon and Garfunkel have significant dates coming up!

Paul Simon turned 75 on October 13, while Art Garfunkel reaches the same milestone 23 days later.

One of the greatest musical double acts of all time, their relationship has always been rocky and, while their initial burst of creativity saw them together from 1957 to 1970, their meetings since have been sporadic at best.

There have been reunions, usually for tours, in 1975, ’77, and several in the decades since.

Alas, there have also been arguments and bitter outbursts.

Bear in mind, we are talking about a couple of perfectionists, and things never run smoothly with such folk.

Simon and Garfunkel, circa 1965 (Keystone/Getty Images)

It was a different story when they had a string of mega-hits worldwide in the 60s, with the likes of The Sound Of Silence, Mrs Robinson, Bridge Over Troubled Water and The Boxer.

Their final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, became one of the most-successful recordings of all time, and when they got together for a reunion concert in 1981 at Central Park, half a million were there to witness it.

It was a full 60 years ago, when they were both 15, that they got their earliest recording deal, with the independent label Big Records.

They called themselves Tom & Jerry, Garfunkel giving himself the name Tom Graph after his love of maths, and Simon becoming Jerry Landis, after a girl he had been dating.

Hey Schoolgirl, their single, was featured every night on the radio and became a hit.

Their first album as Simon and Garfunkel saw four songs penned by Simon, and filled with folk and traditional material.

One day soon, Paul Simon would never again need anyone else to write his songs for him.

Paul would become far more than being another good singer. He has few equals when it comes to songwriting, and is handy on various instruments.

It’s said that his favourite place to write is in the bathroom, preferably with the lights turned out, letting him concentrate.

“The main thing about playing the guitar was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream,” he says.

“Because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber.

“I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run — I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me — and I’d play. In the dark. ‘Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.’”

Yes, we can see how Bridge Over Troubled Water might have come about, too!

On the other hand, Art is a bookish intellectual, a man who has read a huge amount of serious literature, and gone to the trouble of writing at length about every single book in his vast library, listing dates he read them (since 1968!) and so on.

And yet, apart from some prose, he doesn’t actually write and didn’t write any of his many hit songs.

He was, however, destined to be a singer from a young age, when his father gave him a recording device and he’d sing obsessively into it for hours at a time.

When he temporarily lost his voice in recent years, he’d go into an empty concert hall and try, on the stage alone, for hours on end, to coax those high notes back.

He hates, at times, the whole world of showbiz, and often tells journalists that he still gets very nervous when he looks out at a large concert hall full of fans.

That may explain why he went off on marathon treks through Europe and the wider world, incognito, using various modes of transport to see the planet.

At the same time, he has enjoyed some big film roles, not least in 1970s Catch-22. Simon appeared in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, among others.

Simon and Garfunkel (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

When they parted at the start of the 70s, Paul Simon would go into another stratosphere with his writing, almost as if he wanted to demonstrate what a big part he had played in their chemistry.

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover, Still Crazy After All These Years, You Can Call Me Al and many more hit singles and brilliant album tracks showed he could also turn his hand to music from every part of the world.

Garfunkel, meanwhile, had a UK album No 1 with Bright Eyes, but struggled for years after his long-term girlfriend killed herself.

Why do he and Simon keep falling out?

Well, one argument was Paul going on at Art to quit smoking.

At other times, Art wanted to use certain songs, but Paul felt they were so personal to himself that they should be part of just a Paul Simon album, not a joint one.

Sometimes, they just got plain sick of the sight of each other.

However, we should all be thankful that they’re both still around at 75, and that for every candle they will blow out, the rest of us have a classic song by Simon, or Garfunkel, or by both of them together, to play once more in celebration.

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