Paul Simon @ The iTunes Festival, London Roundhouse

“THERE’S A LOT OF PEOPLE TALKING!”
“YEAH, AND IT’S A QUIET GIG, D’YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”

So begins a conversation between two of my fellow gig-goers during a song early on in Paul Simon’s set, which develops into a rambling dialogue recalling the various shows they’ve previously attended at the Roundhouse and their respective noise levels. Gah.

When I was growing up, back in the early nineteenth century, Paul Simon was judged by the kind of people who decide these things as being irredeemably un-hip, but in recent years he’s benefitted from something of a reappraisal. By which I mean Noah and the Whale covered one of his songs, Vampire Weekend based their entire schtick on his classic Graceland, and people at ATP kept playing ‘You Can Call Me Al’.

Accordingly, the audience for tonight’s gig (all here courtesy of the largesse of a well-known digital music platform) contains high proportions of both smartly dressed middle-aged types and preppy hipsters. As well as morons who won’t stop talking.

The first part of tonight’s two-hour performance showcases songs from his new album, So Beautiful or So What, alongside older songs (with the focus almost entirely on his solo stuff) and a couple of covers. After a brief intermission, Simon and his band return for a run through established crowd-pleasers ‘Kodachrome’, ‘The Boy In The Bubble’ and ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, as well as a solo acoustic cover of ‘Here Comes The Sun’, before encoring with a rapturously received ‘Call Me Al’.

But the high point of the evening for me comes when a fiftysomething lady tells a young idiot talking on his mobile to go outside during – oh, the irony – ‘The Sound Of Silence’. Ho ho!