Paul Simon: MS Bank Arena, May 2026

It's been a while, hasn't it?

As I said eighteen months ago or so when I started this newsletter, I need creative outlets outside the main work I do, which is my podcast, but they have to take second place to that main work, so if this ever started to interfere with that work rather than help it, I would have to stop doing this. And I found after a couple of months that my initial plan for this newsletter was simply far too ambitious for my current state of health and the workload I have for the podcast.

(And also, I have had another outside creative outlet for much of that time, which will be announced shortly).

My original plan of doing an Elvis album review and a comic review and something else every week was foolhardy, and I couldn't keep it up, but I do still want to write things that aren't directly relevant to the podcast, and so I've decided that I'll post occasional things here – gig, book, and film reviews, general updates, and all the other things that people normally use newsletters for. If that's not what you signed up for, or if you're no longer interested in hearing from me, please feel free to unsubscribe – I won't take offence at all.
(I also have half an eye on this as being somewhere I could use as a backup way of monetising my work if Patreon ever goes belly-up, though I'll never charge for posts like this).

It's most likely that you'll get messages during times like this, when I'm working on incredibly complicated parts of the podcast (for those who don't know, I'm currently working on three interconnected episodes, two of which will be released simultaneously) – partly because those times are when I need something to distract myself a little from the intense work, and partly to let people know that I'm still alive.

Anyway, one of the things I've decided to do is review at least some of the gigs I go to, and gig season has started up in earnest now (for some reason pretty much every act I go and see tends to tour between May and August, and then you get eight months with maybe one gig in total). So you'll get a few of these in the coming weeks (though not as many as if I weren't also working on multiple other things – since starting to write this review I've been to two more gigs since)...

Paul Simon at the M&S Bank Arena

I thought for a very long time I would never get to see Paul Simon live. Until my mid-forties I had to think very carefully about which gigs I could afford to go to, and Simon didn't tour all that often, and when he did there was always something slightly more pressing calling on what little money I had. For example, when Simon and Garfunkel did their 2004 reunion tour, I desperately wanted to go, but I could afford either to go and see that or to go and see Brian Wilson performing Smile in full, and I chose the latter.

And then in 2018 Simon did what he announced would be his last ever tour, and it seemed like he was retiring from music. I thought I'd missed my chance and I regretted it deeply.
And I didn't keep up with news about him, because I assumed there was going to be no news, and I also knew I'd be dealing with him in future podcast episodes (hopefully the next one by the end of this year) and I would be doing research on him then anyway.

But then last year I got a fan message, and part of that message said "I saw Paul Simon the other day and he played 'The Late Great Johnny Ace' and because of your podcast I felt very proud because I knew who Johnny Ace was" – and I realised that Simon had come out of retirement, and then I discovered that he was actually going to be touring the UK this year.

It turned out that in 2019, Simon had woken in the middle of the night from a dream in which he was told "you are working on something called Seven Psalms". He had then spent the next few years (slowed down by the advent of the COVID pandemic) working on an album which came out in late 2023, a suite that was very different from anything else he had ever recorded, and had come out of retirement to finish the album and tour it.

The tour is titled A Quiet Celebration, partly because Simon has been suffering from hearing loss in recent years – halfway through recording the album he suddenly lost all hearing in one ear, which also meant that he had to relearn a lot of his singing technique, because he was hearing himself differently – and so until recently he couldn't perform with particularly loud instruments, and he's still emphasising an acoustic feel in the instrumentation. And the format of the show was going to be that he would perform the whole Seven Psalms album in the first half, with the second half of the show being a set of hits.

I decided that it would be interesting to hear Seven Psalms for the first time in live performance, so I deliberately didn't get and listen to the album in advance, so I could be surprised by the performance.

I'd decided to splash out for a good seat – I was in the fifth row – which was lucky as, as with Bob Dylan's gig at the same venue in late 2024, there was no live video, so I'm not sure what kind of show the people who sat at the back of this gigantic arena were getting (though my friend who also came but had one of those seats seemed to enjoy himself). 

Before the show, I messaged a friend saying "I'm not exactly sure how many drum kits there are on stage" – and indeed even now I'm still not sure. There were somewhere between three and five, but they were all so big, and there was so much freestanding percussion, that they effectively merged into one giant backline wall of drum.

The band came out – sadly, Simon never introduced the band, which is unusual for this type of show, and indeed people kept coming and going so I'm not sure exactly how many musicians there were, though I think it was eleven. As well as two guitarists, a keyboardist, a bass player, and some unknown number of percussionists hidden behind the wall of drum (one of whom I think was Steve Gadd), there were also people playing strings and woodwinds, though in the first half most of these would only be heard intermittently.

Simon came out dressed in a suit, and explained the structure of the show – he was going to be performing Seven Psalms in full, with no break between songs. This is, as I later discovered, how the record is presented. While there are seven songs, they flow into each other, and if you buy the CD or digital file, or listen to it on streaming, it's just one long half-hour track (on the vinyl there's a break after "My Professional Opinion", the third song).

I was, I'll admit, rather concerned when Simon started speaking. He's in his mid eighties now, and while there are many singers of his generation who have kept their voice and sound almost identical to how they did sixty years ago, like Al Jardine, Micky Dolenz, and Colin Blunstone, there are also quite a few, not least Simon's old partner Art Garfunkel, whose voices have been completely ravaged by time. And Simon's speaking voice was a husky whisper, almost unrecognisable as the same man.

But then the music started. Simon started playing the guitar, and I knew I was in for something special.

Seven Psalms starts with a guitar figure that will be a recurring motif throughout the piece, a variation on a lick from Bert Jansch's arrangement of Davey Graham's "Anji", one of Simon's touchstones in his very early folkie era, and it soon became apparent that this album is about (among other things) looking back on life from the perspective of someone who knows he's close to death.

And it's an absolute masterpiece, easily the best thing Simon has ever done, though it's as far from the commercial catchiness of his hits as you can imagine. The album is largely Simon and his acoustic guitar, augmented with sparse touches of orchestration at points, but only touches. In some ways, it seems to be a (deliberate or otherwise) rebuttal to the complaints that have been made about the way he created some of his most successful albums, complaints which have become more well-known in recent years.

Musicians he's worked with have complained that Simon has taken backing tracks that were largely created without his input, written lyrics to them, and claimed the whole songwriting credit for himself. We'll get to the extent to which that's a justifiable complaint when I get to Simon's solo work in the podcast, but Seven Psalms seems, among many other things, to be Paul Simon saying "look, I can do it entirely by myself, without anyone else at all".

On stage, Simon starts each section as the sole guitarist, but then hands the guitar parts off to two other guitarists – which makes sense because this album has a lot of very metrically complex material, with irregular vocal lines working across the complex finger-picked lines, and given that Simon has essentially had to reteach himself to sing, that would be almost impossible to do live simultaneously.

And when he started singing, it was obvious that while his voice had definitely become seriously ageworn, the man can still sing and very well. From the start, while his voice was huskier and thinner than decades ago, he still sounded like Paul Simon – and his voice got better rather than worse over the course of the show. From about halfway through the second set, he did sound like his old self, and while he avoided going for some high notes that are clearly no longer in his range, he didn't sound like the damaged husk I'd worried about at first, and made up in mature technique for what he'd lost in youthful flexibility.

But this is also why it was a good idea to start the show with the new material. In the documentary In Restless Dreams (which I watched after the show, and which is definitely recommended, it's one of the best music documentaries I've seen in a long time) Wynton Marsalis, who plays on the album, talks about how he'd tried unsuccessfully to persuade Simon to leave in some of the imperfections and straining for notes, and this is material that suits an aged voice.

Seven Psalms is a thoroughly mature, elderly album, and is one of the few works of its type from someone of Simon's generation. It fits in with Dylan's recent albums, Bowie's Blackstar, Leonard Cohen's final album, and some of Scott Walker's last work as an intelligent piece from someone who fully recognises himself as a very old man who is making music for other old people, not for teenagers.

The piece starts with that Davey Graham-derived figure and the lines "I've been thinking about the great migration/Noon and night they leave the flock/And I imagine their destination/Meadow grass, jagged rock" before going into the lyrical refrain that repeats in the transitions between every section of the piece – "the Lord is..."

At first the Lord is "my engineer", but over the various repetitions in the piece, the Lord becomes among other things "a virgin forest", "a forest ranger", "a meal for the poorest", "the covid virus", "my record producer" and "my personal joke", and throughout the piece Simon seems to be struggling with the concept of faith and whether or not there is a God. He seems not to come to any firm conclusions – unlike one arsehole in the audience who shouted out angrily at one point "the only Lord is our saviour Jesus Christ".

(I've never encountered anyone having such an extreme reaction at a British gig before – that kind of vocal, angry, protestation of faith seems alien to me – and one has to wonder what that person expected, given that he had come to a show by the famously-Jewish Paul Simon. )

It becomes clear that the "great migration" of the opening lines is not primarily the great migration of Black Americans north (though among the myriad layers of meaning of the lyrics, one layer is definitely about refugees), but rather it's about migration from life to death, and that's what most of the album is fundamentally about.

The second section, "Love is Like a Braid" is, like all the album, about multiple things, but one of those things is definitely Simon's love for his wife, Edie Brickell. Brickell duets with Simon on the last two songs of the album, and when she came out on stage, each time, Simon gave her a look of adoration that's indescribable, but which clearly communicated in a way that left no doubt that he was thinking "My God, I am the luckiest man in the world to be married to this wonderful, beautiful, talented woman". Either Simon has become a much, much, much better actor in the decades since One Trick Pony, or he is still, thirty years into this marriage, as besotted with her as a teenager on a first date. 

And the lyrics of "Love is Like a Braid" reflect that, with lines like "I lived a life of pleasant sorrows/Until the real deal came" – a line which seems far flatter on the page than it is as part of the full piece, where it hits hard as a perfect descriptor of what life is like without that kind of deep connection to, for want of a better word, a soulmate. 

Next up is "My Professional Opinion", the most straightforward song on the album, and one that's in a mode Simon has used as far back as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme but which particularly marked his seventies solo work – the humorous acoustic blues with a rather sadder underlying message than you might imagine from the superficial tone. It ends though with another of the album's religious statements – "All that really matters/ Is the one who became us/Anointed and gained us/With His opinions"

At this point, the distinction between things that are labelled as songs becomes almost completely arbitrary. For what makes up the second side of the vinyl album, we get the "the Lord is" theme coming back again and again, linking fragments that make up four songs on the tracklist but could easily be counted as as many as six, and with elliptical lyrics about love, refugees, death, ageing, and religion. Simon has in interviews been quite surprised by people saying this is an album "about mortality", saying it's more about God and about questioning religion and looking for answers and not finding them, but it is absolutely an album made by a man who is very aware how many more years he has behind him than ahead. The last song, "Wait", starts "Wait/I'm not ready/I'm just packing my gear/Wait/My hand's steady/My mind is still clear"

It's an astonishing, beautiful, album, and the live performance of it was breathtaking. I would have been happy with just that, but the response was, I think, slightly muted, though not unappreciative – some of which may have been out of respect, but some of it I think was just people not being in their comfort zones. As I said earlier, I had a very good (and expensive) seat, and the bloke next to me must have paid a similar large amount for his ticket. Yet while he was quiet in the first half, in the second half anything that was not on either Graceland, the Negotiations and Love Songs compilation, or The Best of Simon & Garfunkel got an exasperated harumph noise, and I swear that at one point he fell asleep during a non-hit.

But when the second half started, and Simon walked out dressed more casually and the band swung into "Graceland", the audience went absolutely wild. 

Simon had announced at the start of the first set that the second set would be hits and also "some of the songs I've wanted to do for a long time", and while for most artists of his age and level of fame that tends to mean all the hits plus one B-side, it turns out to have been quite an accurate description. The second set did have plenty of crowd-pleasers, but there were a handful of notable songs that were left out, and there were also quite a few obscurities (or as obscure as you get when you're as big a star as Paul Simon) – there were more songs performed from Hearts and Bones, which I think is his worst-selling twentieth century studio album, though one of my favourites, than there were from any other album.

This had two benefits. First, it meant that we got to hear some great songs that I would never have expected to hear live even before Simon's initial retirement, and it also meant that Simon could drop some songs that his aged voice would have difficulty with. It was of course sad not to hear, say, "American Tune" (maybe Simon's best song) or "Still Crazy After All These Years", but there are very good reasons for not including those. ("Still Crazy", for example, has a middle eight key change up a sharpened fourth, because Simon wanted to copy Jobim and write a song with every note in the chromatic scale and that's the easiest way to do it. There's no way his current voice could cope with that sort of leap.)

But the set we did get was absolutely magnificent, and the fact that Simon's voice was worse for wear meant that we got to see how good a singer he is, because he made a lot of very, very, intelligent performance choices in his phrasing to cover for his lost range. He really is a magnificent singer – which really shouldn't be surprising because he's had enough practice, since his first hit was sixty-nine years ago. I think of currently working singers, only Peggy Seeger and Ron Isley have been going longer (Willie Nelson is older, but started performing after Simon).

After "Graceland" and "Slip Slidin' Away" came the first surprise of the evening and the first harumph from my seat neighbour, a lovely rendition of "Train in the Distance" from Hearts and Bones. 

Then came the first of the handful of Simon & Garfunkel songs he played in the set, "Homeward Bound". As it was written in the local area, he talked a little bit about touring England pre-fame, and about writing it. Those who remember my episode on "The Sound of Silence" will remember that there I talked about the confusion as to whether that was written in Widnes, Wigan, or Warrington. Simon is still apparently confused on the matter, as he said it was written in "Widnes or Warrington... whichever one has the plaque that keeps getting stolen from the station".

We then got a whole run of album tracks and obscurities. Of the next seven tracks, the only one a casual fan would have recognised was "Under African Skies", dedicated to Joseph Shabalala, who had inspired it and who had died since Simon's last tour, and sung beautifully with Edie Brickell singing Linda Ronstadt's part.

But these included several of Simon's best songs. "The Late Great Johnny Ace", with the way it ties together the three seemingly-unrelated men named John who died by gunfire, is structured so much like one of my podcast episodes that I think of it as a song that I would have written if I was a great songwriter; "St Judy's Comet", illustrated by projected photos of Simon with his son Harper as a baby, is (or seems to be) one of Simon's most straightforward and direct expressions of emotion; and "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After The War" has always been a favourite of mine (and is one of several songs in this section of the show that are about other musicians, with its litany of 50s doo-wop groups), and my friend, who was not familiar with the Hearts and Bones album, came out of the show saying it was his new favourite Paul Simon song.

It's quite brave of someone as successful as Simon to do so many less-famous tracks in a row, especially after devoting the entire first half to a new album most people there won't have heard, but for me at least the gamble paid off, because before I checked the setlist against my memories, I somehow managed to come out of the show with two parallel sets of memories of this second half of the show. The first was "he did a bunch of my favourite obscurities I never expected to hear!" and the second was "well, that was just a bang-bang-bang wall of classic hits, wasn't it?" And I didn't even question those two conflicting memories until I was writing this review.

And that's because he'd started the second half with hits and he ended it with them. Or, more precisely, he ended the second half proper with hit singular. The last song before the encores was a wonderful rendition of "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard", and by this point his voice had warmed up enough that the only way you could tell he was in his eighties rather than his thirties was that he didn't do the leap into falsetto on the word "Rosie" in the chorus – instead of singing "Goodbye to Ro-O-sie" he just held the note and sang "Goodbye to Rosie". Edie Brickell came back out and did the whistling solo.

(Though please note that this is me talking about my memory of the show, not necessarily what a recording would show. I'm sure that several keys were dropped, that he had more of an old man's slur than I'm remembering, that his voice was still more fragile, that he maybe missed some notes. Even the best live show has a way of being flattened in the recording, the flaws magnified and the high points diminished. But live shows are about the experience in the moment, and this is how I experienced it in those moments).

After the obligatory standing ovation came the bit that most of the audience had been waiting for, the encore, where Simon finally did a run of songs they could sing along to. After starting with a gorgeous version of "Something So Right", they went straight into "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover", with the drummer, who I presume is Steve Gadd, pulling off that wonderful drum riff perfectly. Again, Simon made some choices to minimise the loss of vocal power while still being musically interesting, not going up on "don't need to discuss much" in the choruses, but ending each chorus with a variation on the "get yourself free" where he played around, held "yourself" for an age and did a little melisma at the bottom of his range.

Then came "The Boxer", and this was a point in the show where I actually had a small revelation about a song I've known for decades. Everyone talks about how this seems like an attempt at sounding like Dylan, and I've never heard that myself. But hearing Simon sing it in his older, lower, voice, with the boom-chick-a-boom acoustic guitar rhythm, I realised that what it actually sounds like is a Johnny Cash song. Or even more than one of Cash's originals, it bears quite a resemblance to Cash's version of Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", though it can't have been inspired by that track (Cash's version was recorded for The Johnny Cash Show in June 1969, "The Boxer" was recorded in March). But while it can't be modelled on that particular song, I am convinced after hearing this live performance – not just the arrangement but the way the melody sounds when sung by Simon alone – that Simon was inspired by Cash in general.

And then, after the band took their bows and left the stage to another ovation, Simon stood alone in the spotlight with his acoustic guitar, and started playing the song that started it all. He played through an entire verse of "The Sound of Silence" as a guitar instrumental, before he started to sing. And with just that sparse backing, every flaw in his older voice was exposed, with nothing to compensate for it, and the audience listened spellbound, not singing along (though there was applause at "ten thousand people maybe more"). Because he did a genuinely astonishing performance of this, his elderly voice giving the rather callow lyrics a gravitas they had always strained for but never attained.

In this review I have probably focused far too much on what some people might see as a negative – Simon's voice sounding, well, like that of a man in his eighties. That's because I don't want people reading this, buying tickets for one of his shows, and feeling outraged that he doesn't sound exactly like he did sixty years ago. But if you want to hear an artist who's not pretending to be anything other than what he is, a very old man, make staggering new art that deals appropriately with ageing and impending mortality in a way that few others of his generation have ever attempted, while also looking back at and recontextualising the work both of his youth and of his middle age, this is a profoundly special show. 

Indeed, in many ways I'm now very glad that I didn't get to see Simon twenty or thirty years ago, when he had more of his old voice and was able just to lean on the hits and sounding like the record. I'm sure those shows were great, but this is something truly remarkable, precisely because of that fragility, and that's heightened for me by this being my first (and sadly, I'm assuming, only) experience of him live.

Simon is touring the US in June and July. If you're over there, then I urge you to go and see this show. It's an experience you'll never forget.