Before last Sunday, I had been to only two pop concerts in all my 64 years on this Earth.
One was a performance by Showaddywaddy in Ipswich which I’d been sent to cover as a cub reporter on the East Anglian Daily Times in the Seventies. The other was a Rolling Stones extravaganza at Wembley Stadium, where I was dragged in 1995 by my wife, who’s had a lifelong crush on Sir Mick.
But when, months ago, Mrs U saw an advertisement announcing that Paul Simon would be performing his last ever British concert in London during his final world tour, I couldn’t say no.
Simon, after all, is a gigantic figure in popular culture (if not in physical stature), whose music was part of the soundtrack of my youth and that of every other baby-boomer. I even liked some of his later stuff, particularly the Graceland album, after his split from Art Garfunkel. His farewell show would be an historic occasion. It would be a crime to deny Mrs U her wish.
Paul Simon performs at British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park
True, I balked a little at the ticket prices — £129.95 each, plus a booking fee of £12.50 — which she assured me were the cheapest available. But, hey, if a man won’t indulge his wife’s love of pop megastars once every 23 years, what sort of a husband can he call himself?
Painful
I confess I had another reason for agreeing to go. Though Paul Simon may be at the square end of the coolness spectrum, and therefore more to my taste, his supporting act was James Taylor. (How are the mighty fallen!)
When I was in my teens and 20s, he was the coolest of the cool, adored by the druggiest, naughtiest, sexiest girls I admired from afar, knowing they were way out of my stuffy conservative league.
I was intrigued to discover whether he still appealed to the young, and what had become of those original fans of his, 40 and 50 years on.
Johnny Vegas (left) and Tim Healy at British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park where Paul Simon was headlining
Oh dear, how can I put this kindly? Safest to say, perhaps, that Britons of my generation — I’d say the overwhelming majority in that vast throng at the concert were aged 55 to 65 — don’t look our best, en masse, turned out in casual gear on a sweltering July day in Hyde Park.
Most had opted for shorts, men and women alike — though not me (I’m far too vain, and wore my summer uniform of a linen suit) — with voluminous, sweat-drenched sleeveless shirts to accommodate their middle-aged spread.
In the course of that blistering afternoon, I saw countless paper-white shins turning a painful red.
Those of us who could, cowered from the pitiless blaze of the sun in tiny strips of shade thrown by the fencing around the immense enclosure. I noticed that I was far from alone in surreptitiously popping pills — strictly NHS, rather than the LSD that many of these concert-goers may have taken back in their wild youth.
How we longed for the shadows to lengthen and the two main attractions to come on. I have to say it almost broke my heart to see some of the women, whose bopping I would have found so alluring four decades ago, manoeuvring mountains of flesh and swaying creaking hips in time with the music. How cruel the passage of time can be!
I noticed a couple of other things about the crowd, too. One was that hardly any smoked, while several threw disapproving glances at me when I lit up a Marlboro Red. I imagined them decades ago, shrouded in clouds of cannabis smoke at Glastonbury. Would they have tutted at me so righteously then?
Something else was remarkable, too, and at first I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it slowly dawned on me: among this vast audience, there was hardly a single black face to be seen, except those of the servers behind the bars at the food and drink stalls (lager £6 per pint, plastic bottle of Bulgarian plonk, £25).
A couple of decades ago, this would not have been very unusual. But in the multicultural London of today it struck me as quite extraordinary to be at such an immense gathering where almost everyone was white.
Platitudes
Part of the reason, I suppose, is that Simon and Taylor were at their height, and their fan bases formed, at a time when the capital was still a predominantly white city. But that can’t explain it all.
Clearly, their music doesn’t appeal to ethnic minorities — odd, I would have thought, since Simon in particular is such a devotee of African culture. I offer this up only as an observation, and welcome any theories that aren’t offensive.
Anyway, there we all were, roughly the same age, the same colour, the same shape — and if not in the same income-bracket, at least all comfortably enough off to afford £284.90 per couple for an afternoon and evening’s entertainment.
(I should say I later discovered there were tickets available for £59, for an area of the arena from which the performers looked like ants. From our grand Golden Circle enclosure, closer to the stage, they looked the size of golf tees.)
When first a bald Taylor and then a haggard, 76-year-old Simon finally came on, I discovered that the great majority of my fellow elderly ravers had something else in common, too: almost to a man and woman, they seemed to share a sheep-like, Leftist outlook on life.
This became clear when Taylor, after singing Carole King’s sublime You’ve Got A Friend, announced: ‘I feel I have to say something. There’s another America, other than the one represented by that guy.’ (Donald Trump, need I remind you, was in Scotland that day.) ‘It’ll be back!’
At this, a mighty cheer went up from the crowd, but not from me. I felt like shouting (though, of course, I didn’t): ‘Why do you feel you have to slag off your President when you’re in a foreign country? We’ve paid to hear you sing, not to hear your achingly banal and predictable political views.
‘And anyway, what about the America that is represented by that guy — the America of the 63 million who voted for him, fed up with the platitudes of a smug liberal elite they felt had abandoned them. Don’t they matter at all? Do you, like the insufferable Hillary Clinton, dismiss them as a ‘basket of deplorables’?’
Insulting
Paul Simon wasn’t much better. His contribution to the great Trump debate was to say: ‘Strange times, huh? Don’t give up!’ What an insulting assumption that everyone in the park thought exactly as he did — and that we’d all be tempted to ‘give up’ just because America had elected someone with whose politics this multi-millionaire happened to disagree.
More depressing still, if the bleats of approval from the middle-aged, short-trousered sheep were any guide, was that his assumption was pretty near right.
Indeed, another huge cheer went up when Simon said something about the importance of saving the planet, after revealing that a song he was about to sing had been inspired by the work of an ecologist. The hypocrisy took my breath away.
Why was the audience prepared to applaud an environmental homily from a man with one of the biggest carbon footprints on the planet?
After all, he was coming to the end of a tour which must have required a fleet of jumbo jets to fly his vast band and entourage around the world, belching toxins into the atmosphere all the way?
What’s more, I’ll bet a good 80 per cent of those who cheered him were themselves either fresh back from jetting abroad on holiday, or about to set off. I guess they thought it was enough to signal their virtue, without actually having to do anything about it.
I’ve gone off those girls I used to fancy.
As for the concert itself, not bad but not great. I’d have liked it more if Simon hadn’t messed about with some of the old favourites — Homeward Bound, The Sound Of Silence etc — with new arrangements that made it hard to sing along. But OK, I admit he’s a genius.
I just wish that somewhere in America there were actors, actresses or pop stars who didn’t feel the need to preach politics at us. We know, luvvies, you’re all warm-hearted, liberal Lefties. Now belt up about it, and go back to raking in those millions from your like-minded, unthinking sheep.