Art Garfunkel: ‘I’m in the mood to work with Paul Simon again. We’ll see...’

garfunkel-garfunkel.jpg

Art Garfunkel knows well the sound of silence. “I’ve crossed Europe, I’ve crossed America. I crossed Japan first,” says the higher-voiced half of the 100 million-selling Simon & Garfunkel. Over the past 40 years, he’s been taking continent-wide solo walks, tackling each stretch in instalments, sometimes over decades, writing poetry along the way. “I fell in love with just being out on the road, walking. I found that the less stimuli you have from media and TV and all that, and the more you’re just encountering your own inner self, the fuller you feel.”

One time, in Wyoming, a police cruiser pulled up alongside him. “I remember the cop saying, ‘What are you doing?’” the 83-year-old chuckles, his once pristine voice now deeper and grained with age. “And I said, ‘You know how Thomas Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence, we must believe in ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’? Well, this is the pursuit of happiness I’m doing right now, Officer. Just walking.’”

He’s best loved, though, as a man of rich harmony. The kind of harmony he fell in love with as a youngEverly Brothers fan in the 1950s, honing his crystalline tenor in school stairwells and talent shows. The kind he took to international acclaim and success alongside Paul Simon, creating such beloved classics as “Mrs Robinson”, “Cecilia”, “The Sound of Silence” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. And that he’s now found again, a lot closer to home.

“We started singing when I was less than two years old,” says Art Garfunkel Jr, Garfunkel’s son, long-term band member and a rising star in his own right (Art Jr, now 33, has had several hits in Germany since he launched a solo career in 2021 covering his father’s songs in German). Today, in a room overlooking New York’s Central Park, this tender pairing – the goateed, shaven-headed Art Jr keen to hymn his father’s legend; Art Sr the humble patriarch – are celebrating the release day of their first covers album together as Garfunkel & Garfunkel, titled Father and Son.

Gathering some of Art Sr’s favourite Sixties and American songbook numbers (“Blue Moon”, Don McLean’s “Vincent”, The Beatles’ “Blackbird”) and Art Jr’s Eighties influences (Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again”, Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”), it’s the culmination of decades of collaboration.

After making his first appearance on stage in Japan aged two, pushed on in a wheelbarrow and a child’s kimono to sing a few notes of “Feelin’ Groovy”, Art Jr occasionally sang with his father as a curly-haired, bright-eyed Mini Me, and later joined his father’s band as an adult.

“I remember shows that we did that we were so close together, working one mic, my son and I, that our foreheads touched each other,” Art Sr fondly recalls. “It was a blissful moment of closeness.” Naturally, when his son pushed for the pair to record together, Art Sr agreed, despite not having released an album since 2007’s Some Enchanted Evening and being on an indefinite hiatus from touring since a swathe of cancelled tour dates in 2023. “It needs to exist,” he says of the record, and his son is firmer still. “[The album] was created out of the notion of how terrible it would be to not make this project,” he says. “Time is so valuable, and we rarely stop and think about it.”

The lustrous orchestral covers that make up Father and Son are deeply touching. Particularly since the elder Garfunkel’s angelic tenor, among the most versatile and virtuosic voices of his Sixties cohort, is now charmingly age-worn, but his son’s voice is so crisp and bright that it feels, at times, like Art Sr duetting with his younger self. “I think I have the more mature sound,” he says. “I’ve lived more years of life. I bring more to the lyrics, more experience than my son does. So I have the thicker, the richer voice. My son is just a pure, beautiful tenor.”

The record even includes one Simon & Garfunkel cover, “Old Friends”, a mere sample of Art Jr’s refined handling of his father’s legacy. “You should hear him do ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’,” Art Sr says of one of his most famously shiver-inducing vocals. “He outsings me. He takes notes that are higher than me, he holds them for an infinite period of time, no falsetto. He’s just a wonderful singer.”

Fans of Simon & Garfunkel have hopes of an even more authentic performance, however. Following a lengthy estrangement in the wake of a 2010 reunion tour (the pair’s fourth) that was cut short by issues with Garfunkel’s voice – a period in which Simon retired from touring and declared another reunion “out of the question” because “we don’t even talk” – Garfunkel recently revealed that he’d reunited with his erstwhile colleague over an emotional dinner.

“It was a great experience,” he says, explaining how the meeting came about after he ran into Simon’s son in a hotel corridor. “Before I knew it, we had a dinner and it was a memorable night. It was so great to relive – it had been years since we were together.” Garfunkel took the opportunity to apologise for an interview he’d conducted with The Telegraph in 2015, in which he called Simon a “jerk” and an “idiot” for walking away from the group at the height of their success in the wake of 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album.

“I thought I would stir things up and not be so soft on the image of Simon & Garfunkel,” he says today. “So I was a little spicy, and it was foolish. It hurt his feelings. He said, ‘It’s not so much that you were a victim of the British press, it’s that I thought you wanted to hurt me.’ He said that; I realised, he’s right. I did want to hurt him. The truth is, I was competitive – and I burst into tears. There were hugs and tears; it was an emotional release.”

His frustrations over the split are now troubled water under the bridge, he says: “It’s now a thing of the past.” And with Oasis upping the stakes for large-scale reunions, he doesn’t rule out the possibility of Simon & Garfunkel performing again. “We’ll see. I don’t know if he’s in the mood to work with me. I’m in the mood to work with him.” Art Jr suggests an arena residency, “maybe in England?” “Vegas,” his father retorts. “You move into Vegas and you stay put for a while. They come to you. You remove the travelling part of singing; it’s a better formula... I don’t want to be on the road and do show after show.”

Garfunkel has experience of conducting fame on his own terms. He’s taken regular breaks from the spotlight to deal with depression, grief, or vocal problems. When Simon & Garfunkel originally split, and before his 1979 comeback with “Bright Eyes”, he even spent a period in 1971 teaching maths at Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut.

“[There were] all these high-school kids whose parents had sent them away to a prep school,” he remembers. “I felt bad for the kids emotionally, that the parents didn’t really need to be with them, and I approached them on an emotional level... I said to the kids, ‘We’ll get to the fame thing. We’ll do a Q&A at the end of the semester, but meanwhile, let’s do geometry.’” How strange was landing so abruptly back in normal life? “It was surreal. I’ve always had to deal with fame; it’s such a superimposition on your normal life. It’s hard to get used to it.”

He speaks cheerfully, though, about his years among the highest fliers of Sixties music. “I cherish the time I was with [Paul] McCartney in his office in Soho with Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher, his wife at the time,” he says. “I challenged Paul McCartney and said, ‘Paul, is it always you on piano, on all the songs?’ ... He seemed to take offence at being challenged. He got up, he crossed his office and sat at the piano and pounded out ‘Lady Madonna’ furiously. He did the whole song in a minute and five.”

Then there was the time in the mid-Seventies, hanging out with John Lennon, Yoko Ono and David Bowie in the Dakota building in New York after the Grammys, when he almost re-formed The Beatles. “John said to me, ‘I’m getting calls from my Paul about doing an album with Allen Toussaint’ (of New Orleans fame). He wanted to know, ‘You’ve worked with your partner, Arthur. What’s it like? Should I do this or not?’ And I thought, ‘John Lennon is asking me to advise him?’ It knocked me out. I was so flattered.”

It was Lennon’s innate skill, he says, to play into a person’s ego. “He treated me like the teacher. I said, ‘John, if you have memories of making that blend and you’ve worked together musically, stick with the blend. Forget personality, forget fights, just go with the music and let your ears guide you.’ Ultimately, he didn’t take my advice.”

Garfunkel’s ears are currently guiding him, tentatively, back to the stage. Word has just arrived that Garfunkel & Garfunkel’s first show, at New York’s Café Carlyle, has sold out, and the pair discuss options for further residencies or tours, Art Jr offering to drive his father around the UK from a London hub. Britain, Art Sr says, has been his second home since Simon & Garfunkel toured the country’s tiny folk clubs in the early Sixties.

“Paul and I would go out from the East End of London, where we lived in poverty, to places all over England. I remember going to Hull, everywhere. We would do our show in these folk clubs that were over pubs and only sat about 100 people – they sat on the floor, and we would do our act, and we’d come home thrilled that we made £30 that night.”

Simon & Garfunkel’s classic Sixties hits will make up the bedrock of Garfunkel & Garfunkel shows too, in what Art Jr hopes will become “a long, graceful passing of the baton”. But one of the highlights of the concerts will undoubtedly be their sublime, heartwarming rendition of Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son”, where Art Sr’s gently grizzled tone wraps itself protectively around his son’s youthful clarity.

“The message that Cat and his son had to each other is similar to ours,” Art Jr says: “That my father is my best friend, my ally, gives me infinite emotional support, doesn’t judge me, and waited to see how I would develop as a man with his constructive advice. I really felt we resonated with that song.”

Its most poignant moment is Art Sr’s warm admission, “Look at me, I am old but I’m happy” – as close to a personal on-record statement as he’s come in many years. “It’s a little simplistic,” he says. “Life’s more complex than that – but I’m a very lucky fellow.” He considers, perhaps, his timeless legacy, his numerous Grammys, his 36-year marriage to former model Kathryn Cermak, his talented offspring, and his rebuilt bond with a dear old friend. “Fate,” he says, “dealt me a very lucky hand.”

‘Father and Son’, the new album by Garfunkel & Garfunkel, is out now

The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.