This song reminds me of two periods in my life. Firstly when Kerry and I were students and living in Loughton and also when I was working in Leeds a few years later in 1993.
Sony Records released a ‘definitive’ collection of Simon and Garfunkel hits in the latter part of the 1980s and I had a copy which Kerry and I played regularly in our little flat in Loughton. Kerry’s friend Liz (who lived next door) was also a massive fan and between us we had this disk on the CD player pretty much all of the time. The flat where we lived was mind numbingly cold and during the winter we lived in one room, sleeping on a futon in the lounge and keeping warm using only the duvet and a portable gas fire. This song reminds me of those times when we played this almost daily.
It also reminds me of living in Leeds in 1993 when I was working at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I remember I was singing this song one day and one of the fellow actors in the company telling me that the chorus of the song was ‘lie, lie, lie’ and that Paul Simon had written it about Bob Dylan. He alleged that Paul Simon (who had had a poor and impoverished background) had written this song which tells a ‘made up’ story of living a hard life where ‘a man hears what he wants to hear’ and the whole thing is a ‘lie’ which he believed Bob Dylan had exploited in his work. I don’t know if this is true but the words of the chorus are certainly ‘lie, lie, lie!’
Listen to the song….
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