THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL (1965)

Folk music had always been protest music since before the dustbowl polemics of Woody Guthrie. As the sixties shaped up to blow our minds Bob Dylan had inherited the mantle with excoriating diatribes against war, politics and the class and generational divides.

But Simon and Garfunkel's first big hit was something altogether different. Dylan was a poet no question, but there was a ragged, raw quality to his sentiments that was not shared by the two smart troubadors from New York. The Sound of Silence wasn't just intellectual, it was real and perceptive; a sober slice of social comment for a country, and a world, drenched in paranoia and injustice.

Paul Simon originally wrote the song in 1964 after the assassination of JFK, that pivotal event in twentieth century US history which came close to breaking the spirit of a nation. An acoustic version was included on the duo's patchy debut album 'Wednesday Morning 3am,' which stiffed resulting in Paul and Art going their separate ways. The song resurfaced in Simon's solo shows but it was the intervention of Columbia's Tom Wilson that saved the track from obscurity, overdubbing electric guitar, bass and drums without the band's knowledge or permission and re-releasing it as a single.

Whatever the ethics of the decision Wilson's chutzpah paid off in spectacular style. Simon and Garfunkel reformed and the single climbed the charts to become the first number one of 1966. They may have had bigger hits since but The Sound of Silence is the finest example of Paul Simon's devastatingly artful songwriting and one of the most prescient and haunting records of the sixties.