Music Arcades: Simon and Garfunkel: The Simon and Garfunkel Collection

I didn't mean to start this way, but it turns out to be impossible to avoid commenting that, in the light of

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a parkbench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

I am now almost the same distance from the age I was when bought this record as I am from seventy.

This same record was playing when I had my first kiss. (That's how I meant to start.) Well, technically not my very first, because that was at the bottom of Hollybank Road, but a few minutes later we got back to mine (i.e. the room on the back of the garage), I put this on, and we carried on. El Condo Pasa was a particular favourite of hers. I never liked that song. And knowing me, I probably said so at the time. I mean, it may have been the first kiss and all, but, like the man said, "love means you must like what I like". And thus I never kissed her again.

A few months before that episode, I dropped the needle on The Sound of Silence with my headphones on, possibly in the dark, and the combination of the lyric and that drum sound (overdubbed, as we learned later) triggered a deep awareness of how totally alone I was, forever. Not in a self-pitying or sentimental sense, but more a stark physical realisation of what a single identity means: no one else will ever be me, and I will never be anyone else. It's one of those feelings you remember for the rest of your life, even though (thankfully) I'll never feel quite the same thing so intensely again. I think I've had three of them so far: at least two of them were in the same year, and two were experienced while listening to music on headphones.

I wonder if that may be why we remember the music of our teenage years as being more profound and more intensely experienced than that that came along later in our lives. We're navigating the force fields of identity and bonding and sometimes the high pressure builds up like a thunder cloud. It takes a lightning rod to trigger or effect the release, and music offers that conduit. Then we mistake the conduit for the charge, and attribute great significance to the music when really it was just a dumb strip of metal.

These days I mostly find Simon and Garfinkel just a bit naff, and I never listen to this record.

Footnote: the Last.fm page for this album features the original version of The Sound of Silence without the overdubbed drums and electric guitar. I'm not sure if I ever heard that before. It's OK.