I should probably call this post Everybody’s Mother’s Records because I think Simon & Garfunkel’s final album was bought by every single one of them when it came out, in the UK it spent 41 weeks at number one and was the best-selling album of both 1970 and 1971. It was part of the furniture when I was growing up, not just in our house but there must have been a copy of it sitting on a shelf in every other one we visited too, that sleeve as ubiquitous in early 70s homes as a spider plant and a G-Plan sofa.

Though Paul and Art rode to success on the back of the 1960s folk boom and the younger-generation angst of The Graduate they were never angry or confrontational and came across more as nice, quiet boys sitting in a coffee shop reading The New Yorker instead of throwing rocks at riot police on the streets of Paris. Maybe I’m just looking at them through the lens of my own memories but I never thought of them as being part of the great Youthquake of that decade like The Beatles and Dylan because, well, my mum liked them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, especially when the songs are as good as Paul Simon’s.

It’s always good to go out with a bang and Bridge Over Troubled Water is easily their best album in my ‘umble opinion, it’s also their slickest and prettiest so no wonder it sold by the lorry-load. The epic title track is so well-known and played that it has become sort of aural wallpaper that I don’t listen to much anymore and when I was a kid I preferred perky numbers like this anyway, and still do today.

Download: Keep The Customer Satisfied – Simon & Garfunkel (mp3)
Buy: Bridge Over Troubled Water (40th Anniversary Edition) (album)