Old music: Simon & Garfunkel – A Most Peculiar Man

Paul Simon's English period produced some of Simon & Garfunkel's best-loved work – including this understated song inspired by four lines in a London newspaper

Paul Owen
Thu 20 Dec 2012 04.00 EST



Paul Simon's English period – the year or two in the mid-60s he spent touring folk clubs here as a relative unknown – inspired some of Simon & Garfunkel's best-loved work, including Homeward Bound and Kathy's Song. But my favourite from this fertile time is A Most Peculiar Man, the understated story of a suicide that first appeared on Simon's little-heard 1965 solo debut The Paul Simon Songbook.

Songbook was an acoustic album recorded in London to capitalise on the excitement starting to build around Simon as he roamed Britain following the failure of his debut album with Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, a period of self-imposed exile that came to an abrupt end when a version of The Sound of Silence – overdubbed with electric instrumentation by producer Tom Wilson without the knowledge of either Simon or Garfunkel – became a No 1 hit back home in America. Simon returned to the US and reunited with Artie, and the rest is history.

The version of A Most Peculiar Man on The Paul Simon Songbook is a gentle, echoey lament arranged purely for guitar. But, like other songs from that album, it was rerecorded with a full band following the success of The Sound of Silence for Simon & Garfunkel's subsequent album Sounds of Silence, complete with metronomic percussion, an incongruously jaunty bassline and Byrds-like guitar figures.

Simon explained the genesis of the song on the Live from New York City, 1967 album: "I wrote this song when I was living in England. The seeds of the song were planted one day when I saw an article in a London paper about a man who had committed suicide. Four lines in the paper ... And I thought: 'That's a very bad way to go out. Bad eulogy. Four lines.'"

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