How Paul Simon took on Apartheid… and created his bestselling album

Why would anyone set about creating an album based on a style of music with which he was totally unfamiliar, having only ever heard it on a bootlegged cassette lent to him by a friend?

It’s impossible to say. But that was how Paul Simon’s solo Graceland album was conceived.

Entitled Gumboots Accordion Jive Hits and performed by a group of anonymous South African musicians, Paul Simon found himself playing the cassette repeatedly in 1983. Who were these musicians, he would ask himself? What was this music they were playing?

In 1985, all Simon wanted was to go to South Africa to meet and work with the musicians he’d heard on the cassette. And, though it took a while to arrange, and several hundred thousand of his own dollars, he not only got what he wanted – he spent two weeks working with the musicians. He also helped, albeit in a tiny way, political change for the better to come to South Africa.

Boycott: Paul Simon took on apartheid, the then racist South African government, the African National Congress, and a cultural boycott backed by the United Nations to record Graceland

At that time Simon was suffering a brief lull in his career, his last album not having sold as well as he’d expected. Many artists have moments like this, but, unlike Simon, they don’t solve them by taking on apartheid, the then racist South African government, the African National Congress, and a cultural boycott backed by the United Nations.

But neither do they end up with a Grammy award for the best album of the year, ten million copies sold and countless plays on radio stations around the world.

This telling of how Simon’s album Graceland came to be, by award-winning music historian Ashley Kahn, is a complex study into all the different elements that go into such an ambitious project.

Early life: Paul Simon found fame as one half of Simon and Garfunkel. Pictured here with Art Garfunkel

On one level we have the network of the Los Angeles music professionals who put the deal together.

But more interesting is the story of the bass player, Kumalo, who was so pleased to be paid at the end of the day’s session. ‘Working with Paul Simon helped me take care of my mother,’ he said.

All the African musicians were paid three times the going rate – but there were still problems.

Simon was used to working until the recording was finished, but the South African musicians worried about how they were going to find their way home when it got dark. ‘They couldn’t use public transport,’ Simon explained,’ and they weren’t allowed on the street of Johannesburg after the curfew. They would have to show papers and that was something they didn’t want to do.

‘So, at around six or seven o’clock, there would be an uncomfortable time when the players couldn’t concentrate until they knew there would be a car to take them home.’

Long before Graceland, Paul Simon’s records with Art Garfunkel had revealed him to be not just a creator of popular melodies but a writer who understood wordplay.

Contributors: Paul Simon with the South African musicians who he worked with to make Graceland

‘Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again,’ were Simon’s lyrics on his first hit record, The Sound Of Silence. Taken literally, the words are absurd. How do you talk to darkness? It’s impossible. But as a metaphor for loneliness his use of ‘darkness’ is powerful.

T hroughout his 60-odd- year career Paul Simon’s lyrics have captured his moments which became our moments. Do you remember that line on the Bookends album? ‘Toss me a cigarette I think there’s one in my raincoat.’ With it, he put an entire generation on to that Greyhound bus as they rode off ‘to look for America’.

And although the song Graceland isn’t in the end about Elvis Presley so much as a geography lesson as Simon drove towards Memphis and described it as ‘the Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar’, it is also about his son who was in his thoughts as he drove.

And can it be a coincidence that Graceland mimics in rhythm and construction Mystery Train, one of his favourite early Elvis records from his boyhood?

Days of Wonder of Miracle and Wonder is available now from the Mail Bookshop

In Paul Simon’s songs we just don’t get simple love stories. We get an encyclopaedia of references and wordplay that enriches imaginations.

I still don’t know what he means by the line ‘there’s a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline’. I’m not sure that he does. But we all know that moment when he says of a girl whom he’d forgotten, how ‘she slipped into my pocket with my car keys’ in the song Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.

Days Of Miracle And Wonder might get bogged down with business details, but the pages on how Paul Simon can spend months writing and then rewriting his lyrics are fascinating. That he could create so many songs in a music he didn’t know existed until he heard that cassette has, in my eyes, to be a testament not only to his brilliance but also to his sense of musical adventure.