TALL TALES & TRUE

Rip It Up, Issue 249, 1 May 1998, Page 8

TALL TALES & TRUE

50 Ways to Lose Your Marbles

e™ people I know would admit out fltSB loud to liking Paul Simon. But I iBHMf love the little guy. I met him once and swiftly realised what a misunderstood man he was. Sure, hair implants are a bad move when you only stand five foot three, but three words into conversation with the compact star, I knew how wrong the world was about the man with two first names.

We were in Sydney. I can’t remember the year, but Simon was surfing round the world on the success of his Graceland album, with a high-stepping, funky African band in tow and a big show that wasn’t coming to New Zealand. So his record company took me to Australia in a bid to convey the profound excitement of the experience to the readers of whichever Auckland newspaper I was working for at the time.

It’s hard to remember which newspaper I was working for at the time. There was a lot of to and fro-ing. It was a to and fro-ing time. I was a leading to and fro-er for a

while there in those half-forgotten days when job security wasn’t the sought-after item that it is today.

But in the capacity of whichever job I was briefly secure in at the time, I flew first

class on a breakfast flight to Sydney, drinking bloody marys all the way with the lovely people from the record company. It was a deeply sophisticated scene. Across the Tasman. We were swept from the airport by limo to a slick hotel on the edge of Kings Cross.

Then there was lunch at an Italian restaurant with a Cosa Nostra ambience. Our numbers swelled and the accountant

turned as white as all the wine we’d spent all afternoon drinking when he picked up the tab. “Thirty-two bottles,” I heard him exclaim. I think it was a new record.

By evening and the show, everyone was half crazy and turning to various personal methods to handle the headlong rush into madness. Dinner only made things wilder and in the confusion when we got to the Sydney Entertainment Centre, the record company boss gave away his own ticket to the show and had to beg his way into a cheap seat.

Meanwhile the rest of us sat in a row in the flash seats — and promptly fell asleep. Well, I didn’t. I was feeling far too lively for that and, anyway, the sight of the little white guy on the stage, looking nervous while funky Africans whirled around him, was far too rivetting.

Afterwards, I woke up my row and we stumbled off to a meet-and-greet with Paul Simon and his band. Which was where I met him. I’d been told he wouldn’t do an interview, but in my crazed state when I saw him across the crowded room at the after-show party I thought I’d talk him round.

First I got talking to one of his backing singers, a charming woman who seemed a bit fazed by it all. I was being as friendly as possible. I was in mid-sentence with her, I remember, when the lights in the room suddenly went out and just for a few seconds it was pitch black.

I thought at first it was another one of

those flashbacks, only this time without the flash, but then the lights came back on and the backing singer was gone. It was weird, but not as weird as the top of Paul Simon’s head, I thought. With its implants, it resembled a paddy field. I was staring transfixed at it, when he stepped back and looked up.

He looked like he might be considering writing a nasty song about tall people with full heads of hair. Then we got talking,

though it must have been very small talk, because I don’t recall a thing we said, except that we must have got on well because he said he’d do an interview

with me the next day. A few hours later, he was seen in the hotel foyer shouting, “Where’s the hash. I need some fucking hash.”

And this is the same man who wrote ‘The Sound of Silence’. The next day when I crawled out from under my hangover, Paul Simon’s manager turned the Paul’s promised interview down flat. “He must’ve been on drugs,” he observed.

It’s strange when the mildest turn out to be the wildest — apart from Chris Knox, who once threw up in my shirt pocket and Shane MacGowan, of course. But Iggy Pop was mellow, Joe Walsh philosophical, Mick Jagger was polite (he even rang back when I wasn’t home the first time) and Rat Scabies just wanted to go to a pub “full of ugly old geezers” for a quiet drink.

I took him to the Britomart. It was breakfast time and the Rat sat in the corner and laughed at all these rough old buggers in shorts. Didn’t seem very punk to me. I was tempted to go and sit with the rough old buggers and laugh at Rat.

Up close, the Clash didn’t seem so tough. Weakened by bad diet and self-belief, they didn’t have a laugh in them at all. Spike Milligan was crazier than any rock singer I ever met. And, as I said, if I have to nominate, from among those singers, a Wild One, then it has to be Paul Simon.

COLIN HOGG