Paul Simon gig review: Magic night at 3Arena in Dublin, complete with surprise Irish guest
A recent image of Paul Simon, who played 3Arena in Dublin on Wednesday night. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
, ★★★★★
“Whenever I’m back in London...” Paul Simon begins. There is an affectionate pantomime hiss from the crowd.
He jokingly corrects his mistake. He implies this might be a sign of age, but this is a man who left the audience in no doubt that he knew exactly where he was, and his place on the stage.
“They’ll forgive me anyway,” he laughs, before roaring, arms outstretched, “Hello Amsterdam.”
And the sell out crowd at the 3Arena did forgive him. By that stage of the night, he’d earned that.
His last tour in 2018, the triumphant Homeward Bound, was billed as his farewell. But within a few years, Paul Simon was hinting at a return to the stage.
“I never said I was going to retire,” he said. “I was going to stop, which I did... I wanted to find out what happens when you stop.” As it turns out, quite a lot happened.
In 2023 he released the critically acclaimed the album that he says came to him in dreams. And as he recorded it, Simon lost his hearing in his left ear, a disability he has described as scary and frustrating.
Others would have given up on live performances, but tonight, the 84-year-old music legend takes his seat again on the stage at the 3Arena, guitar in hand.
The voice is certainly frailer, gentler, especially throughout the first 30-minute set, a captivating and uninterrupted performance of
But when he returns for his second set – suit abandoned, he wears jeans, a t shirt and baseball cap – there is a lift in the room. As he sings classics from to the voice still quivers but it hardly matters. There’s a confidence, an energy in the performer.
The emotion, the lived experience, feels raw and tangible. Simon’s profound hearing loss means this is a stripped back performance. The choices he made from his vast songbook were more built on weaving stories rather than hits and catchy choruses, and that, coupled with the frailty in his voice brought an intimacy to a vast arena.
There’s a respectful awed silence. Simon commands the stage. He chose to call this tour a quiet celebration. It is an appropriate title. Until close to the end, when he sings
Throughout the show, it was as though the crowd were almost respectfully holding back from the singalong moments to give him the stage. But that restraint evaporated when Simon invited the man he calls his old friend, Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, to the stage. The crowd went wild, the floor vibrating as people pounded to the trad beat.
At the close of the first set this felt like a sad goodbye. But as he ends an approximately two-and-a-half-hour show with and proceeds to shake hands with some members of the crowd, the mood was transformed into a joyous, and not so quiet celebration.
