Credit: Far Out / Album Cover
Sat 19 September 2026 21:00, UK
It sometimes seemed that in spite of themselves, everything Simon & Garfunkel ever did turned out to be a success.
For a duo who were at loggerheads with one another for most of their career, particularly the most prolific part, it’s unfathomable how they ever even managed to get anything lifted off the ground, let alone transform it into the products of American musical titans. Even in moments when they didn’t want to, everything they touched turned to gold.
It was simply a sign of how hugely talented the pair were in their own respective rights, never mind when they could actually get along well together. The greatest testament to that was found in the songs that started out as flops, yet inexplicably over time went on to become one of their most seismic sonic legacies.
‘The Sound of Silence’ falls into that category most of all. These days, it may be regarded as one of the most classic Simon & Garfunkel staples to ever exist, but back when it was first released in 1964, the response was hardly the tsunami we would expect it to be. Indeed, it was barely a drop in the ocean, such was the ironic silence that surrounded it.
The reality was that, with the song being part of the duo’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, they were still whole worlds away from what legendary records like Bridge Over Troubled Water would become. S&G were not yet the mononymous giants that the next few years would see them transform into, and instead were just Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the new kids on the block.
All of this is to say that if the pair were to be disheartened by the lacklustre first response to ‘The Sound of Silence’ and the album it came from, then we would have never heard from them again. With the beast of the British invasion dominating the scene, it was no wonder that they were mere mice in the musical world. They just had to bide their time until their luck changed.
It was a matter of months later when, for reasons largely unknown to all involved, the track began to pick up airplay on college radio stations. That certainly pricked up the ears of executives, who realised that once the tide was finally turning, they had to strike while the iron was hot. A remixed and overdubbed version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ was released in September 1965 without Simon & Garfunkel’s knowledge, and unbelievably, it shot to number one.
Further reading: From The Vault
For a lot of artists, it’s pretty much impossible to specifically pinpoint the moment when they ascended to becoming the biggest stars in the world. But for Simon & Garfunkel, this was very much not the case, as the reinvented version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ was essentially the key to the rest of their lives. A flop transforming into the 12th best-selling song of all time, with 30million copies sold? You’d definitely take that.
It just goes to show how quickly fortunes can change in the music business, from one extreme to the other. Some people seemingly destined for greatness one day can be gone the next, while others have to endure a much more slow-burning process, and a stroke of luck, to get there. For Simon and Garfunkel, it was simply a lap of the gods that ‘The Sound of Silence’ ended up becoming a lion’s roar.
