Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits: The Top Of The Poppers - Pickwick 1972

That's what you want on the sleeve of an album of Simon & Garfunkel songs isn't it? A sharp focus shot of a woman (with a freakishly long right arm) sprawled out in a gravel pit with a look of combined mild fear and disgust at something lurking off camera. It's not what I would have chosen, but there you go. What I've never seen before either is the name of the recording artist asterisked to the biographical blurb on the back cover; someone was clearly anxious that this text was too important be missed, so I've added a photo of it down below with no comment, other than to say if someone was taking extra special pains to draw the casual buyers attention to the fact that this is not the work of Messer's Simon & Garfunkel, then a healthy sense of guilt and/or shame was probably behind it.

As a point of fact, the first ever Simon & Garfunkel 'Greatest Hits' album was released the same year as this, and the track listing of both is identical, except that the 'official' release has two extra songs. The similarities don't end there either; when the cover says 'The Top Of The Poppers sing and play Simon & Garfunkel's' Greatest Hits, it's not lying - these are in fact straightforward copies of the original songs that stay as faithful to the source material as the talent involved allows. There are no radical drum and bass makeovers here, and as far as that approach goes it's both a blessing and a curse. 

Musically, the backing band are, as you'd expect, better on the more straightforward, acoustic based songs that don't need too much heavy lifting. They struggle badly on the more difficult tracks. Concern for my own sanity means I'm not going to give a track by track breakdown, but suffice it say it reaches a nadir of sorts on 'The Boxer' and a version that's truly awful on every available level. Simon famously took over 100 hours to piece together the original version of this song alone, and while it's neither fair nor realistic to expect the same attention to detail from an anonymous covers act, the version here sounds like a quickly knocked out, first take affair with the band falling over their own feet with every awkward step and the famous drum slam 'punches' on the chorus are reduced to the sound of a bag of spanners being dropped onto concrete, and then frequently dropped out of time.

As for the vocals, well one of the delights of Simon & Garfunkel was always the interplay of Garfunkel's celestial choirboy soar that never quite swamped or bullied Simon's more plaintive everyman weariness. You could forgive this album a lot of its misdemeanours if the duo here got at least half ways toward the same level of harmony, but I'm afraid the vocals here gel as well as salt on  ice cream. That they don't try and imitate the original vocals is a blessing of sorts, but even with their own voices there are times when the surrogate S&G are singing in different keys, different pitches and frequently out of tune, and both have a habit of aiming for notes they were never going to reach. We are literally talking late night pub karaoke standard and the end product genuinely sounds like two strangers only recently acquainted, both of whom have only a passing familiarity with the source material.

But enough - seriously, any Simon & Garfunkel fan who truly needed to own their greatest hits on vinyl would have to be down to the bare bones of their bare arse to have to make do with this rather than pay whatever the difference was in 1972 for the genuine article. Maybe someone was trying to sell a copy to the woman in the gravel. It would explain a lot.