You should dig out Paul Simon’s first solo album. And if you can’t dig it out because you’re one of these post-album wankers or, inexplicably, you’ve failed to buy it - though why that would be the case I couldn’t even begin to speculate on as it would probably end with me coming round to your house and explaining to you at length, with slides and much salty language why you SUCK SO HARD at everything - then you should go download it or whatever it is you punks do these days.

You should dig it out because it is a Truly Great Lost Album.

Point being that we live in a world where acoustic guitar toting toolbags are as ubiquitous as carbon molecules. This upsets me for a number of reasons, not least of which is they’re horning in on my action. That whole sensitive artist, rumpled shirt, oh-thanks-I-wrote-that-years-ago-it-means-a-lot-to-me-that-you-liked it schtick is MY SCHTICK and it’s the birthright of my children. I have nothing to teach them about life except how to pick up a guitar and get good enough at arpeggio that maybe, one day, you will receive the oral sex from someone at a party because of it.

That worked at like one of the parties I went to in my life. One of them. Out of at least 20. That’s a 1:20 chance of the oral sex. Vanishingly small. And this was in the nineties when the oral sex was common. By the time my kids are old enough to go out and get the oral sex, well, there’ll probably be an age or height restriction on it which will only make it more critical that the parties they go to are not saturated with scruffy-haired ballsacks singing about their problems.

Paul Simon is an interesting place to start learning about this kind of shit. For one, he’s about the only guitar-toting hipster I can think of who wore a toupee.  For another he could actually play the guitar and, for thirdly (?) his lyrics - on this album anyway, are incredibly spiky and mean-spirited. He’s like a jewish Elvis Costello. A bald, jewish Elvis Costello. And short with it.

This is my favourite song from that album. It’s short, nasty and almost impossibly hard to play. Its like, not content with insulting Garfunkel on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album, he’s found that he wants to continue hurling insults at him from his solo career too. I swear to god, if we could get access to the studio masters of this album we’d find tracks called ‘Why Can’t You Just Sing It In Your Normal Voice” and “Shove Your Bright Eyes Up Your Arse, Twat.’

Also, this song contains the word ‘Paraphernalia’. Beat that with a stick, Sufjan.