John Marr
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Jul
John Marr’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Good to see you, Derval.
I was 11.
I was 11, but You Can Call Me Al was everywhere on MTV at the time.
MTV really had come into its own by the mid-80s and I was very aware of Paul Simon at that stage.
Probably not aware of the extraordinary legacy he'd already had, but that album was everywhere.
I mean, it sold 16 million copies, which was a huge number for what was then called world music.
Yeah.
But very groundbreaking.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, he was 44 when he started working on Graceland and already he'd been making music since a teen age.
Quite extraordinary.
And, you know, himself and Art Garfunkel had released some of the biggest selling albums in the States in the previous 20 years.
To give you an idea about how big the two of them were, they played a free open air concert in Central Park in 1981.
600,000 people turned up.
So he was absolutely enormous.
But in the early 80s, he felt that...
He needed a change of direction because, you know, he was seen as old hat, believe it or not.
The writer David Hepworth, who founded Q Magazine, I interviewed him recently and he said that it's remarkable when you think that in the early 80s, older statesmen at the time, people in their early 40s like Paul McCartney were seen as just dinosaurs.
Yeah.
I mean, they're still touring today.
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