The night Paul Simon slept on a sofa in a terraced house near Grimsby’s Birds Eye

The Sounds Of Silence echoed across Grimsby last night as a tribute show from the West End took to the stage at Grimsby Auditorium.

But how many in the audience knew the links that Grimsby already had with one half of the successful duo who have sold more than 20 million records in the US alone and won 10 Grammy Awards?

Not Art Garfunkel, who graced the very stage at Grimsby Auditorium in the 1990s, when it first opened, but Paul Simon – at the very point where he would become a worldwide name.

For the shorter, dark-haired one of the folk duo, played twice for Grimsby Folk Club at the Queen’s in Sea View Street, Cleethorpes, in 1965.

John Conolly, who has been a presence on the British folk scene since the folk revival in the early 1960s, set up the Grimsby Folk Club with Bill Meek.

Remembering the visit of Paul Simon, John wrote: “The first time he came for £15, the second time he’d gone up to £25. There should be a blue plaque on the door: Paul Simon played here twice.

“Bill Meek had heard him on the radio and he rang up the BBC to ask how he could get in touch with him. Paul came and he was great.

“We’d discovered the LP The Paul Simon Songbook and we were learning all the stuff off that.

“He stayed with me the first time. I was living with my mum in a little terraced house next door to the Birds Eye factory in Grimsby and Paul slept on our settee in the front room.”

When he first played he was an unknown American boy, singing the tunes which would soon make him an international star – unknown to both Paul Simon and members of the Grimsby Folk Club.

For Paul Simon and his best friend from school, Art Garfunkel, had already twice tried to make it professionally, first as a rock ‘n’ roll duo called Tom & Jerry.

Both still only 15, they released Hey Schoolgirl in 1957, but it didn’t achieve any success.

After graduating, they tried again, this time as Simon & Garfunkel and playing their folk music, releasing Wednesday Morning, 3am in 1964.

Again, it didn’t go well, selling just 3,000 copies and Simon moved to England to tour folk clubs.

And that’s how he ended up at Grimsby – twice.

However, by the second appearance, little did he – and the Grimsby crowd – know that he was about to reach international stardom.

A DJ on WBZ-FM in Boston heard The Sound of Silence, from Wednesday Morning, 3am, and began to play it and play it.

It topped the Hot 100, selling over one million copies and Paul Simon was called to return to America as soon as possible.

Back to Grimsby, where Roger Busby, a musician, takes up the story in a blog he wrote about the experience: “Paul Simon was playing his second gig at Grimsby Folk Club in the winter of 1965/66.

“I was 18 at the time and Paul would have been 23. I was sharing a flat in the town with work colleague and friend, Bill Johnston, and we had been regulars at the club for about a year at that time.

“During the break we got chatting with Paul and asked him where he was staying that night – he said that he didn’t know (although it was the custom at the time for the club organisers to arrange a bed at someone’s house) so we said why not stay with us? Bill had a VW Beetle at the time so imagine four of us plus Paul and his guitar crammed into that!

“We had an hour or so chatting and listening to music and he was telling us about how his US record company had dubbed electric guitar, bass and drums onto an acoustic track of The Sound of Silence that he’d recorded with Art Garfunkel and had released it as a single. ‘It looks like it’s starting to sell’ he said, ‘so I may have to go back.’

“Of course it went to #1 in America and started the whole Simon & Garfunkel phenomenon. We had to get him up very early next morning to catch the milk train back to London and he wasn’t the best of early risers.

“However, I did ask him to sign my copy of the Paul Simon Songbook which was, together with an acoustic EP with Garfunkel, the only recording available at that time. He signed it ‘To Bill and Rog, thank you for the bed, the meal and the conversation.’ I still have it to this day.”

Back in the USA, Simon reunited with Garfunkel that winter in New York, leaving England and Grimsby behind, and they rushed through a new album, called Sounds Of Silence within three weeks, consisting of re-recorded songs from The Paul Simon Songbook, and released in January 1966.

Fifty years on, the simple brilliance of Paul Simon’s lyrics with the perfect harmony of the voices of both Simon and Garfunkel is being celebrated in a tour that kicked off in the West End.

The Simon & Garfunkel Story, with Greg Clarke as Simon and Joe Sterling as Garfunkel, told the story of their rise to fame and their subsequent split at its very height – as Bridge Over Troubled Water at the time became the biggest selling album of all time.

Using a projection screen to set the scene, the show featured original film footage and photos to transport a small, but very appreciative audience back to the Sixties as the duo performed all the Simon & Garfunkel classics – in fact 30 of their songs as a definitive evening of pure Paul and Art.

I’d jumped at the chance to review the show, transported back to the days when I would drive to college in Sheffield in my one-litre Vauxhall Nova singing along to my cassette tape of Sounds Of Silence.

And I was not disappointed – it was an evening to remember how perfect harmonies and seemingly simple chords can create some of the best music of all time.