Story of the song: The Boy in the Bubble by Paul Simon

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ by Paul Simon

Hearing a bootleg of Mbaqanga, South African township accordion jive, helped revive Paul Simon’s career (Getty)

In the mid-1980s, Paul Simon’s career was revived by a tape given to him by another musician, Heidi Berg. It was a bootleg of township accordion jive, or Mbaqanga, from South Africa. Intrigued, Simon acquired all the black South African records he could. Six months later, he flew to Johannesburg with Roy Halee, his sound engineer, intent on finding the musicians he'd heard.

With the producer Hilton Rosenthal, Simon booked into Ovation studios and within a week he’d written and recorded “The Boy in the Bubble”, a key song for the project that became Graceland.

What emerged was an album of jubilant warmth. Simon won a Grammy, and Graceland wedged itself in the album charts.