NOW 83, Art Garfunkel is heading back out on tour — and he’s warming up for the big moments in the most Garfunkel way possible: belting out Bridge Over Troubled Water in a hotel bathtub because “there’s reverb”. He even reckons it sounded as good as he ever did in the 60s.

The singer-songwriter hasn’t toured since 2019 and says that until about a year ago he was “hardly singing at all”, left wondering what he was supposed to do with himself. He’s since thrown himself back into live performance, after testing the waters with a small, story-and-song set for around 60 people at an art gallery north of New York — three nights that convinced him to fully return.

Garfunkel, who says he’s “singing much more than I have done in two decades”, will bring his What a Wonderful World tour to the UK in October, with dates also set for France, Germany and Japan. The tour begins on 1 October in Los Angeles.

It’s another chapter in a famously restless life: acting roles including Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge, a stint teaching geometry after Simon & Garfunkel split, and years spent literally walking things off — across the US and across Europe, from western Ireland into Wales, through England and on to the Channel.

On the music side, he released the father-and-son album Father and Son with his son Art Jr two years ago. His latest track, Authorship, places spoken words from his 2017 memoir over an AI-generated piano backing for a compilation made with tech company Eleven Labs — though Garfunkel says he’s barely involved with the tech and doesn’t have a computer or the internet.

As for Paul Simon, he says they did meet for dinner and hugs in 2025, but he hasn’t seen him in the past year — and he’s not keen to get drawn into talk of another tour together.