Bill Fay has died at 81 years old. I am sure many of you will have heard of him. After two albums of melancholic singer songwriting (more pop than folk) he went off the radar in the early 70s and I remember it being reported in Mojo in the 90s that he was presumably a Jeremy Spencer style casualty. Nonsense! He had just been dropped by his label and was getting on with his life: a lesson for us all in avoiding dangerous rock romanticism. His comeback via Wilco’s cover version of ‘ Be Not So Fearful’ was heartening, and he made some good mature recordings. Apparently a disciple of Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I think his second album, the suitably apocalyptic and odd ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, is his best.
Bill Fay
Teilhard de Chardin, creator of the Omega Point, and reputed to have helped create Piltdown Man. Interesting character.
Bill Fay’s popular resurrection, so to speak, seemed to have come with the release in 2002 of ‘Screams in the Ears’ on a Decca sampler called ‘Legends of a Mind: The Underground Anthology’. ‘Screams in the Ears’ was one of the better tracks on the sampler in my view, and, ironically, only the B side of Fay’s first single (released in 1967). Although the track wasn’t included initially on Fay’s first album, just called ‘Bill Fay’, it was added to the album’s reissue on Eclectic in 2005. ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, Fay’s second album, from 1971, was also reissued then by Eclectic.
Both albums are very good, with Fay being backed by some respected names in the jazz world of that time.
I second this recommendation – his work is exemplary.
This is scary. I am currently on holiday in Santiago and was thinking about him last week and how I needed to hear his voice when I got back to UK. That will be on Wednesday and will be doing a suitable playlist. An under appreciated talent.
If I may indulge in a bit of self promotion, I wrote this song about Bill quite a few years back. It came about after my astonishment about the news of him releasing a new album in 2012 after decades of total silence. I tried to get the song to him but he was such a private guy it proved impossible.
https://on.soundcloud.com/E5h5yVK8Yf3LNF8M8
I liked that – and the song’s title was a good one too. It’s a shame you never got through to Bill.
I first came across Bill Fay in 2004, when I read a rave review of “From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock (A Collection Of Demos And Outtakes 1966-70)” in Mojo magazine (I think). I bought the album, loved everything about it, and then snapped up the debut record “Bill Fay” as well.
In 2010 I was amazed when Fay resurfaced with new material on the “Still Some Light”, but ultimately, I was disappointed with the songs. Luckily, the real comeback arrived two years later, with the magnificent “Life is People” album, which is one of my favourite records of the decade. A beautiful, genuinely spiritual work. Even though “Who is the Sender” (2015) and “Countless Branches” (2020) didn’t quite reach the same heights, they were still nice to have.
The only Bill Fay album I’ve struggled with is the one that everyone else seems to love, namely “Time of the last Persecution”. Perhaps I should give it another go…
I thank Bill Fay for all his wonderful songs, and wish him safe travels to the place he called “the coast no man can tell”…
Have you tried Tomorrow Tomorrow And Tomorrow by The Bill Fay Group? It’s an album that means an awful lot to me. A bit Prog, a bit Jazz, it’s still unmistakably Bill.
It came in a lovely reissue last year, or maybe the year before.
Yeah that’s a great album. That was the one with Gary Smith on guitar, wan’t it? . He was a friend of a friend and so how I learnt that Bill Fay was still making music.