In the first song of his nameless debut album, Bill Fay sang in 1970 about how he planted himself between potatoes and parsley in a garden bed to wait for the frost to bring his soul and he can go into permanent relationships with Blattlaus, Spider and Made. And then an orchestra blows over the line, as if it were a great existentialist drama as in the songs by Scott Walker. And that’s it too.
Because Fay only needed a few moments to get from the smallest to the most sublime. For him there was a song and a divine spark in all things. During the rest of the British folk world in the beginning of the seventies in the Bukolian and pastoral, the songwriter, born in northern London in 1943, sang on his debut and the successor “Time of the Last Persecution” (1971) in dark, end -time images about transience, end of the world and Divine grace.
Like his contemporary Nick Drake, Fay was afay public appearances, and so only a few initiated people enjoyed his songs. He broke off the recordings for a third album in the late 1970s. Fay founded a family, accepted occasional job as a place keeper and fruit picker and did not plan to return as a singer again.
The rediscovery
But when the small British label See for Miles Records published its first two albums on CD at the end of the nineties, the songwriter and producer Jim O’Rourke became aware of him and played it in his friend in the recordings for the Wilco album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” Jeff Tweedy, who played Fays “Be Nand so Fearful” more often at concerts.
Current 93 songwriter David Tibet also became aware of Fay by O’Rourke, began to search for the missing person and finally persuaded him to publish his shots from the late 1970s and early eighties, who appeared in 2004 as “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” .
Bill Fay’s epochal late work
The producer Joshua Henry, who discovered Fay’s albums about his father’s record collection, finally persuaded the songwriter to go back to the studio. Fay’s album “Life is People” was released in 2012, on which Jeff Tweedy made a guest appearance on two pieces and Fay the Wilco song “Jesus etc.” Coverte. It sounded like the promise of a late work of the first flat. He solved this just three years later with the spun successor “Who is the broadcaster”, followed in 2020 the reduced “Countless industry”.
At the beginning of the year, Fay started the recordings for a new album, but on Saturday morning, as his label Dead Oceans announced, he died at home in London. His last recordings are to be completed and published, the label promises. “Bill was a gentle man and a gentleman, wise beyond our time,” says the official message. “He was a reserved person with a big heart who wrote incredibly moving, meaningful songs that will continue to find people in the future.”