A day or two after Bill Fay made his one return to the stage, in 2007, he called to tell me about how the day had gone. Fay had turned up for the encore of a Wilco gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, where he duetted with Jeff Tweedy on Be Not So Fearful, a gentle prayer of a song from his 1970 debut album.
Fay talked a little about the kindness of Tweedy and Wilco, but mostly he wanted to speak of how he had travelled to the venue by bus from his North London home. For the entire journey, he said, a ladybird had hitched a lift on his jacket sleeve, and he'd been transfixed by it. It was a measure of Fay’s boundless capacity for awe, for understanding the value of small epiphanies, and for how he carefully avoided discussions of his own brilliance. “There are miracles/Everywhere you go,” as he sang on 2012’s Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People).
That sense of wonder permeated much of Fay’s music, beginning with the songs he started writing in the mid-1960s, a boy from the London suburbs studying electronics at Bangor University. His demos eventually found their way to Peter Eden, Donovan’s former manager, who produced Fay’s debut single in 1967. The B-side, Screams In The Ears, was a scything, Dylanesque study of being an outsider in fashionable London, but the A-side, Some Good Advice, was a meditation on single-mindedness, zen-like in its simplification of how life could be lived: “If you want to ride a bike/Ride your bike, if you like.” It was a message he persevered with for the rest of his life.
It took three years, though, for Fay to release an album. 1970’s Bill Fay was a more grandiose affair, its orch-pop closer in tone to Scott Walker or David Ackles, played by an array of British jazz musicians under the leadership of Mike Gibbs. But Fay’s lyrics were more intimate than the arrangements signalled: tales of modest but profound British lives; songs that communed with nature in a different way to the prevailing hippy rhetoric.
One of the players on that first album was a fervid jazz guitarist called Ray Russell, who grew close to Fay both musically and intellectually. It was Russell who would helm his second album, 1972’s Time Of The Last Persecution, a small-group set where Fay’s visionary bent turned apocalyptic, and the sound intensified accordingly. Pictures Of Adolf Again, in particular, was a warning that fascism could return: “As sure as I sit here there will appear/Pictures of Adolf again.”
Fay’s appearance on the cover of Time Of The Last Persecution gave him an air of wild prophet, but for all his music’s spiritual power, the record was not a success: “I didn’t leave the music business – the music business left me,” he told The Guardian in his last interview, in 2024. Fay spent the best part of the next four decades out of the public eye, working as a gardener and fruit-picker, quietly writing and recording songs as a kind of devotional pursuit.
In the early 2000s, these songs started finally being released, most notably a collection called Tomorrow Tomorrow And Tomorrow that had been recorded in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fay’s songwriting practice was a constant, often private imperative, and there is an argument that this unmediated collection – along with From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock (from 1966-1970), and Still Some Light (recordings from 1970-71 alongside 21st Century home demos) – are the truest representation of his art.
Nevertheless, it was heartening in 2012 when an enterprising producer, Joshua Henry, finally cajoled Fay back into a studio to record a formal comeback, Life Is People. The album sensitively augmented the beauty of Fay’s piano songs, often melancholy in tone, but also imbued with an enduring gratitude at the wonders of life, and a faith in that wonder which had only deepened over the decades.
Two more lovely albums – 2015’s Who Is The Sender? And 2020’s Countless Branches – followed, cementing Fay’s reputation as one of the great British singer-songwriters of his time, finally receiving the kind of acclaim he had always deserved. Fay, though, remained a private man, at one remove from the music business: hugely touched by the love for his work, but content with his life as it was and untroubled by even the slightest desire for fame. In later years, Parkinson’s stymied his piano-playing, but the songs kept coming - a consolation not just to himself, but to more people than perhaps he could ever comfortably grasp: “So be at peace with yourself/And keep a spring in your heel/ And keep climbing that hill/And be at peace with yourself.”