ONE LIFE CONSTANTLY CHANGING AND BEYOND ANY KIND OF FATHOMING: BILL FAY

I first heard of Bill Fay in November 1998, when I was an inpatient at the John Radcliffe Hospital. I had been painfully transferred there from the Chelsea and Westminster after having been operated upon for injuries sustained in a contretemps with a 52 bus across the road from Knightsbridge Barracks. Laura would bring up copies of the monthly music magazines for me to peruse on the ward, as well as things like Time Out (which at the time you could get in Oxford). From the latter I recall, possibly inaccurately, radio presenter Bill Overton being interviewed about record shops in Primrose Hill (were there any?).

 

But from that month's MOJO magazine, in the reissues section, I came across Jim Irvin talking about a two-on-one CD reissue of the first two albums by Fay. One was self-titled and pictured him standing atop the Serpentine. The second was called Time Of The Last Persecution. Reference was made to names like Mike Gibbs and Ray Russell and my curiosity bell rang.

 

Upon my discharge from hospital I painfully made my way to HMV on Cornmarket Street where they had one copy of the CD in their racks. I swear to goodness that HMV and Virgin, facing each other on the same street like gunslingers, only ever got one copy in of certain CDs because they knew I was likely the only one who was going to buy them.

 

 

Certainly, in the process of recovering from a severely traumatic incident, and in the context of late nineties Oxford, I required quietly disturbing, yet fundamentally pastoral, music to ease my varying manifestations of pain; and this CD left a mark on me. English music, as much as or more than any other, demands of its appreciation its relationship (real or imagined) to the environment in which you listen to it. And I still cannot listen to Fay's exquisitely tactile music without thinking of Oxford in that transitional, queerly sunny winter of 1998-9.

 

On that See For Miles CD were also included both sides of Fay's solitary single from 1967. The B-side "Scream in the Ears" is a surprisingly volatile take on electric Dylan, but the A-side "Some Good Advice," painfully perfect in its two minutes and eighteen seconds, is, I am convinced, one of the most punctuating singles I have ever heard. And it is so fragile; a repeated descending minor key piano chordal range with melodramatic drumrolls every eighth beat and a mellotron floating above the music like Banquo's ghost. Lyrically it is what the title suggests; advice to a young child, more probably advice to himself. "If you want to build a shed/Then go ahead/And bulid your shed...And if you want/To paint a gate/It's not too late/To paint your gate." Sounds like a Junior Choice reject? No...it's so frail and hopeless a scenario, so shattering in its humility. Hear how the guitar suddenly shreds halfway through the track before disappearing again. The final lines, sung with evident relish, are: "Don't listen to/Anything anyone tries to tell you." Except he doesn't. It's one of the most striking singles of its, or indeed any, year. You may weep at it should your mind be framed in a certain way.

 

 

Then nothing for three years, until he emerged, clean-shaven atop the Serpentine, for his 1970 debut. The sonic palette was magnified immeasurably (though not everyone agreed) by the involvement of  Gibbs as arranger. On the sleeve there is a telling commentary by Fay wherein he states that as a boy he spent five years constructing a small wooden box. When completed, he took it to his woodwork teacher, who proclaimed it the worst piece of woodwork he'd ever seen and smashed it with a mallet. This album, he stated, was the first creative thing he'd done since then. He would do what he needed to do, and then go away again to dodge any further mallets.

So this is what he needed to say, and he needed to say it all at once. Critics complain that Gibbs' orchestrations compete with and drown out Fay's songs, but here the large sonorities are to me as apposite as those Gibbs was later to devise for Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. One only has to hear how the strings and brass rise and fall with terrible suddenness behind Fay's vocal on "The Sun Is Bored." The record is much more explicitly bleak than anything *insert doomed turn-of-the-seventies singer-songwriter of your choice here* did, but not terminally so.

 

The brief but biting "The Room" is the nearest the record comes to the atmosphere of "Some Good Advice," but here Fay presents us with a black and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction which again and again finds no respite in the unresolved graveyard of its minor chords battling against his fatalistic, semi-croaked "forever." "We Want You To Stay" is pretty unambiguous in its message, too, though Gibbs lifts us out of the despair with his radiant sunlit chords, as well as an uncredited but instantly recognisable John Surman blowing soprano saxophone. The desperate faux-Cockney of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May" is reminiscent of the John Cale of Helen of Troy tackling "Yesterday Once More" - who the hell am I? Yet there persist hope and light until the end, with the mildly rebuking but essentially positive message of "Be Not So Fearful," sung in a tone somewhere between Mick Softley and the Singing Postman - a song which somebody will someday cover and take to number one.

The record didn't sell - was barely promoted - but Fay still had further things to say, and say them he did, albeit ten million times more brutally, on his second album, Time Of The Last Persecution. This record was scarcely even reviewed, let alone promoted, and its cover depicted a now long-haired, bearded and very weary-looking "Billy Fay." Out went Gibbs' lushness; in came what was essentially the working band of guitarist Ray Russell, who had appeared, albeit relatively restrained, on the first album, but who was now given licence to do whatever was needed. And certainly in that strange period between 1970-73, bookended by comparatively conventional careers, Russell was as near as this country ever got to producing a guitarist as proficiently fiery as Sonny Sharrock.

How worst to describe Persecution? The name of Syd Barrett immediately springs to mind, but more pertinently, imagine a Syd Barrett who, in a rare moment of utter clarity and lucidity, saw his situation, saw the world and for 30 or so minutes was able to make complete and articulate sense of it. Not so far from Roger Waters? Perhaps not - and there's certainly an element of Waters' later misanthropy in songs like "Let All The Other Teddies Know." But there is a severely scarifying assuredness to the brutality into which this record more often travels, especially on its second side. The songs on side one, including bruised ballads with divine Beatles chord progressions like "I Hear Your Calling" or "Don't Let My Marigolds Die," give us an idea of the suppressed immense rage at which Russell's guitar intermittently and immaculately scratches. The focus on the very Barrett-esque "Laughing Man" is as sharp as last Thursday afternoon's snow. A horn section - two of whom worked with Keith Tippett's Centipede - appears on "'Til The Christ Come Back" but its repeated fanfares become increasingly higher-pitched and more discordant. The track fades out just as it's about to explode. 

And detonate the music does on side two, most pronounced on the title song over which Fay's Cale-like croon (and even Bryan Ferry in a sour mood-anticipating croon) over stately Sunday school piano chords is increasingly subverted and finally drowned in a freeform whirlpool, Russell taking off for atonal space; trombonist Nick Evans and tenor saxophonist Tony Roberts not far behind him. "Come A Day" is the equivalent of the previous album's "Be Not So Fearful," but no easy salvation is to be found here as again the track disintegrates into shards of noisy improvisational causality, the piano continuing sternly underneath the apocalypse. The album concludes with the still terrifying lullaby "Let All The Other Teddies Know" (with its sinister aside "be ready when the cupboard explodes"). This song is relatively peaceful, but Russell cannot resist adding some more Sharrockian runs towards the end, just to let you know that the demon, and death, still exist. 

And, for a long time, that was it. Fay released nothing more in the interim and until the 1998 CD reissue (see its liner note, if you can find a copy) had been assumed to have vanished without trace, into some sort of *insert doomed singer-songwriter etc* type of self-imposed hell; another casualty of causality. But stories are not always so facile. With the renewed interest, Fay bemusedly re-emerged to say that actually he had been holding down a perfectly good day job for the last quarter-century, and yes he did still write songs but didn't feel any great need to put them out on record; because (he didn't say it, but we knew it anyway) everything he had, was driven, to say had been said, definitively and finitely. The malletphobia out of his system, he could then resume his life. Art, music, as catharsis. He didn't die, didn't go mad, didn't do drugs. He lived.

 

"Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."
(Shakespeare, The Scottish Play, V.v.19-28)

 

If a sense of closure was detectable in Time Of The Last Persecution, we were subsequently confronted with what sounded like a renewal. It is hard even in this unlimited space to articulate how completely I have been affected, emotionally and otherwise, by the third Bill Fay album, Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow, which was released in 2005, a quarter of a century after it had been recorded. It is a record which would have sounded as out of step in 1978 or 1981 as it would have done in 1971 and perhaps only fractionally less so in 2025. No record company in any of those years would have known what to do with this kind of a vision. Listening to it, as I still do twenty years on, I not only think of all those avant-MoR operatives whose careers were curtly curtailed by punk - John Howard, John Carter, Gilbert O'Sullivan - but also of things yet to be promised, of the late Elliott Smith and the later Mark Hollis. Perhaps the only way to view Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow is in the same way as Wilson's SMiLE - a singular masterpiece, relieved of any time zone, standing both outside and over much of the rest of popular music.

 

What remains most immediately apparent about Tomorrow - apart from the fact that it is not credited to Bill Fay the solo artist, but to the Bill Fay Group - is a sense of calmness which is made all the more Olympian by its having been being so hard-earned. Although this record is capable of bewitching the listener on its own, it should be heard in tandem with his two Deram albums, which were made available on CD again not long afterwards - I was personally thanked by Fay in his liner note to both. The overwhelming spiritual aura of this record is made more poignant - made more Alice Coltrane rather than made more Cliff Richard - by the pungency of its predecessors, especially the violent and tumultuous Time Of The Last Persecution with its explicit references to "The Christ."

The "Group" aspect of the Bill Fay Group cannot be under-emphasised; whereas on Persecution Fay worked with Ray Russell's group, here he appeared with improvising trio the ACME Quartet, featuring bassist Rauf Gulip, drummer Bill Stratton and Gary Smith, subsequently one of the leading names in European improvised music, on guitar. In many ways Smith comes across as the natural successor to Russell; the anger remains present in his playing but is tempered by compassion and the overall need to, as Fay puts it in his brief sleevenote, give service to the music. As Fay goes on to state, the Group did not work towards the hope or expectation of receiving a recording contract; it was enough that the music be played and recorded, even if no one else got to listen to it (there are parallels with my own blog writing). Thankfully, everyone could now get to listen to it - and it is still, to deploy a very Bill Fay type of adjective, astonishing.

The opening track in particular, "Strange Stairway," is sufficiently poignant for me to want to pause from living, even if only for the three minutes of the song's duration. Smith's vulnerable tremelo picks a high-register motif against an indescribably moving chord sequence, while Fay's only slightly less vulnerable voice comes in, trying to clamber back into the world: "I feel, in myself, the river run, the ocean swell/And miles above me, a strange stairway/And one thing I know for sure/The only thing that'll get us up off the floor/Is the love inside we." Stratton's cymbals tick away in Robert Wyatt-esque quiet insistence throughout, but the symbolism which sets the tone for the rest of the record is already clear; an upward journey towards salvation and deliverance. Best heard while walking up Dunstan Road towards Headington Cemetery on a fresh Wednesday spring mid-morning. The religiosity is accentuated in "Spiritual Mansions" ("Lifegiver/Blessed Redeemer") but is not unquestioning; Fay's quiet voice trembles: "There's a woman in labour/The Creation awaits you," before the music suddenly swells with his more urgent pleas: "To close/These bodies/These souls/In immortality," the last syllable of which is punctuated by an abrupt booming Moog synthesiser before receding just as rapidly. Stratton again soundtracks the nagging doubt with dub-like rimshots.

 

"Planet Earth Daytime" is the sort of song you wish could have been number one instead of "The Lady In Red"; the first ninety seconds have "hit" written all over them, with what begins as a small urban tableau ("She leaves her apartment/About midday/And the colour of the pavement/Is the colour of her face") before the music gathers in intensity for the chorus, where Fay indicates the hint of imminent apocalypse ("Planet Earth daytime/Maybe the last time/Who cares?").

 

But then the initial music dies away, or is supplemented by another melody coming in from the right channel, lending the piece some bitter bitonality as Fay tacitly howls "Our world" before embarking upon a not too decipherable monologue ("So many flags...Pray for the sergeant major who only had orders to give - nothing else") which in turn is briefly supplanted by a shocking flare-up of atonal improv noise (flashbacks of the Persecution hell?). This too quickly disappears as Fay launches into what sounds like a dry run for the soundtrack to Local Hero with its optimistic guitar lines shadowing (or shielding) words which are still to do with the apocalypse; Fay bargaining for a place on the Ark ("Dangerous sailing/In a ship that's going down"). Over the sunset major key ending he dimly intones what could either be: "Let's all aboard" or "Let's go home." It's up to us to decide - or listen to the strikingly similar, albeit more jauntily articulated, themes of Duncan Browne's unexpected 1972 hit "Journey."

 

"Goodnight Stan" revisits the disassociated war veteran theme of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May," though there is now a touch of George Harrison about Fay's petitioning of Stan to "take a watering can to protect yourself," since "Soon they say/They'll be taking us away/To another place/Was it Mars/Or was it Jupiter?" The effect is plangent as well as poignant, and the song is terminated by an unearthly lament of a howl which turns out to be Fay's own voice. At this juncture there is nothing to add apart from the prayer which is the title track, a modified "May Each Day" (not to mention an updated "Some Good Advice") where Fay, alone over a simple piano and synthesiser line, advises his child (?) "May you have faith/May you have hope/May you have life/And a skipping rope/To turn with you/And see you through/Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow." The faintest glow of hope in a torrent destined never to end.

 

And here is where the album "proper" disappears into the background, as we are now presented with an extraordinary collage of nine song fragments clearly taken from demos and home recordings - an album within an album, or the hidden fourth album, like a lo-fi take on side two of Abbey Road, which even on its own betrays more invention than can be found in...well, I'll leave it to your discretion to fill in the names of your choice. As though the anaesthetic has taken effect and you drift into a pellucid dream of the album. "Just A Moon" manages to predicate the work of Roddy Frame and Aztec Camera (listen in particular to that "Round and ROUND you" line). Some fragments, for example "To Be A Part" and "Turning The Pages," exist only as barely audible minutiae, coming indistinctly from the right channel only ("Nothing lasts forever," the sleeve remarks ruefully, "Tape deteriorates in time"), like unanticipated ghosts. With "Sam" we are again in the world of Scott Walker's "Two Ragged Soldiers," as Fay tries to remind his aged colleague of who exactly he is - "When you walk down the street, does it feel like a dream?.../Hard to recall where you've been?/...It's an ill punch that knocks into no one no sense" - over a Wyatt-type keyboard figure as the progenitor tries to deny the possibility that both he and Sam are slowly but steadily disintegrating, both physically and mentally.

 

This segues swiftly into "Lamp Shining," or the ending of the song "Lamp Shining," a song as venomous as Lennon at his blackest: "In our stalls, there's nowhere for you to play!" yells Fay. "At our table, there's nothing we want you to say!" before ironically advising "Keep your lamp shining as you journey on your way" as the song is instantly engulfed in more spiky freeform chaos, a life already terminated. Then, via the curiously Bacharach-ish "Love Is The Tune," we reach the positively vituperative "After The Revolution" where Fay's protagonist has just shot the enemy ("With my guns still smoking"). The victim's dying words - again explicitly paralleled with the Passion of the Christ ("There is no peace unless you bleed!/Bleed for Christ!") - give the impression of Lennon's "Revolution" with its acid content quadrupled and set against a restless "Whiter Shade Of Pale" organ riff. "A voice that in its time vomited forth a thousand words in anger" reflects Fay as he realises the uselessness and waste of his gesture, and by extension that of "revolution" in inverted commas, as he is finally driven to overflow the barlines and launch into another bitter spoken monologue into which the music disappears, though one feels it could continue eternally. Finally "Jericho Road" sees Fay wry over the possibility of an ending to everything ("I may get the chop from Kung Fu fighters/...I pray if I do, the Samaritans will find me") before returning to the opening "Strange Stairway," here noticeably faster, sounding like a Wings outtake, but its humble message undiminished, completing the cycle.

 

Then we return to the "album" with Fay's spiritualism heightened and intensified to new levels of poignancy. "Life" finds him asking fundamental questions over a lugubrious organ and Smith's guitar, mimicking seagulls ("Who are we? Where do we stand? Who holds the key? Who holds the plan? When you hear no voice, no sign of land. Who are we to say we are?") before launching into a passionate chorus (echoes here of what the vastly and sadly underrated Ultrasound would go on to do years later with songs like "Best Wishes") wherein Fay acknowledges the facade but refuses to diminish his belief in its potential effects - "So let the world make believe/That life is risen/That life is conquered/So that the world might believe/And feel the power of the life and love we see!" This anguish is brilliantly articulated by Stratton's frequently freeform drumming (very reminiscent of Laurie Allan on Wyatt's version of "Song For Che") and Smith's squealing, raging and weeping guitar solo, perching on the verge of chaos but always stepping back when required.

 

"Man" is an indistinct echo of Nilsson's "One" where piano is again succeeded by distant guitar squalls ("Nobody knows when you are gone"), while "Hypocrite" will make you shake your tears in disbelief that a song with lyrics as elemental as "Love is like a rose" can make your soul collapse, particularly when the lament vanishes into a pronounced late seventies synthesised drone.

"Cosmic Boxer" sums up the tenor of Fay's message on this album; the ordinary human, venturing into the world every day, struggling to stay in the contest even if, as the song admits, they are only boxing their own shadow, but finally succumbing to the Beckettian leitmotif of I-can't-go-on-I-go-on ("It's true he viewed the cocoon with despair/Yet he boxed on"). At the end the song slows down into a regretful minor/major key seesaw as Fay pointedly states that the "boxer" will "always find a way through" but "not by your own merit." Note Stratton's solitary gong/cymbal crash towards the song's end - the world forever treading on our heads.

 

It's getting near the end, now, and so must Fay sing of passing from this world into another. "We Are Raised" starts out as a simple Dr Dykes hymn - so damned simple, the sentiments "We sit beside Him now" and "Thank you for the life you gave," so damnably poignant that I can't listen to it without dissolving into floods of mourning. And then, right at the end, the Sunday school piano segues into a 1978 synthesiser - and the latter sounds, chillingly, exactly like PiL's "Radio 4." Two different and distinct routes towards the same heart. See what he did there?

To end, and no other song could end this remarkable record, there is "Isles Of Sleep," no doubt deliberately placed at the end to speak to 2005 listeners as much, or more so, than any potential 1981 ears. Over a cyclical piano motif which foretells of "Sleepy Song" by Tindersticks (and also sounds like the prelude to a Meat Loaf song), Fay finally turns to address you:

 

"After all these years/I emerge from the darkness."

(Dylan - not dark yet)

"I dwelt in the Isles of Sleep/Banished as a shadow/Where no light could reach/No teachers' arrows"

(remember that one of Bill Fay's day jobs was as a teacher)

"The purpose now is plain/To not have lost and not have strayed/Would have borne me far away/From my true nature"

But we all have to come back to the world, even if at the end.

"Bereft of spear/Naked...(the voice lowers to humility)...harmless."

Then a new piano motif begins, and if I tell you that it anticipates, by twenty or more years, the similar closing section of Pulp's "Sunrise," you might not believe me.

However:

"Nothing has changed.

Only me.

The world's still the same.

(pause)

(pause)

But I'm not the same."

 

Nor could I ever be. In 2005 I thought that this record had saved me from myself. Again.

 

"O my lord, when I was last at Messina, I looked upon her with a soldier's eye, that liked, but had no leisure for loving; but now, in this happy time of peace, thoughts of war have left their places vacant in my mind, and in their room come thronging soft and delicate thoughts, all prompting me how fair young Hero is, reminding me that I liked her before I went to the wars."
(Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing)

The interest in Fay magnified. Other studio compilations appeared: From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock (1966-70 demos) and Still Some Light (2009 - a two-CD collection, one of band demos from the seventies and another entirely solo album recorded at home the previous year). I think Fay was more relieved by his reacceptance than he let on, but the tenor of his music eased towards contemplative and spiritual - his Christianity invited the listener in, as opposed to scolding them.

Three further albums followed in his later years - Life Is People (2012), his first hit, which saw him reunite with Russell and drummer Alan Rushton as well as younger acolytes; "The Never Ending Happening" is one of those songs which sound so bloody simple until you realise how hard it is for anybody to express the plain wonder that Fay manages so expertly. Who Is The Sender? (2015) continued down the same, increasingly intangible path (Fay sounds as though walking into a dream, or another life, but his buried anger is barely abated - "The Freedom To Read" is so relevant a composition it could have been written last week), and 2020's Countless Branches turned out to be his swansong - the music brushed down to its essence, largely just the man and his voice and piano, as though picking up from the ashes and cherishing what survived that last, apocalyptic persecution. It came out in very early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, just before normal life was ending, hence it feels like a last will and testament on behaf of humanity.

 

There are pauses so long and deep in places (e.g. "In Human Hands") as though he were composing these songs before our ears. When other instrumental voices appear - the electronic keyboards at the climax of "Salt Of The Earth" for instance - the maximalism of this newly-attained peace balances out the noise and torture of Persecution and gets back to the relegation of fearfulness. The closing song - Fay's last song (although he was apparently working on a seventh album a month before his passing this morning, aged eighty-one, so some words may yet need to be said) - "One Life," sounds three hundred years old and is likely still to be sung three hundred years hence, if we permit ourselves the option to do so.

 

When we know that our time is almost up - we don't always know that - we look back at our lives and ask ourselves what difference our existence made to the world. Me? I was perhaps the third person to write about Bill Fay when he remained a semi-open secret (I doubt even Kate Bush knew about him back in the seventies). He came from the Archway and when you heard him genially converse you knew that. But he wasn't much of a fuss about audiences, or exposure. When he appeared on Later With Jools Holland in 2012 he stipulated that he would only perform if the studio were cleared of people and other distractions. Let's leave Bill Fay there - stooped at the piano, somewhat baffled but thankful to be given this chance of expression, making cross-hand playing seem like the simplest thing (when, as pianists know, it's one of the most difficult things), his voice cracking with the miracle of astonishment, and the not yet forlorn hope that it can drive away and banish the things which make life, here and elsewhere, not worth living. Be at peace with yourself, everyone.

(Elements of this piece were extracted and reworked from two previous blog posts; The Church Of Me, originally published 4 February 2003, and Koons Really Does Think He's Michelangelo, first published 18 April 2005. This current piece supersedes both.)

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