Bill Fay, the cult British singer-songwriter who skilled a late-in-life profession revival, has died, in keeping with a statement from his label, Useless Oceans. “Invoice was a mild man and a gentleman, clever past our instances,” it reads. “He was a non-public individual with the most important of hearts, who wrote immensely transferring, significant songs that may proceed to search out individuals for years to return.” A reason for dying has not been revealed, although Fay did wrestle with Parkinson’s Illness throughout his remaining years. He was 81.
Born in North London in 1943, Fay attended faculty in Wales to check electronics, the place he started writing songs on the piano and harmonium. Former Van Morrison drummer Terry Midday quickly got here throughout his demos, and helped Fay signal to Decca Data subsidiary Deram, the place he put out two albums: 1970’s Invoice Fay and 1971’s extra fragmentary, experimental follow-up Time of the Final Persecution. As a result of latter file’s lackluster gross sales, Fay was dropped from his label. “I didn’t go away the music enterprise—the music enterprise left me,” he stated in a Guardian profile final yr.
Closely influenced by his personal Christianity, Fay’s music was conversant with the contemporaneous Jesus freak motion within the U.S., although, as Sadie Sartini Garner wrote for Pitchfork in 2015, “he hardly avoids the reality; his staring into the void is the one factor that enables him to mourn its existence.” Time of the Final Persecution, specifically, was a direct response to a few of the nice tragedies of the twentieth century, together with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Jim Crow legal guidelines, and the Vietnam Conflict.
Over the course of the subsequent 4 many years, Fay acquired married, raised a household, and labored at numerous factors as a groundskeeper, fishmonger, and fruit picker. “So far as I used to be involved, I used to be gone, deleted. Nobody was listening,” he described to Spin in 2012. Nonetheless, following a reissue by a small British label in 1998, producer Jim O’Rourke found Fay’s first two LPs, which he would later play for Jeff Tweedy throughout the classes for Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Tweedy ended up including a canopy of Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful” to the band’s dwell units, and after a lot cajoling, the singer joined them to carry out it twice—as soon as in 2007, and as soon as in 2010.
O’Rourke additionally despatched a replica of Time of the Final Persecution to David Tibet, of the long-running experimental act Current 93. Tibet was so taken with the file that he tracked down Fay and helped him put out Tomorrow, Tomorrow, & Tomorrow, a compilation of studio recordings from between 1978 and 1981, as its correct follow-up in 2005. Just a few years later, file producer Joshua Henry, whose father had a replica of Final Persecution in his file assortment, additionally sought Fay out. After getting in contact with 50 labels, Henry helped Fay signal to Useless Oceans, successfully kickstarting the second act of his profession as a recording artist.
