Cult singer-songwriter Bill Fay: ‘I didn’t leave the music business, the music business left me!’
“From the age of 15, it’s just been me and a piano in the corner of a room,” says Bill Fay. “I’m not an upfront kind of guy.”
This is an understatement. The enigmatic 80-year-old has a music career going back to 1967, but there is just one live performance of Fay online – a single song on Later… With Jools Holland – and he has no interest in being a public figure. “I record just for the sake of the music,” he says.
Fay’s chosen location to chat is a Toby Carvery, an upgrade from the car park he picked for his brief appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme in 2012. When he arrives, he immediately stands out among the daytime diners. He is wearing round glasses with yellow lenses, a suit and a trilby, from which tumble loose curls of greying hair that match his beard. He is on the arm of a helper, and looks frail. “The Parkinson’s has really kicked in,” he says. Interviews were always rare, and he tells me this will probably be his last.
Our conversation has been prompted by the release of Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, an album recorded as the Bill Fay Group (with Bill Stratton, Rauf Galip and Gary Smith) in the late 70s but never released. It remained unheard for decades until Current 93’s David Tibet put it out in 2005, and it is now getting a vinyl release for the first time. Blending art rock with folk and hints of jazz, the album merges plaintive ballads with experimental touches, with Fay’s voice perpetually tender.
A lifelong north Londoner, Fay grew up not far from where we sit today. He played the piano at home and, at college in Wales, began to write and record songs. Those demos caught the ear of Terry Noon, a former drummer in Van Morrison’s Them, who helped him get a record deal.
His 1970 self-titled debut was a lush collection of bucolic folk pop that later drew comparisons to Nick Drake. Fay’s second album, 1971’s Time of the Last Persecution, is a masterwork of tormented introspection on which he grapples with his religious faith and tries to find optimism amid impending Armageddon.
It would later go on to win fans including Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. “It was music made for me,” says Tweedy. “There’s a simplicity and an elegance to it. You immediately recognise this is something uncut by ambition and fashion; it’s just somebody humbly adding their voice to contribute some beauty in, and maybe make peace with, the world.” But the album flopped, Fay lost his record deal and released nothing more for decades.
These were what Fay calls his “deleted” years. “I didn’t leave the music business – the music business left me,” he says. But he expresses no resentment. “It wasn’t difficult, because I still had the music,” he says softly. “And you find the songs. And then you find another. That’s good enough for me.”
Fay talks as if the songwriting process is outside his control. “I’m not a working musician, I’m a discoverer,” he says. “Growing up, the piano slowly taught me itself. I feel the notes and songs come. That feeling then inspires the lyrics – they aren’t written down – and it’s kind of a happening. A mystery.”
In his years away from the music industry, Fay worked as a groundskeeper, fruit picker, factory worker and fishmonger. He kept making music with a modest home recording set-up, never thinking it would be heard. “One day [in 1998] I was doing some gardening and I always had a Walkman to listen to work in progress,” he recalls. “And at the end of the tape there was a song from each of the first two albums, and I said to myself: ‘These were good. Maybe one day someone might hear them.’” The very same day, the phone rang and he learned that his first two albums were being rereleased.
Unbeknown to him, Fay’s influence had spread. Artists such as Jim O’Rourke became huge fans. It took years of persuasion, but Tweedy managed to coax Fay on stage to join Wilco for a cover of his track Be Not So Fearful in 2007. “One of the most beautiful nights of my life,” Tweedy says warmly. At about the same time, Marc Almond was covering Fay, and Nick Cave was inviting him to tour with Grinderman and calling him “one of the greats”. Fay declined that invitation, of course.
A young musician and producer, Joshua Henry, discovered Fay’s music in his dad’s record collection. They bonded deeply over it as his father was dying from cancer, and Henry vowed to track Fay down and make a record with him. “Bill makes it very hard to contact him,” laughs Henry. “And everyone he knows is really strange and eccentric.” After months of emails, the pair finally spoke and immediately clicked. “When Bill started sending me songs, they were incredible pieces of music,” Henry says.“The first time I was recording with him, it was like being in the room with John Lennon.”
The result was 2012’s acclaimed Life Is People, 2015’s Who is the Sender? and 2020’s Countless Branches. A new generation of fans followed, with compliments and cover versions streaming in, including from the War on Drugs, Kevin Morby, Julia Jacklin, Cate Le Bon and Mary Lattimore.
Fay’s response to inspiring other songwriters is typically modest. “I’m aware of it, and it’s touching,” he says. “But it’s hard to take in. The song has an effect on me while I’m doing it, but I don’t think about what someone else feels. If I finish a song and I’m pleased with it, that’s it – it’s gone. I’ll go on to the next one. I don’t reflect.”
He breaks open a packet of nicotine lozenges and talks about his formative years. “Some images that enter you stay with you,” he says. “Hiroshima; Black people hanging from a tree. The young girl with her back burning in Vietnam. The awareness of that as a youngster, and the generation I was in, impacted me.”
Looking at the world wearily but through a Christian lens, Fay explored life’s extreme joys and pains, the artfulness and anguish of life on earth. “I was a seeker,” he explains. “There was a lot of seeking going on back then. The first album I was planting myself in the garden and focusing on the wonders of the world. I’d be sitting in the back garden and a bee would pass by but it would be so intense because you’d then compare it to the blackness of the universe.” On Fay’s follow up record he plunged deeper into this intense blackness. “It’s a heavy album,” he says. “Apocalyptic music for apocalyptic times.”
Does he still struggle to find hope amid harrowing events of the world? “That’s a very deep question,” he says, before a prolonged silence takes over. “There is always good and bad, but belief is important.” Religious belief ? “Yes,” he says. “I wrestled with that a bit [when I was younger] because it felt a bit narrow, but I did come to believe in Jesus and look into prophecy. I felt that there would be intervention.” Does he still? “It can’t carry on like this for ever … it has to accumulate in something.”
Despite clearly still being distressed by the same subject matter that shaped his songs more than 50 years ago, Fay is no longer making music about it, or about anything at all. “I haven’t played a piano for three years due to Parkinson’s,” he says. “But I’ve got lots of songs in progress recorded. What’s out there is really just a fraction – there are piles.”
Is he proud of the music? “I don’t know about pride,” he says, the word almost getting stuck in his mouth. “I’m just … thankful.” He stretches out both hands and warmly scoops them around mine to offer a gentle shake before slowly getting up to leave and head back to where he thrives: the corner of a room.
• Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow is released on a 28-track double-vinyl, a 24-track CD and digitally, by Dead Oceans on 23 February
of where biodiversity is changing is so great that even if we achieve the goals, we wouldn’t be able to measure them,” says Andrew Gonzalez, a professor in conservation biology at the University of McGill, who co-chairs GEO BON, a global biodiversity observation network aiming to make the initiative a reality.
“We wouldn’t even know if we’d hit the target. I’m not sure that everybody’s quite ready for that conclusion but that’s the stark reality,” he says. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, as the saying goes. And if you can’t predict it, you can’t protect it. These things really matter.”
This year, the world’s space agencies are coming together to improve their biodiversity monitoring. There are various limitations of the current data, say researchers. Analysis of 742m records of nearly 375,000 species in 2021 found widespread gaps and biases: just 6.74% of the planet has been sampled, with high elevations and deep seas particularly unknown. Some of the biggest gaps were in the tropics, despite these areas being home to large swathes of life. Europe, the US, Australia and South Africa accounted for 82% of all records, and more than half of records focused on less than 2% of known species.
The data gaps are not limited to animals. In 2023, Kew Gardens identified 32 planet “dark spots” – including Fiji, New Guinea and Madagascar – that are known to be rich in plant biodiversity but have poor data records. Fourteen dark spots were in the Asia-tropical region, six were in the Asia-temperate region, nine in South America and two in Africa. There was one in North America.
Alice Hughes, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, says the poor data coverage means that places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has the largest share of the second-biggest rainforest on Earth – home to huge numbers of species – are poorly understood despite being under significant threat. Geospatial data can be used to monitor loss from spaces, says Hughes, but new technologies such as eDNA and other methods have opened up new ways to monitor ecosystem health.
Other techniques, such as acoustic monitoring and DNA barcoding allow better understanding of ecosystems and identify some of the millions of species yet to be discovered. Innovations in scanning technologies enable researchers to check an entire forest for disease and identify species distributions. But scientists say there is still more to be done to look at Earth’s systems as a whole.
“If you go to a doctor, you don’t want them to just look at you and say, ‘yeah, you look healthy’ or, ‘you look a bit pale’,” says Hughes. “They take measurements. There are many different ways to use this data but it would basically allow us to take the pulse of the planet.”
Maria Azeredo de Dornelas, a professor of biology at the University of St Andrews, says: “We need a bigger observation system that allows us to measure biodiversity like we measure the weather. We probably don’t need it as frequently as the weather but we do need to do it.
“There is the potential to do this really well. It would need international cooperation because it’s not the kind of thing that one country or even continent can do. The planet’s biodiversity doesn’t really care about political borders.”
(before she could even pronounce them properly).”
For Rachel, a Swift fan in her late 20s in London, Taylor Swift brought her closer to her parents, who are in their 60s. “After a period of severe arguments I put Taylor’s song The Best Day on a mixtape for my mum and it significantly helped to heal our relationship by reminding her how much I loved her – I was really nervous in the car when she played it and my whole family was there to hear the message about how much I appreciated what they had done for me in my childhood through Taylor’s lyrics,” she says.
“We ended up going to family therapy together and we are doing much better! Me and my mum have listened to all of Taylor’s albums together on car rides and bonded over this and they both came with me to the Eras Tour movie which felt like a lovely full-circle moment.”