“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
