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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Daniel Dylan Wray

Cult singer-songwriter Bill Fay: ‘I didn’t leave the music business, the music business left me!’

Bill Fay, with a beard, in an overcoat, trilby hat and round glasses, smiling slightly in the sun
‘I’m not a working musician, I’m a discoverer’ … Bill Fay. Photograph: Parri Thomas

“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.

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