Originally issued on Decca's Deram imprint in 1970, Bill Fay's debut album is a soulful and introspective folk-rock masterpiece. With its warm, lush arrangements and heartfelt lyrics, it showcases Fay's poetic storytelling and enduring from-the-heart emotion. This 180g vinyl re-issue replicates the original UK stereo pressing.
Produced by Peter Eden and orchestrated by Michael Gibbs, Bill Fay's debut album is often stately, frequently poignant, and unfalteringly catchy. Fay's voice, a tentative mix of purity and knowhow is framed by high-period Decca arrangements, full of celestial strings and flourishing horns. The dressing does not take away from the immediacy of the material; a wistful eye cast across post-war Britain, removed from the cliches of the swinging sixties. Here as a hymnal full of kinship, family, encouragement and strangeness. For example, The Sun Is Bored – the sun is bored, and the moon wants to get away to another place. Sing Us One Of Your Songs May – while inventing The Streets 30 years before Mike Skinner appeared – is a sweetly powerful rumination on grief. Methane River conflates pollution of water with a closed mind. Gentle Willie explores the complexities of pacifism; Be Not So Fearful – championed by Jeff Tweedy – is an aural equivalent of an arm around the shoulder.
These are NOT moon-June-love ditties. Comparisons have been made to Nick Drake, but there is also Peter Sarstedt, Gilbert O'Sullivan and Brian Protheroe at play here. Original copies of Bill Fay change hands for three figure sums. For once, you can understand the price tag: this a remarkably accomplished debut.
Bill Fay's second album, Time of the Last Persecution (1971), is a haunting and contemplative work blending folk, rock, and spiritual introspection - With its poetic lyrics and evocative melodies, the album explores themes of faith, doubt, and human vulnerability - This 180g vinyl re-issue replicates the original UK pressing.
As Fay's journalistic champion Rob Young wrote in 2005, "If Bill Fay was his songs of innocence, Time Of The Last Persecution collected songs of experience." Shorn of the lush orchestration of his debut, Time Of The Last Persecution, originally released in 1971 and produced by Fay's guitarist Ray Russell, is deep, pensive and philosophical. Working with a small band, songs like 'Til The Christ Comes Back and Release Is In The Eye are powerful statements, with Russell's guitar lyrically complementing Fay's sometime oblique words. One of the most prescient songs is Pictures Of Adolf Again, which looks aghast at the resurgence of the right-wing 25 years after the Second World War. Fay questions what the choice people will have to make "Christ or Hitler? . . . Christ or all the Caesars to come?" The title track was influenced by the Kent State University massacre; Come A Day suggests that at the day of reckoning, no nation will prevail.
Of Time Of The Last Persecution, Ray Russell said in 2005, "I think it was apocalyptic. I think we were all waiting for the sky to open a bit. But, funnily enough, you know how these feelings kind of bring you through things, and it's interesting that people now find it very relevant to the situation again." Sadly, issues like this never seem to go out of fashion. With its subject matter, the album's occasional discordance, and Fay's dishevelled look on the cover led to speculation that Fay was about to become another hippie casualty. Far from it. He got a day job and lived quietly, yet never stopped writing. "I've just simply accepted the fact that I wasn't an established artist and couldn't keep making albums. But the songs didn't stop . . . To be able to write songs is really a big enough plus." Thank heavens he could – Time Of The Last Persecution is one of the best albums you've never heard.
