Bill Fay

Bill Fay is a name familiar to obsessive collectors of hopelessly obscure sixties singer-songwriters and Wilco trainspotters alike. Bill Fay excels in the former category, his two original Deram releases of the late sixties-early seventies, a s/t affair and one with the ominous title of Time of the Last Persecution, are gorgeous, schizophrenic affairs, and the back story that he went insane, OD’d, died, fell off of the earth’s face always make for great lost legends. (He still lives, plays, not a Syd Barrett case in any way). The latter set of folks traced him from the song that Wilco used to close their encores on their most recent tour, with a beautiful, resilient ditty “Be Not So Fearful.” Where that twain meets is in the triple digit eBay auctions for original copies of these discs, a condition recently relieved by Eclectic Discs.

I cannot pretend to be an anglophile, obsessed with Ray Davies’ minutiae, kitchen-sink dramas, Portobello Road, the socio-cultural relevance of the British garden, London free jazz (or grime, for that matter), though I can’t get enough of this. So some of the smaller details (sonic or sung) woven into Bill Fay’s songs will elude me, to where I may not appreciate the Uncut hyperbolic comparisons that he is the missing link between “Davies, Drake, and Dylan.” That boast is a tad overboard regardless, as Fay’s voice and noir-ish orchestral backing brings to mind other bleak iconoclasts, Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen (to name two), with each song seemingly sung before a straight razor. For his 1967 single, “Some Good Advice,” you can see how much fun Fay would be at a garden party, sneering at the phony hypocrisy of the proceedings and sulking in a corner, despite the propulsion of the song itself.

Scant years on, Fay is fed up with everything on Last Persecution, at the end of his mental rope. He weighs the true differences between Christ and Hitler and their cults of personality and finds it in a dead heat; he finds solace nowhere in the disintegrating world around him, which makes for some grave, ponderous, yet cathartic listening. That doesn’t mean I can’t get off on the shredding bombast of his backing band, spearheaded by guitarist Ray Russell, who plays electric guitar like John McLaughlin on some shitty speed. Listen to him take the indignation of “Time of the Last Persecution” to a higher level with his frenzied lead and hear how such ghosts can be reborn.

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