Josh Rosenthal on Singer/Songwriter Bill Fay

British singer/songwriter Bill Fay recorded two albums of musical interest in the early 70’s. His eponymous debut (1970) followed by ‘Time Of The Last Persecution’ (1971), both on Decca, are remarkable in their own right, and even more so considering how different they are from each other, released just one year apart. They represent one of the most compelling left-right combinations in rock music history, akin to how Leonard Cohen’s raggedly glorious ‘Songs Of Love And Hate’ immediately followed the well-mannered ‘Songs From A Room.’ Fay’s debut features grandiose orchestral arrangements that blast his miniature character studies into the stratosphere. Like Scott Walker’s early solo LPs, it’s cerebral, rococo English orch-pop. The second LP is experimental, spontaneous, and influenced by acid rock and Bob Dylan. Pictured on the cover of the self-titled debut album wearing an overcoat, walking over shimmering water in Hyde Park, a clean cut Fay gazes wistfully into the camera. By contrast, on the second album we find him with downcast eyes, unkempt beard and wild hair. “It wasn’t a set up or a pose,” Fay told Flashback magazine in 2014, “It was serious music, and I was concentrating. But people always read meanings into things, and they assume that because I had a beard I was undergoing a drug meltdown or personal problems of some sort. I wasn’t.”

That same sort of speculation swirled around Fay’s conspicuous decades-long absence after Decca dropped him in 1971. Fay dismisses the typical “script” that often accompanies commercial failure and disappearance – the descent into drugs, mental illness – rejecting any portrayal of himself as a “tortured artist.”  Instead, he never stopped writing or recording. The period of 1977-1982 was especially fruitful, but no record company was interested in releasing his work. It wasn’t until the late ‘90’s that whispers of Fay’s legend started circulating, the result of various archival CD releases and MOJO Magazine mentions. A collection of early demos from the first two albums along with other material, ‘From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock,” was released in 2004. A “lost” third album under the moniker of Bill Fay Group, ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow,’ featuring the magnificent “Isles of Sleep,” surfaced in 2005, as did reissues of the Decca albums. Incredibly, Fay released a whole disc of unreleased demos from the ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ sessions in 2010 as ‘Still Some Light’, which included a few never-before-heard songs that were left off the album, such as “There’s A Price Upon My Head” and “I Will Find My Own Way Back,” both as great as anything on ‘Time.’

Jim O’Rourke played Fay for Jeff Tweedy in 2001 while mixing Wilco’s ‘Yankee Foxtrot...