Bill Fay, the cult British singer-songwriter who experienced a late-in-life career revival, has died, according to a statement from his label, Dead Oceans. “Bill was a gentle man and a gentleman, wise beyond our times,” it reads. “He was a private person with the biggest of hearts, who wrote immensely moving, meaningful songs that will continue to find people for years to come.” A cause of death has not been revealed, though Fay did struggle with Parkinson’s Disease during his final years. He was 81.
Born in North London in 1943, Fay attended college in Wales to study electronics, where he began writing songs on the piano and harmonium. Former Van Morrison drummer Terry Noon soon came across his demos, and helped Fay sign to Decca Records subsidiary Deram, where he put out two albums: 1970’s Bill Fay and 1971’s more fragmentary, experimental follow-up Time of the Last Persecution. Due to the latter record’s lackluster sales, Fay was dropped from his label. “I didn’t leave the music business—the music business left me,” he said in a Guardian profile last year.
Heavily influenced by his own Christianity, Fay’s music was conversant with the contemporaneous Jesus freak movement in the U.S., though, as Sadie Sartini Garner wrote for Pitchfork in 2015, “he hardly avoids the truth; his staring into the void is the only thing that allows him to mourn its existence.” Time of the Last Persecution, in particular, was a direct response to some of the great tragedies of the 20th century, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Jim Crow laws, and the Vietnam War.
Over the course of the next four decades, Fay got married, raised a family, and worked at various points as a groundskeeper, fishmonger, and fruit picker. “As far as I was concerned, I was gone, deleted. No one was listening,” he described to Spin in 2012. However, following a reissue by a small British label in 1998, producer Jim O’Rourke discovered Fay’s first two LPs, which he would later play for Jeff Tweedy during the sessions for Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Tweedy ended up adding a cover of Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful” to the band’s live sets, and after much cajoling, the singer joined them to perform it twice—once in 2007, and once in 2010.
O’Rourke also sent a copy of Time of the Last Persecution to David Tibet, of the long-running experimental act Current 93. Tibet was so taken with the record that he tracked down Fay and helped him put out Tomorrow, Tomorrow, & Tomorrow, a compilation of studio recordings from between 1978 and 1981, as its proper follow-up in 2005. A few years later, record producer Joshua Henry, whose father had a copy of Last Persecution in his record collection, also sought Fay out. After getting in touch with 50 labels, Henry helped Fay sign to Dead Oceans, effectively kickstarting the second act of his career as a recording artist.
Fay would go on to put out three more albums of new material—Life Is People in 2012, Who Is the Sender? in 2015, and Countless Branches in 2020—and count among his fans The War on Drugs, The New Pornographers’ A.C. Newman, and Stephen Malkmus. During this time, he never toured and only made one live television appearance (on Later… with Jools Holland), preferring to stay close to London, where he’d lived almost his whole life. “It’s best I spend my available time doing what I’ve always done,” Fay told the New York Times in 2020. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my—finding songs in the corner of the room.”
