Bill Fay passed away early Saturday (February 22nd) at age 81.

I first heard Bill Fay's 1971 record "Time of the Last Persecution" a decade or more ago.  I thought it was simply incredible upon my very first listen.

Fay was born on September 9, 1943 in north London, where he lived throughout his life. He attended college in Wales, studying electronics, where he first began writing songs on the piano and harmonium.

His first single, "Some Good Advice" / "Screams in the Ears", was issued on the Deram label in 1967, and was followed by two albums, Bill Fay in 1970 and Time of the Last Persecution in 1971. The recordings did not sell well, and Fay was dropped from Deram soon after the release of his second album. They were re-issued in 1998, and then again in 2005.

Despite returning to the recording studio in the late 1970s, Tomorrow, Tomorrow & Tomorrow, the follow-up to Time of the Last Persecution was not released until January 2005, following the reissues of his earlier works.

Cult status and comeback

Fay's work enjoyed a growing cult status in the 1990s. His first two albums were re-issued in 1998, an event which Bill Fay described in 2012 as follows:

Up until 1998, when some people reissued my albums, as far as I was concerned, I was gone, deleted. No one was listening. But then I got the shock that people remembered my music. I was doing some gardening, and listening to some of my songs on cassette, and a part of me thought they were quite good. I thought, "Maybe somebody will hear them someday." That same evening, 14 years ago, I got a call from a music writer telling me that my two albums were being reissued. A shock is not gonna get much bigger than that, It was astonishing to me. I won't ever really be able to believe that it happened. That's how I feel about it. I had come to terms with the fact that I was deleted, but that I had always kept writing songs anyway and that was good enough.

Albums

Bill Fay, 1970

Time of the Last Persecution, 1971

Tomorrow, Tomorrow & Tomorrow (recorded 1978–1981)  2005

Life Is People, 2012

Who Is the Sender?,  2015

Countless Branches, 2020

Compilation albums

From the Bottom of an Old Grandfather Clock (recorded 1966–1970) , 2004

Still Some Light (recorded 1970, 1971, 2009; Coptic Cat, 2010) / compilation of early 1970–1971 studio recordings and 2009 new material home recordings