Bill Fay: not your typical rock star

Although a singer-songwriter with a cult following, Bill Fay was far from being your typical rock star. After releasing two albums in the early 70s, he was dropped by his record label finding alternative work as a groundskeeper, fruit picker, factory worker and fishmonger while continuing to make home recordings. Growing appreciation of his first two albums led to their reissue, then release of his recordings made without a contract, and, finally, to a new contract and three further studio-quality albums.

A very private man, who latterly rarely performed in public, his music nevertheless had a huge impact on the many hearts he touched with his songs. This was so, despite (or because of), the spirituality that was fundamental to his life and work; his songs essentially being musical haikus on “his recurring themes: nature, the family of man, the cycle of life and the ineffable vastness of it all”.

In the late 1960s, he, and a friend, “reached a place where we realised we were walking around largely asleep to bigger issues, to a greater reality … So I started to pay more attention to nature … That’s why, on the back on the first album I wanted to have that photo of me, with all the leaves on me, like I’d been sitting there for quite a long time, looking.” He expressed this new sense of contemplation in ‘The Garden Song’, the opening track on his debut album, where he sang of “planting myself in the garden … Between the potatoes and parsley” to “wait for the rain to anoint me / And the frost to awaken my soul”. The natural world constantly revives his sense of wonder with sight of trees “blowing in the wind” and seeds “being sown by the wind” forming a “cosmic concerto” which stirs his soul (‘Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)’).

By contrast ‘War Machine’, although beginning with a description of nature (including the natural role of predators feeding on one another), ends with the indiscriminate slaughter unleashed by human beings in wartime, with each of us complicit “As we pay our taxes, to the War Machine”. Fay’s second album Time of the Last Persecution was dominated by his vision of contemporary violence as the sign of a coming apocalypse. David Shirley has explained that: “Shortly after his debut was released, Fay stumbled across an old biblical commentary and quickly developed a fascination with the books of Daniel and Revelation. With the Vietnam War still escalating and the Kent State massacres in the headlines, the dark, apocalyptic tone of the ancient prophetic literature seemed disturbingly relevant.”

Yet, despite this album’s focus on imminent violence, Fay was ultimately looking towards the Omega Point that the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had prophesised which, as Hugh Dellar writes, is “a supreme point of complexity and consciousness, transcendent and independent of the evolving universe, a point which can also be seen simply as the realisation of Christ”.

These key themes of the beauty of the natural world and the horrors of warfare are intimately linked in Fay’s work, as he himself once noted: “If you become more awake to the wonders of the natural world, if you actually feel that life element, you begin to feel the anti-life element too and begin to want answers to the terrible things that happen in the world.”

The answers he found to those questions were the ideas of Teilhard, who, as David Shirley explains: “believed that all of reality, both human and non-human, is rapidly evolving toward an eternal state of unity and peace. The earth’s present travails (war, poverty, injustice), however overwhelming they may seem, are really the birth pangs of the coming paradise—evidence of both the deficiencies of our current existence and the imminence of the world to come.”

Shirley noted that: “For Fay, as for Teilhard before him, deliverance is deliverance for all (hippie and soldier, young and old, human and non-human) from the structures and institutions that oppress and alienate us. And the coming of the messiah signifies that all of reality—however senseless it may now seem—ultimately has value and significance.” Fay said of Time of the Last Persecution: “The album was a commitment, albeit a reluctant one at first, to the belief that there will be, and has to be at some point, some spiritual intervention in the world.”

Dellar brings these two poles of Fay’s work together well when he writes that: “Like an earlier London mystic, William Blake, Bill Fay leaves you feeling that it is still possible ‘to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower’, yet also insists we recognise the flipside and face down hell as it encroaches upon us. There is hope and the comforts of home, but also a harrowing sweep through the pain and injustice of the strange little planet we happen to find ourselves passing through.”

Despite tackling such large themes, Dellar also notes that Fay’s “music … somehow transforms such mundane and everyday objects as patches of parsley and factory floors, door keys and teddy bears by feeling in them a wider, clearer truth and meaning.” Similarly, Tom Taylor writes of “humble records that strive to find meaning and beauty in the workaday ways of the world”.

Humility is a word that constantly recurs in writing about Fay and his work. It is there in his acceptance of the music business leaving him after the release of his second album and of gratitude when his music began to be re-released and recorded once again. It is there in his sense that his thoughtful, contemplative and melodic songs are sent to him from elsewhere (‘Who Is The Sender?’). It is there in in his low-key, almost hesitant delivery, in lyrics such as “The never ending happening / Of what’s to be and what has been / Just to be a part of it / Is astonishing to me” (‘The Never Ending Happening’) or “Just to be a part, just to be a part of your plans, Lord / What can I say, how can I speak” (‘Just To Be A Part’). In Fay’s praxis, gratitude, wonder and hope all derive from contemplation and point forward to the healing day which is to come.

Bill Fay died on 22 February 2025 aged 81. His family described him as “quite literally an angel sent by god” with “the biggest heart and the purest soul”. His reflective ballad-based piano music mirrors and supports the meditative content of his songs. Ultimately, his music seems to settle in the spaces between between the whimsicality of Syd Barrett and the romanticism of Nick Drake (fellow artists sitting adjacent to the music industry).

Taylor has accurately summed up Fay’s work as “beautiful music that makes sense of life” noting that: “In an age of endless noise, his whispered attention grabs were a godsend that enraptured a legion of folks hungering for something calmer”. Through his creative engagement with the ideas of Teilhard, it may be that Fay’s greatest achievement was to take a form of music that has sometimes been characterised, by both supporters and opponents alike, as ‘the Devil’s music’ and convincingly and calmly enable it to sing of God.

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Jonathan Evens