The performance that defined the brilliance of Bill Fay

Posted On February 23, 2025February 23, 2025

The purpose of art is not to occupy the attention of a stadium under a 1500-watt spotlight. I’m not sure exactly what the purpose actually is, but Bill Fay makes it clear that it’s not that. He embodied the mistiness and magic of human creativity. However, his passing aged 81 helps to elucidate the matter somewhat: because what remains of Fay is beautiful music that makes sense of life.

An ever-growing cult of fans reveres his work for its wholesome and wholehearted brilliance. For a long time, this didn’t seem like a fate that would befall him. Fay’s label dropped him in the early 1970s, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s that his music gained any real recognition. At that stage, he had given up on recorded music, playing largely for himself and picking up work as a groundskeeper, fruit picker, factory worker and fishmonger.

When you listen to his humble records that strive to find meaning and beauty in the workaday ways of the world, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is exactly how his music was always destined to find the folks who needed it—enveloped in a mist of dust and lived-in sincerity. Success seems a million miles away from lines like, “All my time is lying on the factory floor”.

So, Fay admitted that when success arrived, it came as quite a surprise. “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.”

He humbly continued, “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.”

He was creating for art’s sake—in truth, that’s always the way you suspect he operated even when he was signed to Deram. But now, he suddenly found a blossoming audience. He came along like a wise old friend whose charm prompted the band, Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, to chant, “And Bill Fay is my J.C Bose, Village fair hermit hair he’s my English rose”. In an age of endless noise, his whispered attention grabs were a godsend that enraptured a legion of folks hungering for something calmer.

In the eyes of the world, Bill Fay had arrived. But every good story needs a final act. He had found his setting and his scene with his arc all but complete—but what next? If you dust his life down, you’ll find prints from the fickle fingers of fate all over it, and in 2012 they orchestrated a perfectly fitting swansong.

On a Friday evening in the UK, old Jools Holland shows creep onto terrestrial TV like the ghost of Christmas past and grace your evening with a nostalgic boon. Sometimes, the gift is a blast from the past that calls for the wine to be topped up and the feet to shuffle, and sometimes, a silence and calm descends as a snippet of astonishing beauty renders time still and distractions nullified. The music takes over the here and now like a swell of conscious sleep. That’s a moment Fay crystalised when he made his entirely un-grand appearance.

With his crooked, well-worked hands, he might deliver a piano ditty in ‘The Never Ending Happening’ that picks at the whys and wherefores of the unchanging world, but there is far too much beauty to the piece to be maudlin lament—he blesses onlookers with a rhapsodic balm of catharsis that makes you almost gladdened that life is tragic after all. As an overlooked artist of the past, this spotlight moment is what Jools Holland is all about, as the culmination of a poignant story reaches its triumphant and honeyed conclusion in your very own living room.

In some ways, that’s perfect for Fay—an artist who could make a rig of TV lights look like a flickering candle and a star-studded studio seem like a favoured nook of his own living room.

He might be gone now, but the lore of his legacy proves he will never be forgotten.

Related Topics