The folk singer Bill Fayan artist of the seventies becoming a hero of the author’s song after his rediscovery in the nineties, he has died to as his record of Oceans announced. «With great sadness we announced the death of Bill Fay in London, at 81. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, wise beyond our times. He was a reserved person with the greatest hearts, who wrote immensely moving and significant songs that will continue to find people in the coming years. For now, we remember Bill’s legacy as the ‘man in the corner of the piano room’, who wrote in silence felt songs that moved and connected with people around the world ».
Known for songs like ‘The Healing Day’ and ‘Thank You Lord’, Fay had started working on his last album a month ago, but his stamp ensures that he hopes to “find a way to finish and publish it.”
Fay was born in London in September 1943 and went to university in Wales to study electronics, where he began writing songs with piano and harmonium. In 1967 he threw his first single, with ‘Sum Good Advice’ on the face A and ‘Screams in the Ears’ on face B, and began to give concerts playing his own material, and the drummer of Van Morrison, Terry Noon, Lo Lo Lo He listened and liked that he helped him get a contract with the Deram Records record company.
In 1970 he launched his homonym debut, which was followed by ‘Time of the last persecution’ (1971), two albums that had little commercial success causing his dismissal of deram Records. Fay spent decades without approaching musicbut in 1998 the two albums were reissued and producer Joshua Henry located him and convinced him to make music again. Files of models and recordings were rescued from 1978 to 1981, and in 2009 ‘Still Sub light’ was launched.
At that time Fay’s work had caught artists such as Kurt Vile (from War On Drugs), Nick Cave, Pavement, Marc Almond, Kevin Morby or Cate Le Bon, and especially from Jeff Tweedy (from Wilco)who said about him: «His music is as if he were designed to passionate to me. There is a simplicity and elegance in it. You immediately recognize that this is something that is not cut by ambition and fashion; It is simply someone who humbly adds his voice to contribute some beauty and maybe making peace with the world.
Wilco often versioned ‘Be not so fearful’ live in concert (Fay joined the band in one of her 2007 shows) and when the renewed interest in Fay’s work led him to return to the recording, Tweedy was invited to the 2012 Fay album ‘Life is People’, published by the Dead Oceans label, with which he would later record two more albums, ‘Who is The Sender?’, 2015, and ‘Countless Branches’, 2020.
“Until 1998, when some people reissued my albums, as far as I was concerned, I had been erasted,” Fay said in an interview with Spin on the occasion of his return. «No one listened to me. But then I was surprised that people remember my music. I was doing some gardening and listening to some of my songs in Casete, and a part of me thought they were quite good. I thought: ‘Maybe someone listens to someday’ ».
His fame climbed a step when a version of his song ‘Be Not So Fearful’ was recorded by AC Newman for the soundtrack of the horror series ‘The Walking Dead’but Fay always resisted being too seen. In fact, he was very reluctant to play live, he only made an appearance on television, in the BBC’s music ‘Later … With Jools Holland’, he rejected an offer to accompany Grinderman as an opener during a whole tour, Despite Nick Cave’s insistence to accept.
In 2022, along with a reissue of his first two albums, Dead Oceans directed a 7 ″ singles series of other artists playing his songs, including his usual collaborator Jeff Tweedy, Steve Gunn, Kevin Morby and Julia Jacklin.
“I did not leave the music business: the music business left me,” he told The Guardian in his last interview, in 2024. In recent years it was learned that Parkinson’s disease had diagnosed him, but not The cause of death has been announced.
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