Death of Bill Fay, the eternal revenant

This time, the disappearance is final. English singer Bill Fay has died at the age of 81, announced the Dead Oceans label on Saturday, February 22, which had housed this folk phoenix for a dozen years, long lost in the void. The first disappearance dates back to the early 1970s, when Fay was ejected by Deram, his label at the time, due to insufficient sales. The two albums Bill Fay (1970) and Time of the Last Persecution (1971) do not seem to have been recorded by the same man, which does not help to identify this songwriter who was nevertheless above the rest and who would give up on overcoming this failure at the time. He would be the first surprised to receive delayed waves of admiration during a reissue that was nevertheless confidential in 1998 but which would fall into good hands. "I had no idea that these records that belonged to the past could still interest people today," this gentle miracle worker told us in 2022. " Thanks to Jim O'Rourke, initially, then to David Tibet, I started getting requests from all sides, until I got a call from Nick Cave who told me some very nice things about my work."

Born in 1943, William Fay began writing songs while studying electronics at Bangor University in Wales under