{"id":6871,"date":"2025-02-24T12:35:44","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T12:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=6871"},"modified":"2025-02-24T12:35:44","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T12:35:44","slug":"bill-fay-planting-myself-in-the-garden-2012-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=6871","title":{"rendered":"Bill Fay \u2013 Planting Myself In The Garden (2012 interview)"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a rabid cult reputation and fearsome outsider status that stems from a triad of early \u201970s albums and a collection of his \u201960s demos, BILL FAY\u2019s name continues to engender a rare reverence and hushed tones among connoisseurs of introspective, leftfield pop songcraft.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t me who left the music, it was the music business that left me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

HUGH DELLAR meets the North London enigma<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In my bedroom, I have hung a painting done by my father in 1971, two years after I was born. Entitled Instant Artificial Recollections Of Childhood, it\u2019s a split canvas featuring two slightly different versions of what is essentially the same image \u2013 a woman (not one particular visually specific woman, but rather a symbolic representation of a woman) standing with her back to the viewer in a garden as squadrons of fighter planes fly high overhead. In the right-hand side of the painting, thewoman is further removed, the garden slightly elongated, the memory more distant and removed. More like that which lives in the mind, the real overlaid by the patina of memory and its many falsifications. Despite never having asked, I\u2019ve always presumed the woman to be my nan, who died when I was 14 and of whom I have only fragmented memories, the scene to be the Croydon house my dad\u2019s folks relocated to after Camberwell and the time the years of The Blitz.<\/p>\n

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\u2018The Lodge Gates, Addington\u2019 (1947) by the author\u2019s father, Ron Dellar, reproduced at Bill Fay\u2019s request<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I mention this because I suspect that one the main reasons why Bill Fay\u2019s trajectory as what he terms \u201ca song finder\u201d resonates with me quite so deeply is because it echoes and mirrors much of what my father, now 83 and still painting every day of his life, has been through \u2013 and has passed down to me.<\/p>\n

Much of the music Bill has gifted us that hits me hardest is that which generates instant artificial recollections of childhoods I may well have never actually had. I put on \u2018Katie And Me\u2019 and find my mind flooded with images of pebble beaches, sunburnt necks and popping blisters, the screech and caw of seagulls, brass bands on bandstands; \u2018Sing Us One Of Your Songs, May\u2019 conjures up the smoky south London pubs of my father\u2019s early \u201950s salad days, the piano singalongs echoing down foggy dusk streets, men with hat brims tugged down and collars pulled up and against the cold puffing on hand-rolled fags.<\/p>\n

“As a teenager, I was once dragged by my dad into our garden and told to stare at a tree. \u201cIt\u2019s a tree\u201d I told him, in answer to his questions about what it was I was looking at, which caused him to splutter in incredulity and point out that the eyes he had given me were being wasted. \u201cIt\u2019s not just any tree. It\u2019s THIS tree. Full of tree-like qualities and yet only its own unique self.\u201d He then went on to explain the problems of truly seeing things and then painting them when the mind collates every example of a thing that it encounters and from them forms an archetype \u2013 tree, say, or duck \u2013 and these interrupt the act of actually observing that which is before you.<\/p>\n

This sense of being awake to what we encounter, to feeling and knowing its wonder and uniqueness, and of accessing the frames of mind that allow us to see things as they actually are \u2013 or at least as they can be \u2013 lies at the heart of Bill Fay\u2019s music, music that 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. Like an earlier London mystic, William Blake, Bill Fay leaves you feeling that it is still possible \u201cto see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

Much like my father painting in the free time snatched amidst a life spent hustling for brass by running a bed & breakfast and selling antiques and old cars, Bill Fay has spent a working life also managing to craft and collect songs and the fact that he not only remains among us, but is still recording and perhaps only now finally finding the fame and fans he so richly deserves, is something we all should give thanks for. What follows is his story. Or part of it. Written in the knowledge that all views inevitably contain the viewers.<\/p>\n

Born during the war, Bill Fay grew up in a tight North London community where music provided release and solace, laughter and relaxation. His mother\u2019s side of the family was particularly musical, with her five brothers and sisters all able to play instruments by ear. The family would frequently have get-togethers on a Sunday that would cause passers-by to stop and listen a while. His father was also an adept guitarist and wrote and sang songs in the music hall tradition. As Bill himself puts it, \u201cAlthough I was to grow up as part of a significantly different generation, I remained, and remain, deeply connected to that generation,\u201d and it doesn\u2019t take much to hear traces of earlier eras echoing through his recordings.<\/p>\n

At some point during his youth, a piano arrived in the house. Bill remembers its appearance roughly coinciding with the purchase of a Dansette record playernand a guitar for his older brother, both of which led to rock \u2019n\u2019 roll filtering through. After early experiments failed, Bill was initially inducted into the mysteries of the ivories by his brother\u2019s wife-to-be, who showed him a simple party piece, out of which emerged an understanding of its basic structure, which in turn led tonan ability to break down the whole and re-chunk it in different ways. Before long,nhe\u2019d realised muchncontemporary pop music was constructed around variations onnsimple themes and four main chordsnand from there grew to a greater grasp of the instrument. Whennpushed on influences, Bill talks freely about the inevitability of absorbing almost everything heard from his earliest days \u2013 \u2018\u2019Smile\u2019 by Charlie Chaplin is in there, \u2018Moonlight Sonata\u2019\u2026nand then of course the first two nDylan LPs, but I was wide open to listening to anything\u201d\u2013 and yet also keenly stresses that the piano itself was always his biggest teacher and influence. Through finding the feelings that spoke out through the keys, he edged his way towards a highly personal and idiosyncratic direct and expressive style.<\/p>\n

At the age of 18, Bill headed off to Bangor in North Wales to do a degree in Electronics, a subject he\u2019d been drawn to chiefly as a result of the influence of his uncle Ron, who was a radio enthusiast and owner of assorted old pieces of equipment. It was this passion that spurred Bill on to pay attention in school and get the qualifications needed to move on to higher education: \u201cI stopped mucking about in school because in Chemistry they\u2019d mention batteries and I\u2019d think \u2018Oh, hang on! That\u2019s to do with radios\u2019 \u2013 and the same in Physics. They\u2019d mentioned magnets and I\u2019d be like \u2018Hang on!\u2019 and from there, I just got really into the atmosphere of old radios. I\u2019d buy cheap old radios at jumble sales and take them to bits and that led to being interested in it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, once there, he found himself increasingly drawn back to music and actively sought out pianos. There were two on campus \u2013 an upright and a grand \u2013 which he frequently found free and on which he continued his explorations and experiments. However, it was actually a cheap harmonium that proved to be the door into the music business. By 1964, Bill was sharing a cottage up near the mountains, with only infrequent buses into town, and was starting to piece songs together, though with neither words nor vocals just yet. Despite devouring books \u2013 a trait that would lead to and nourish the deep sense of seeking Bill later came to feel \u2013 by Orwell and Beckett and the like, he\u2019d yet to voice himself. Nevertheless, this germinal work somehow came to the attention of a local beat ngroup, who started playing it at gigs and eventually cut a demo version onto an acetate. Though the names of both the song and the group in question have been lost in the mists of time, this recording proved crucial in what happened next.<\/p>\n

On returning to North London in mid-65, Bill slipped a copy of the acetate to a local bass player, whose own group then started playing the song at gigs. Before too long, Bill had been tracked down by a guy called John Boden, an amateur music and recording enthusiast with his own mobile four-track recording studio, which he offered free use of. For the next 12 months or so, John recorded several of Fay\u2019s early offerings (including \u2018Sometime Never Day\u2019, \u2018Camille\u2019 andn\u2018Lily Brown\u2019, all later rescued on the Tenth Planet demos set, From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock<\/em>), along with work by his older brother John. It just so happened that Boden was related by marriage to another John, John Barker, who managed Unit 4+2, who\u2019d had a #1 hit with \u2018Concrete And Clay\u2019 and, through this connection, a recording of another Bill Fay track was arranged in a local hall, with backing provided by half of Unit 4+2, some of Adam Faith\u2019s old band The Roulettes (possibly Russ Ballard and Bob Henrit, who both went on to join Unit 4+2 anyway) and Bill himself.<\/p>\n

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Bill-of-all-trades: high hopes for Bill in 1967<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By some strange and fortuitous chain of events, all this activity resulted seven months later in Terry Noon finding Fay and offering him a deal with Decca. A drummer who had played with Gene Vincent and Them, only to find himself left out of the picture when Van Morrison decided to relocate to the States, Noon had decided to move more into the music industry itself and had contacts at Decca, his old label. By the time he approached Bill, he was already managing Honeybus, who would play a key role in a later stage of his career. Decca had only recently set up their new subsidiary Deram as an outlet for spacious stereo \u201cDeramic Sound\u201d recordings of contemporary rock and pop groups. Putting out startling new releases by Barry Mason, The Truth, The Move, The Pyramid and many more in its early months, the label was clearly a hip place to be.<\/p>\n