Bill Fay: a very likeable and unaffected bloke

One of the most decent men I have ever met in the record business is Peter Eden, the remarkable independent producer whose work in the late 60s and early 70s encompassed folk (Donovan, Clive Palmer, Mick Softley, Heron), pop (The Fingers, The Crocheted Doughnut Ring, The Pyramid), jazz (John Surman, Mike Westbrook, Alan Skidmore, Norma Winstone) and singer-songwriters (Mike Cooper, Bill Fay). We were having lunch a couple of years ago, and I asked after Bill, who is another truly humble and appreciative soul. Peter told me that his wife had asked the same question out of the blue a year or so earlier, during his little granddaughter’s birthday party. He was in the process of telling her that they hadn’t spoken in years when the phone rang – and it was Bill (who likes to ring you, rather than the other way around). A few minutes later my phone rang – and it was Bill. A coincidence, of course – but strangely fitting, given the enigmatic nature of the man, whose music all but disappeared for decades before being rediscovered, reissued and praised from the rooftops. I won’t rave on about Bill here, largely because he finds praise embarrassing, but thought I’d post the paltry selection of snippets about him I’ve found in the contemporary music press.

Bill’s first release was the terrific Some Good Advice / Screams In The Ears 45, produced by Peter and issued on Deram in August 1967. Accompanying its release was this small profile from Record Mirror’s weekly ‘Names & Faces’ column, which appeared on September 2nd 1967 (alongside a piece about Robert Plant!). ‘Names & Faces’, incidentally, is a terrific resource for info about and pictures of obscure 60s acts, and would make a terrific little book…

The disc was not a hit, though it did manage to get released in America. After its release Bill languished for a couple of years before Peter persuaded Decca to fund an album of his songs, which was released on its budget Nova imprint in February 1970. It’s a strange set that find his deeply personal ruminations set to grandiose jazz and pop arrangements. Nothing sounds quite like it, and I know several people who’d take it to their desert island. Reviewers were enthusiastic – on February 21st Disc & Music Echo called him ‘a creative young man who builds his music round his poetry, and comes up with songs that are not likely to cause a revolution in music – but the arrangements are excellent and at times the sound is suddenly full and exciting’, while on March 7th Melody Maker said the set was ‘a little reminiscent of Peter Sarstedt, though Fay’s songs are more poetic and less cynical. The arrangements, by Michael Gibbs, are really excellent’. On April 18th, Record Mirror said ‘this is what might be described as ‘improved folk’, since the normal quiet guitar has been nicely augmented by sweeping string orchestrals, woodwind and brass. His Dylanesque voice is not pretentious, in fact it is relaxing. Just the right arrangements develop into symphonic progressions, and enhance Mr. Fay’s far-from-fey lyrics,’ concluding that it was ‘a triumphant debut’.

Nonetheless, despite Bill’s obvious knack with a tune and lyric, Peter Eden remembers that the Decca execs deemed him too vocally similar to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and did little to promote the LP. It was fast sinking without trace when music journalist Jeff Cloves contacted Bill, with a view to profiling him for the great ZigZag magazine. The resulting piece appeared in its May 1970 issue, and seems to be the only interview Bill gave at the time:

The appearance of the piece impressed Decca enough to send the album out to reviewers and radio stations, but it did little good. Nonetheless, they miraculously allowed him to make a follow-up, this time with avant-garde guitarist Ray Russell producing. Taped in October 1970, the astounding Time Of The Last Persecution appeared in February 1971, and sounds like the work of a different artist. In place of his debut’s catchy and quirky orchestrated pop are dense, enigmatic and despairing songs with improvised, sometimes cacophonous arrangements, and lyrics packed with Biblical imagery. It was promoted via an austere advert whose chart-friendly hook was to quote from Revelation:

Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a cryptic record, initial reviews were unenthusiastic. On February 20th the NME called Bill ‘another rather tuneless singer who writes his own songs’, adding that ‘Londoner Fay is 28, and has the right sound in his voice for today’s folk tunes. He plays piano and is backed by a six-piece at times, including guitarist Ray Russell, who helped produce his second LP, which is versatile and interesting.’ A week later Melody Maker stated that ‘Bill Fay follows a somewhat predictable path. He seems to find his inspiration, in part, in Biblical accounts, and sees pollution as a symptom / cause of doomsday. He has ideas that are worthy of attention. The difficulty is that, either through the limitations of the medium or Fay’s own intellect, the critic is left with an impossible decision. Is the album intended as a series of brief sketches, or as an end product in itself? If the latter, then it is unconvincing and uninspiring.’ Record Mirror agreed, writing that ‘Bill’s private form of folk-rock has the necessary ingredients, but an emptiness pervades – probably due to the lyric content and his not-so-tuneful voice. There’s a kind of coarseness here that attractive folk-rock must measure carefully to succeed. Slightly jazzy at times, probably due to Ray Russell’s influence on guitar.’ The album sold next to nothing (originals have cleared £1000 in recent years), Decca dropped him, and he faded from view for over three decades before his renaissance began.

I have a (very!) long letter from Bill in which he sets out his personal and musical history in eloquent and touching detail. I won’t reproduce it here, for obvious reasons, but next time he calls (whenever that may be…) I’ll ask his permission. In the meantime, here’s a brief Q&A he gave me a few years back:

How would you describe your music?

My music was a product of the age I was at – being young then meant things were pretty intense. My songs reflected the world’s troubles, not mine. I wanted to write songs that were personal and comforting in one sense, but that also reflected the heaviness of the outside world. And the world at that time was heavy. So the song ‘Time Of The Last Persecution’, for example, was inspired by the student deaths at Kent State University in Ohio. The first album is a gentle affair overall, and Time Of The Last Persecution was my Slow Train Coming, I suppose. It was a very happy marriage between my songs and Ray Russell’s musical style. Biblical ideas, prophecies and so on, had started to permeate, and gradually I came to believe. I wasn’t trying to convert people, though. The record’s Christian, but hopefully not in a narrow way. I know full well that it’s a heavy album, but I stand by it. I feel there’s a therapeutic release in its intensity. It may be a bit immature lyrically, but if terrible things are happening in the world, how can you not face them and try to respond to them?

Do you know how many copies the albums sold?

Around 2000 each, I think.

What did you do when you weren’t recording?

I wasn’t a working musician. The albums only took a day each to record, so other than that I worked in various jobs. I was in a factory at one point, which I referred to on one level in ‘I Hear You Calling’. I didn’t play live, and until Ray Russell’s band came along on the second album, I had no group to tour with anyway. We did some radio sessions, though, and one concert in a town hall in St. Albans where we played straight through the entire second album. Sadly I didn’t think to tape it.

What happened after Time Of The Last Persecution?

I didn’t get a new contract, that was all. Whether my manager, Terry Noon, decided I should leave Decca, or they decided they’d already lost enough money on me I don’t know. But my contract was up, and though I continued to record we couldn’t get another deal and consolidate what we’d achieved.

Its sleeve has led to a lot of assumptions about your state of mind at the time.

That photo was taken during the recording session. It was serious music, and I was concentrating. It wasn’t a set-up or a pose, but people always read meanings into things, and they assume that because I had a beard I was undergoing a drug meltdown or personal problems of some sort. I wasn’t.

How do you feel about the perception of you today?

I’m amazed by how uncannily accurate some of the reviews on the internet are about my music, but I’m not a Nick Drake figure, I’m afraid. Though I’m well aware of the other side of life, I’m lucky enough always to have had a cheerful disposition. The most touching and meaningful thing to me is that people genuinely valued my music when I thought it no longer existed.

Dr. Z: A Vertigo Profile

Because it's so expensive in its original incarnation, the sole LP by Dr. Z has acquired a disproportionately bad reputation. I don't think it's great, but it's not bad, and has a very nifty sleeve. Here's what Vertigo had to say about the band and their album in September 1971:

I have found two reviews of the album, both of which can be found in my Galactic Ramble book (alongside an original press ad and a new review). The first appeared in Melody Maker on December 4th 1971, and has an especially prescient closing sentence: 'We see a couple of new Vertigo bands a month, gracing the already confused record shelves and vanishing as unnoticed as they arrived. Who picks em? Well, here’s another, a three-piece that’s roughly two years old and might really be two days… There are some interesting ideas drifting about, but that doesn’t merit a reason to make an album, put it out and expect people to buy it. I cannot imagine this selling at all.’ The other one appeared two weeks later in Record Mirror, and was a little kinder: ‘Nice concept here, and the packaging is original and well done. The only fault lies in the performance, and even then there’s nothing really wrong – it’s just that when you set your sights as philosophically high as this, you need the music to be right on. This just misses, but an extra shade of performing awareness should give Dr. Z a fantastic second LP.’ Needless to say, that never happened.

Fairfield Parlour: A Vertigo Profile

Life has been busy lately, so here's a couple of swift posts – both press releases from Vertigo for sought-after LPs. First up is the June 1970 handout that accompanied review copies of Fairfield Parlour’s sole effort. As I’m sure you know, this was an attempt by UK psych faves Kaleidoscope to break with the past and win chart glory, but it didn’t work. It’s notable that the profile makes no reference whatsoever to their former incarnation (and gets drummer Dan Bridgman's name wrong throughout).

I’ve only encountered two reviews of From Home To Home, by the way. On June 27th Melody Maker, evidently unaware of their history, called them ‘yet another band who emerge from nowhere with an album full of memorable songs, beautifully conceived and executed’, adding that it’s ‘a gentle, lyrical, happy-sad album, and very English, with fine harmonies floating above solid and unflashy playing.’ Disc & Music Echo was a tad less enthusiastic on August 8th, describing it as ‘lyrical music, gently and thoughtfully presented, with wild if somewhat pretentious lyrics. The lads are multi-instrumentalists and could be accused of trying to out-Moody the Moodies. However, a very pleasant album.’

Great lost pop papers #1: Top Pops

      

It’s hard to believe nowadays, but in the heyday of the British music press several newspapers appeared weekly. Most music fans have heard of Melody Maker, Record Mirror and the NME, and some have heard of Disc and Sounds – but Top Pops is the one that got away. Even the British Library doesn’t hold copies in its press archive. Published by Woodrow (later Lord) Wyatt as part of his short-lived attempt to become a print mogul, it first appeared in May 1967, and ran fortnightly until November 1967, when it became weekly. Colin Bostock-Smith was appointed editor in the summer of 1967, and used the paper to build a bridge between light pop coverage and the more serious approach that was emerging as albums overtook singles in popularity . Last week I asked him a few questions about his time at Top Pops, and he kindly answered them as follows:

Were you always a pop enthusiast?

Yes! Some would say an over-enthusiast… I was born in 1942, so I was exactly the right age for rock and roll when it all happened. I went to boarding school, so hearing music on Radio Luxembourg was a big thing. I was especially fond of Little Richard – still am.

How did you get into pop writing?

After leaving school I became a journalist on various local papers, and was soon running the pop pages, as well as managing various semi-professional groups. Eventually I became a features sub on the London Evening Standard, and was working there when I heard that Top Pops was looking for a new editor. This would have been in the summer of 1967, a few weeks after it started.

 

What did the job involve?

The owner, Woodrow Wyatt (of all people), had started Top Pops in the hope of cashing in on the pop scene, but by 1967 the era of screaming girls had largely ended, and music was being taken much more seriously. He therefore wanted the paper to become less girly and more journalistic, in the hope that it would attract advertising from record companies (which was how such publications made money, rather than from sales). Needless to say, he had no interest in pop music himself. I decided what went in, and wrote quite a lot of it with my colleague Gordon Coxhill, who was a lovely chap. Editorial was basically a two-man effort, and my main memories of Top Pops are of us frantically getting each new edition together. I lost touch with Gordon years ago, and have tried to find him on Google, but nothing much comes up. It would be terrific to be back in touch with him.

How did you decide on what to write about?

To fill the paper each week we had to cover as much as we possibly could. There was a lot of ducking and diving – part of the appeal of the pop scene for me was how dodgy it was; you never quite knew where you were with anybody. A lot of the content was dependent on who an artist’s publicist was, and if I had a good relationship with him or her. If you were friendly with the publicist, you would get invited to a gig or a launch party, and then write about the artist. Derek Taylor would slip me Beatles stories. I remember we attacked John Peel one week in April 1968. It was only mischief, but we got a lot of flak for it. But my overall memory is of sitting in the Top Pops office, drawing up layouts and desperately trying to get the thing out on time!

How did Top Pops differ from the other pop weeklies?

Woodrow Wyatt owned his own printing press, in Banbury, so we had access to good quality technology, which meant we could add colour pages, which set us apart a bit. In fact, the only copy I still have is from December 1967, and has various colour stills from Magical Mystery Tour in the centre pages, which still look great. But in general I was so absorbed with just getting the thing out in time that I didn’t pause to analyse our place in the market. We were hopefully somewhere in between girls who wanted pin-ups and something more substantial for serious music fans. Another difference between us and the competition was that we were based in Banbury to start with, but I soon persuaded Wyatt to move us to Fleet Street, where things were much livelier – and for a short time it was terrific fun.

What was its circulation?

I have no idea. At one point I remember claiming on the masthead that it was 78,000, but that sounds very unlikely! There was also a German edition for a while – Wyatt brought some poor linguist in to translate each edition, before it was sent over there for printing. God knows how many that sold.

German edition, August 19th 1968

How did record reviewing work?

You’d tear open the latest package of LPs from a record company, stick an album on and start writing! We couldn’t be too high-minded about it, as we needed their advertising. It was usually done in an hour and-a-half on a Sunday afternoon, as I recall. Tony Macaulay, who was a terrifically successful songwriter at the time, reviewed the singles for us each week. I have no idea what was in it for him, but he obviously liked doing it. Unfortunately I got rid of all of my records at a car boot fair in about 1980.

Do you recall any particular interviews or encounters with musicians?

I saw Cream playing in a dive in South London shortly after they formed in the autumn of 1966, and remember thinking that they were a sensation waiting to happen. I remember a very tricky interview with Long John Baldry, who treated everything I said sarcastically. I don’t blame him – he was obviously bored of being a pop star, and had probably already been asked the same questions hundreds of times. Sadly Jimi Hendrix didn’t turn up to our interview (though Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell did), so I never met him. I remember Janis Joplin living up to her reputation, with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other. And I remember the launch of Mary Hopkin’s Postcard album in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower in February 1969 – one notoriously unstable member of the music press managed to put the controls onto high speed! I didn’t go into recording studios much, but I do remember visiting Roy Wood when he was recording the single Brontosaurus. I asked him what 'Brontosaurus' meant, and he said it was far too rude to tell me. Since then I’ve worked it out for myself, but it's far too rude to tell you. He’s a splendid man, is Mr. Wood.



Rare info about CBS signings The Fox, 4/68

How did your association with Top Pops come to an end?

It was actually quite funny. Wyatt was the sort of person who behaved like an eccentric aristocrat, though he wasn’t one, and because he was self-important, people began to treat him as if he was important. We’d been striving to move away from the old-fashioned style of pop writing, but sometime in the summer of 1968 he ordered me to give Russ Conway a weekly column. I ignored him, and as he wasn’t used to being ignored, he fired me in September for ‘not conforming to the Chairman’s suggestions’! But I had my revenge by giving the story to Private Eye.

The flimsy Top Pops annual, autumn 1969

Nifty Led Zep piece from the above

What came next for you?

I became editor of Rave magazine, which was fun. While working there I asked John and Yoko to design a peace poster as the prize for some competition or other. Instead of just knocking something off, they actually made a real effort to produce something impressive. If it still exists, someone somewhere is sitting on a fortune! I went along to meet them with all the anti-Yoko prejudices that you’d expect, but she was so charming that I was completely won over. Anyway, after Rave I worked on some women’s magazines, then moved into TV writing, thank goodness. There was a time when I could have recited the whole top 20 and the names of all the musicians in each band, but by the end of the 1960s my interests were changing – and there’s nothing sadder than an elderly pop journalist.

After leaving magazines behind, Colin became one of Britain’s leading TV comedy writers. An interview about his subsequent career can be found here:

www.denofgeek.com/television/54151/the_den_of_geek_interview_colin_bostocksmith.html



Colin Bostock-Smith



As for Top Pops, Colin was replaced as editor by Jeff Tarry, then John Halsall. In September 1969 it changed its name to Top Pops & Music Now, and in March 1970 it became plain Music Now, before going out of business in May 1971. Top Pops and Music Now are treasure troves of arcane information about the British pop scene, but both are pretty scarce these days. If you have any copies, please get in touch!