Bill Fay

Bill Fay
Pen and ink portrait of Fay.
Background information
Birth name	William Fay
Origin	London
Years active	1967–1971, 2010–present
Labels	Deram, Durtro, Dead Oceans, Wooden Hill, Coptic Cat

William "Bill" Fay is an English singer, pianist and songwriter whose early releases were made on the Deram label in 1967. Following the release of his second album in 1971, Fay was dropped by the label. His work enjoyed a growing cult status in the 1990s, and his older works were re-issued in 1998 and 2004/2005. Fay's 2012 album, Life Is People, was his first album of all-new material since 1971. His next album, Who Is The Sender was released on 27 April 2015.

Fay was born in north London, where he still lives.

His first single, "Some Good Advice" / "Screams in the Ears", was issued on the Deram label in 1967, and was followed by two albums, Bill Fay in 1970 and Time of the Last Persecution in 1971. The recordings did not sell well, and Fay was dropped from Deram soon after the release of his second album. They were re-issued in 1998, and then again in 2005.

Despite returning to the recording studio in the late 1970s, the follow-up to Time of the Last Persecution was not released until January 2005, following the reissues of his earlier works.

Bill Fay's work enjoyed a growing cult status in the 1990s. His first two albums were re-issued in 1998, an event which Bill Fay described in 2012 as follows:

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. 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, David [...] 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.

In 2004, the British label Wooden Hill released a collection of demos recorded between 1966 and 1970 entitled From the Bottom of an Old Grandfather Clock. In 2005 his late 1970s recordings were released January 2005. Entitled Tomorrow, Tomorrow & Tomorrow, it was credited to the Bill Fay Group and was released on the Durtro Jnana label.