"That's me, darling. Unusual places, unusual love affairs. I am a most strange and extraordinary person."

 

Rebecca Lucy Taylor spent six months, not very long ago, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre just off Trafalgar Square; the lead role in a musical about a time that once again might not be very far away from now. She stands and watches blunt dogmatic medieval bullshit slowly immerse humanity to the point of suffocation but Self Esteem isn't even an anagram of Sally Bowles. She's going to punish your bodies until you believe in her soul, or at least give her a chance to let us know what's in it.

 

The Mercury Music Prize isn't yet due for a few months but I would like to see the third Self Esteem album bite at it. A Complicated Woman is an extraordinary and righfully angry song cycle (in the way that Sgt Pepper and What's Going On weren't really song cycles). It begins like Sinéad O'Connor - oh, so much of Sinéad's spirit burns through this recital - hijacking an Enya session then plays as though the last quarter-century of pop has been rewired through Taylor's mind, flashing before her eyes and all craving improvement. Cleverly there are elements of both the Polyphonic Spree (the choirs awarding Heaven back to its rightful owners) and St Vincent, of Little Mix, Atomic Kitten and what Girls Aloud could have been, in fact what all those girls could have been if men hadn't told them what not to be in the first place.

 

Of course there are also elements of brat ("Mother," "The Curse") and more than a nod to Jade Thirlwall; both "Focus Is Power" and "The Deep Blue Okay" point to a slightly older and wiser pop exploitée. Over and over we hear what might be damnations of lovers ("Logic, Bitch!," complete with a hilarious yet frightening coda from Sue Tompkins, the lead singer of that other lost early noughties compass to the pop yet to happen, Life Without Buildings) or drink ("The Demon") but on closer examination tend more to be about Ms Taylor herself, or the image that The Poisoned Industry would prefer her to assume.

 

A Complicated Woman says enough is fucking enough. In the showstopping Nadine Shah duet "Lies" - Taylor, Thirlwall, Shah, it's far from grim up North - both singers nail the lie of pop patriarchy with formidable aplomb. "One step forward, ten steps back - and I'm to be grateful for that?" Enough of the inching compromises, of crying on ceaseless trains, of singing a third above or playing drums because that's allegedly cool. The Moonchild Sanelly duet "In Plain Sight" climaxes with them screaming "WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT FROM ME?" (see also the "HEY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?" of St Vincent's "Broken Man"). No more nice dinner manners for grannies in Arbroath or Which-Was-Nice dinner party pudding-bowl jerks who'd secretly and smilingly shove you back down to the laundry basement.

 

She says it in "Mother" - "I recommend listening." She reiterates it later in the same song: "I don't need solutions, I just want to be heard." By the time of "Lies" the reserve of patience has run out: "I'll push through the fatigue...and make you fucking hear me."

 

Self Esteem doesn't care what you think, but cares very deeply about your acknowledging her right to think. And there is also redemption. "Turn into something new," Tompkins cheerly advises Taylor at the end of "Logic, Bitch!" "If Not Now, It's Soon" is a very moving reassurance that happiness and fulfilment will find us all in the end - far more affecting than the facile Play-Doh fortune cookie wellness homilies that recent pop has made only too familiar. Even at the record's beginning, Taylor admits hope - "Focus Is Power" was composed during the pandemic, the torn era that compelled us to rethink our entire reasons for being, and if you're not moved by "I deserve to be here/And every time I fall/I crawl back like an animal/My focus is powerful" (see inter alia "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba and "Happiness Is Just Around The Bend" by Brian Auger) then not even a gigantic bulldozer is likely to move you.

 

What does Self Esteem want you to hear? She knows what she doesn't want, what she really, really doesn't want - the priapic banger "69" - and as she nears the horizon of transcendence in the record's closing two songs, she knows that what she's reaching isn't perfect (tell me, Ms Thunberg, what is) but, as with Number 6 in the Lotus at the end of "Fall Out," closing the loop, is sorely aware that she's going to have to fight this battle over and over, chapter by chapter of her life, but really is fine with that. Her closing thought? "I guess I've got something."

 

A Complicated Woman is loudly and artily theatrical and of course I am fine with that, as should you be. Why murmur when you can shout? Why permit music critics to confine female artists to the kennels of despondency and damage (what good is sitting alone in your room)? If you're not going to say everything within the span of your allotted life then WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IT? In a lot of ways the record answers a lot of the questions posed by the various decrepit characters chronicled in The New Sound; Greep's protagonists, all specimens of impaled toxic masculinity, all perish at the font of perverse and unfulfillable dreams of what they imagine women are like. Taylor yells back, well this is the shit we have to deal with every second of our fucking imperfect lives! In "Mother" she seems to address the speaker of "Holy, Holy" directly - "I am not your therapist/You don't pay me enough for this" ("And I want you to look at me as if you're lost - HOW MUCH WILL THAT COST??").

 

Both records are hugely catchy and pretentious - and these are among the highest of compliments I can offer. The more pretentiousness, the better, since that is, by definition, what art is about. Both are exceptionally worthy of winning the Mercury, though of course that will not happen since acceptance depends on how playable they are in the reductive and pandering petrified doxa of daytime BBC 6 Music. But A Complicated Woman is spectacularly and proudly brilliant. It's the album Geri Halliwell should have been allowed, or should have allowed herself, to make.

 

"Oh God, how depressing! You're meant to think I'm an international woman of mystery. I'm working on it like mad."

(Sally Bowles to Brian Roberts, Cabaret)

 

"Men are fucking terrified that whatever they say, I’ll have a problem with — but that’s because they’re not listening. I’m not intimidating at all. It’s just that I’m not submissive.”

(Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Evening Standard interview, 9 November 2023)

IT WAS HIS OWN FUCKING STUPIT FAULT ANYWAY MAN KNOW WHAT I MEAN YE BLAB, YE: THE NEW SOUND BY GEORDIE GREEP

 

There are options for writing about this record and almost all of them involve making multiple references to other artists but the thing is I want you to keep reading and then listen to the bloody thing and the thing yes don't I bloody know it the thing is there are two main reasons for making multiple references to other artists when you're writing about a record, the first and by far more prominent one being to show off how many records you've got and how much music you've heard of and look at the size of my stylus hee-haw you bogus donkey, and the second and by far less utilised one being to help the reader get a grip on the music you're expecting them to listen to by giving reasonably intelligent suggestions of other comparison points rather than make them view this record which you think is so bloody great as some singular alien spaceship that's just daintily landed from the planet Artura, and these suggestions are based on your own fairly extensive if you may say so yourself shut the fuck up and tell us about the fucking record ok.

 

This record called The New Sound, as a lot of jazz and easy listening LPs of the 1950s and '60s tended to get called, almost as an afterthought although it was really a covert selling point for up-to-date hi-fi equipment, by this young man called Geordie Greep who used to be in a group called black midi but you can find out about them in four million other places, look you don't have to have heard any of that group's records to get this one, just get it is what I advise almost six months after the bloody thing came out, and I put it in the unnumbered but alphabetised 21-100 section of my 2024 albums list because let's be honest, what's the bloody point otherwise, I got stuck on "Holy, Holy" and hadn't listened to the rest of the album properly but better late than never as Neddy Merrill insincerely elides in The Swimmer and WELL

 

This record, called The New Sound, is the most extraordinary long-playing record I think I've heard since The Drift by Scott Walker. It arrives within its own fully-formed and furnished universe and hopes you'll be able to engage with it without laborious explanations, so why am I writing this for fuck's sake, but few albums of recent ages have worked so seamlessly as an album. Albums these days are usually much too long but even clocking in at 62 minutes plus you feel that every second is justified, and anyway it feels much more like forty minutes but don't try taping it onto one side of a TDK C-90 ask your parents.

 

This young man called Geordie Greep is twenty-five years old, comes from Walthamstow, speaks and sings with an accent somewhere between Bow, Soweto and Dublin, has been doing music for all bar six or seven years of his life since he was given one of those Guitar Hero PlayStation game things, ask your parents, and played "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand you see that song gave birth to Geordie Greep the musician I told you it was important and you can immediately tell that in "Holy, Holy" since its staccato intro basically is "Take Me Out" at about 130% speed.

 

This record called The New Sound, though, I'd say like thousands have already done that it's an in-depth examination of masculinity on the point of curdling into toxicity, what it does or doesn't mean to be a man and Mr Greep makes his feelings rapidly known in the introductory "Blues" where, over a quietly galloping guitar-guided rhythm (Back Door x Tony Williams Lifetime ÷ the main recurring riff in The Tain by Horslips + Ornette Coleman's Prime Time with Mr Greep's voice on alto; use the brains and Google provided and find out for yourself; my knowledge is only a guiding torch, not a remonstrating truncheon), he meticulously skewers the man who thinks his dick will enable all magic - Brel would have got it and I'm sure Momus already has (the concept, I mean, not the dick) - into his sad frittered elements, wearying away at his pallid and purposeless life in some pathetic bedsit way down the wrong end of the Piccadilly Line plus elongated bus ride (it's Momus' gatecrasher!) and less than secretly looking forward to his eventual extinction when he will finally be able to do what he likes because humans have disappointed this disappointing prick and it's do you know what I mean first AND second favourite phrases KNOWWHATIMEANKNOWWHATIMEANKNOWWHATIMEAN over and over the knitting needle/Knitting Factory rhythms and I'm reminded of James Kelman's doss self-deluders but this is 2020s London where only howling pricks prosper I read in the Life & Arts section the other day.

 

Mostly the music on this record called The New Sound is Latin in nature which you can ascribe to the record having been recorded in several different studios in São Paulo and London, including RAK Studios where some of that other extended meditation on man and his fundamental misunderstandings, The Lexicon Of Love, was made, and it's Tropicalia as everybody misunderstands it, a far more complex and ambiguous form of music than ooh sunny sixties Our Kind Of Music hello there. Such songs as "Terra" and "Through A War" combine the guess-where-the-next-beat's-going-to-land tactics of Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso with the what-fucking-UFO-just-spotlit-my-siesta "otherness" (sorry!) of Arto Lindsay (The Subtle Body, Prize etc.) and the innate melodic facility of Ed Motta - and if you don't know the latter gentleman, drop what you're pretending to do just now and get a copy of his 2013 album AOR because it's genius.

 

Anyway it's as good as it is angry, this record that's called The New Sound. I wouldn't call it an extended study of the one character - although I think the protagonist of "Holy, Holy" and all the songs from "As If Waltz" onwards is the same person - but more an extended examination of the minutely differing aspects of hormonally acquisitive men. "Terra" and "Through The War" concern themselves with men of history and self-appointed destiny who march through the world and trample it down to dust, all because some woman in the past impugned his cocksmanship and/or passed a disease on to him. "Through The War" is splenetically hysterical with its escalatingly absurd comparison points fully worthy of a Vivian Stanshall or a Chris Morris. Until, that is, you remember that Mr Greep is singing about the kind of men currently engaging in trampling the world, and its contents, human and otherwise, into corrugated carbon.

 

These songs are about men who see sex as a primary function that usurps any potential foundation of meaningful life. In "Walk Up" it's the bored CEO with "fish fingers" who has it off with her in the office over the photocopier every lunchtime. In the brilliantly constructed "As If Waltz," abject crooning of a perfect world from which the man has exiled himself, the balladry becomes intentionally distorted as the protagonist, busy with a prostitute, again in the lunch hour, imagines the actual life which he can never hope to share with her ("To hear you sing in the shower," "To meet your parents," "To take you to see my favourite films") because of his penile fuckwittery (his ideations also include "To hide in your closet and see you at work" and "To watch you fuck other men") and because his need to become instantly turned on supersedes any desire to build and work on a genuinely fulfilling and lasting relationship.

 

Vocally this resembles Neil Hannon trying very hard not to werewolf into Cathal Coughlan - Fatima Mansions and Red-era King Crimson certainly come to mind in "Motorbike" where the venge-fuelled vocals are provided by the album's producer Seth "Shank" Evans - black midi's drummer Morgan Simpson also makes an appearance on several tracks) and the music excitingly explodes into a furious avant-fusion workout. "Bongo Season" is an all-too-brief fragment of fluid morbidity - Arthur Russell having taken some very inadvisable drugs; it fades with some free-form horn section scrummage but in concert has been known to last for up to twenty minutes. As with Miles Davis' eighties albums (Tutu, Amandla), it's easy to imagine The New Sound as a collection of draft guides, indicating where these songs could go live (which would be where the real business starts). The title track itself resembles one of those experimental pieces Roy Wood would occasionally summon up (e.g. "The Thing Is This [This Is The Thing]") and otherwise functions as a fairly straight-down-the-askew-line instrumental fusion piece that fans of John Abercrombie's Gateway should appreciate - both guitarists (Daniel Rogerson as well as Mr Greep himself) interweaving most alluringly; there's even room for a double bass solo (performed by John Jones).

 

 

 

I have left "Holy, Holy" and "The Magician" until last because I feel they are the most significant songs on this record called The New Sound. How great and determinedly misunderstood a pop song is "Holy, Holy"? It lasts just over six minutes and feels about half that length. In its duality it manages to get everything in - a fabulously-sketched character study of a thoroughly scuzzy, but importantly not quite irredeemable, individual, narrated with just the right mix of bravado and petrification AND NOT NECESSARILY IN THE RIGHT ORDER.

 

The song's first half, the one that starts with the "Take Me Out" intro before shuddering into a shockingly supple Santana Latin-rock-fusion groove, sees Mr Greep and his peerless (Brazilian) rhythm section deliberately veering off the straight 4/4 road, as though staggering around slightly drunk while he's chatting this hapless woman up. He tells her who he is - doesn't she believe him? Even the jihadis read my tweets (see Mr A Tate) and isn't she up for a dance or maybe something more?

 

This part of the song glides confidently through a tropical forest of Broadway clichés before the aggravated guitars build up again, opposite a choir of apposite holiness. The bassline is reminiscent of something from the eighties - most have already decided it's "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind and Fire, which is a perfectly reasonable guess, but I reckon it's "I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz speeded up and reharmonised a little.

 

In all the while, Mr Greep's protagonist is becoming steadily drunker and drunker and he knows that he shouldn't say the "p" word (the one only women should use, in the same way that only Blacks have the right to use the "n" word) knows it in his bones - but now he can't help himself, with all the expectation that he's worked up within himself...and when he says that word he bites down upon it and crunches at it as though attempting to extinguish it. There's a pause as though to ponder whether he's gone one step too far. Then a howl as if he's just had his face slapped or worse.

 

One final chorus of boom-boom backing vocals and juicy lead guitar later, we are escorted into the song's disorientating second half, its disorientation made complete by the fact that it's being sung out of sequence. Here we have Mr Greep's protagonist outlining the conditions to somebody whom he's clearly going to be paying for the privilege of her limited company - he outlines them in minute detail, as though it were a film script she had to follow - and we realise this is actually happening the night before what happens in the first verse; she's been paid to act out a role and that is, accordingly, what she does.

 

Mr Greep's character proceeds to paint an increasingly humiliating picture of himself as somebody who just wants to be seen as cool. His intererst in this woman does not even extend to sex ("Don't worry, we won't do anything/We'll just loiter for fifteen minutes or so"). He desires only a picture of status, not the thing itself. His demands become embarrassing and pathetic ("I want you to make me look taller - can you kneel down the whole time? HOW MUCH WILL THAT COST?" - as if money will buy him a life). He drunkenly mumbles about meeting again at the same time next week, and the week after that, and the month and dot dot dot and the miasma of fairground music with its circle of ascending changes disappears into the ether.

 

Part of the reason why I mentioned James Kelman at the top of this piece, and also why the subject matters of "Terra" and "Through The War" properly belong in Alasdair Gray's pair of Axeltree short stories, is something nobody else seems to have noticed about Geordie Greep (apart from the harmonic influence of Chaz Jankel, which nobody has mentioned either) is a very pronounced Scottish and perhaps specifically Glaswegian aura, in that...

 

...he sounds exactly like Alex Harvey! Think about it; the theatricality, the character studies, the facility on guitar, the complete refusal to compromise or meet anybody or anything else halfway - some might say Mr Greep's a new Bowie in the making, but that has usually proved a curse in the past, so let's say he's the true inheritor of the Alex Harvey mantle:

 

 

And one has to grasp the fact that here is an extremely major new talent. Note also how Mr Greep has developed "Holy, Holy" in a live setting. Here is an extended studio take with a five-piece band; although it slightly suffers from not having a second guitarist to take care of routine bits of business, Mr Greep as a guitarist does a grand job, somewhere between Brian May and Ray Russell with touches of Sonny Sharrock in places:

 

 

 ...and if that weren't enough, here he and his full band are, extending the song out on the stage which was the only one to respond to his initial request for gigs - the Brixton Windmill:

 

 

Finally, here is none other than Justin Hawkins, frontman of leading British rock band The Darkness and a pretty astute music commentator in his spare time, getting to some admirable grips with The Greepness:

 

 

The twelve-minute effective album closer, or climax anyway, "The Magician," is about three train stops beyond phenomenal. In it Mr Greep's protagonist, who as I suggested above is the propositioner of "Holy, Holy" - and also materialises in "As If Waltz" ("To pretend I've more to say to you than, 'How much?'") - takes a stark look at his life and the million ways in which he has wronged it and despises what he sees, so despicable does he find it that he endeavours to blot out all memories, all reminders, again in the context of a circuitous middle-eight which with lambent patience reveals itself as the record's coda, realising that everything he has known and been misled (mostly by himself) to believe has been nought save a detailed yet finally spurious dream which is all leaking away from what remains of his memory. As the dream fades, so does the music's noise rise; one imagines a battalion of screaming improvisers but in fact it is the band augmented only by a string quartet (arranged in a mastery fashion by Felix Stephens) who build the song up and steadily smash its smug façades - not the first time this has happened on the album; see also the repeated smashing (in both senses) rhythms of "Motorbike"'s emotional climax - until the smoke from the fire has cleared, the incel storyteller's lies have evaporated, and then there reside mere sand and vacancy. As though "pop music" had been cleansed with the least merciful of scouring agents.

 

As though the lies that men and pop teach us have been detected, detonated and distilled from common memory.

 

Not unprecedented. Did I mention The Drift?

"What's up, Doc?" DONALD. He knew. Didn't he?

 

Yet one song remains, the oldest song on the record and the one not composed specifically for the record's purpose. "If You Are But A Dream" was composed, after an old Anton Rubinstein melody, in 1942; Sinatra recorded it with Axel Stordahl in 1944 and again with Nelson Riddle in 1957 and it is the latter version, coming midway between the emotional troughs of Where Are You? and Sings For Only The Lonely, where the singer sounds irretrievably bereft. In Mr Greep's hands, the song sounds sung by an emptied man who is fully aware of the illusion he has furtively conjured up but ultimately afraid to let it go. He will cling to this scorpion of superficial promise even if it ends up stinging him fatally because, hey, that's the way he was made, he can't help his nature.

 

Mr Greep sings this song, against a traditional small dance band arrangement, in the manner of a penitent orphan who knows he has asked for more at least once too often. He yearns for escape but cannot even penetrate the ceiling, let alone the heavens. Remember what the first song says about "That spirit that enters your room/Those arms that envelop poor you!/That carry you away/In those arms you escape - you dissolve through clouds."

 

And then the almost imperceptible other voice which materialises right at the end of the record, whispering "but a dream." Much like the "it's okay" that turns up in the last second of "A Lover Loves," the final song of The Drift.

 

Or what did George say about it being good to be free?

 

I don't know what constitutes genius - the word isn't in my working vocabulary and I've no notion of how its colours mix. But God help me, I listen to this record called The New Sound recorded by this gentleman called Geordie Greep and I see a glimpse of greatness.*

 

*this paragraph is a Difplag of an excerpt from Ian S Munro's radio monologue "The Artist In Search Of A City," performed by John Grieve as part of the BBC Radio Scotland series Clydesiders, broadcast in 1975. It concerned another artist - also named Donald - who ended up an inpatient in the mental hospital at Lenzie.**

 

**doesn't render the statement untrue, however.***

 

***what is truth, as Johnny Cash once asked; the song "Walk Up" culminates in a pile-up of people shrieking for the music to be turned down, only to be succeeded by a hilarious bluegrass pastiche ("I got two words: fuck you!"). This might be the record's most revelatory moment.

 

Envoi (Conventional Mix)

 

The New Sound concerns the tragic, self-inflicted fate of the epitome of a certain type of man who values visibility over depth, transitory thrills to lasting contentment. The album begins with the Greek chorus describing this man to us and outlining his squalid life and squalider fate in paingiving detail before switching the spotlight to the man himself, who is in a marriage that he considers loveless and endeavours to pass his expiring time by engaging spuriously with prostitutes. The irony of the lush music accompanying words describing the darkest and filthiest corners of the human mind cannot be overstated. The man imagines himself in spent history or in aspiring future, crushing the world to satisfy his insatiable and most likely non-existent libido.

 

Eventually his wife finds out about all this and casts him out. He has nowhere to turn except to several variations of a silver dream machine. He is incapable of compromising the two extreme sides of himself, which meet in the middle anyway, thus is left with abandoned and by definition non-existent dreams which evaporate in rough proportion to his existence. He can never let go. It's his nature.

 

Envoi (Punctum When Two Worlds Are Pressed Together And Explode Remix)

 

So the man stays where he is, and steadily diminishes, but that’s not the whole reason why things decline; Mr Greep has no problems with the idea of love, but when the reality happens, the picture becomes muddy and confused.

 

And so the record ends, Mr Greep remembering, remembering, that he is trapped in a fantasy of love, as he has been throughout the whole of The New Sound, too trapped to form any meaningful relationship. The whole scenario, when not told in melancholic rages of flashbacks, seems to amount to little more than one pick-up at a time, one meaningful exchange…but nothing further, nothing in the form of a commitment to what you and I would recognise as life.

 

We have nearly been here before.

 

EVERYBODY’S PROMISED TOMORROW: MAYHEM BY LADY GAGA

Incorporating A Brief Introduction To This Fourth New Blog Of Mine In Two Months

 

 

I don’t recommend falling downstairs and fracturing your left humerus as a path to enlightenment. But in the nearly three months that I spent recovering from surgery, painfully lazing around at home with little to do, I discovered that, once again, I needed to write, and to write differently. So I started three new blogs to add to the three that I was already running, and still it didn’t seem sufficient.

 

I got back to writing pretty quickly; consider the Then Play Long piece which I painstakingly and sometimes agonisingly typed with one finger of my right hand, with my left arm still in a sling. But there remained a space, a gap, something lacking.

 

Hence, following some characteristically wise words from my friend Mark Sinker, I have decided to start yet another blog. The purpose of this one is to accommodate my instant, present-tense thoughts on new music while it is still new. I have recently posted several things on The Church Of Me which really are not in keeping with a blog whose aim had always been to facilitate and ensure an endgame, but I couldn’t think where else to place them. For that reason I have transposed those pieces to here. This is where you will now need to go if you want to read about “Genesis.” or “Angel Of My Dreams” or my favourite albums of 2024 or my posthumous thoughts on Bill Fay. This is not nor could ever be Maja or Koons or Blue In The Air. Those blogs were for and of their times. I am at the time of writing sixty-one and my time, agree all of my doctors, is limited. I haven’t got any time left to waste.

 

As is my patience with the tired and tiring antics of music critics. Everywhere I look it’s still the same studium of nothingness – forgive the tautology. Marking and grading songs and records like they were school ink exercises (“must do better”). Choking the flow of prose with endless recycled “But The Kids Don’t Know, Say The 40-Something Marketing And Accounts Managers” facts like brains and the internet didn’t exist. Goldfish memory-level kneejerk reactions. Wearisome analyses of lyrics – to which it’s long since been proved nobody listens – by otherwise unemployable English Literature graduates because musical analysis requires technical knowledge and doesn’t usually make for an enticing read. It’s like swimming through treacle.

 

Can anybody think, without prompting, of a major music writer who’s come up since, say, 2010? Somebody whose name you see appended to a review and you think, ooh I must have a look at this? I can think of two names tops, and even that’s stretching things. If they aren’t drones, then they’re stuffed-shirt Sunday school teachers, nascent empire-builders with preset agendas who get their moderate kicks scolding you for daring to like pop music. As for the examples of sadly departed spirits? Do me a favour. Reading Neil Kulkarni’s writing felt for most of the time like being shouted at and I’m afraid he reminds me of my father, forever raging against more or less everything and dropping dead of a heart attack in his early fifties as a direct result.

 

Wherever I look, that Picasso quote springs up like a newly-opened daffodil - “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” That’s the way music writing needs to go if it’s going to be saved from the hell of A.I.-generated glorified advertising puffs. Forget the received history and opinions. Your gut knows better. This blog is one attempt to get that envelope opened and pushed.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: This blog is not going to be regularly updated. I’m not getting paid for writing it and am not your butler. It will concentrate on looking at new albums that we – Lena and I – care about sufficiently to purchase in physical format, as opposed to the 25-30 new albums that we routinely add onto streaming per week (and which all get listened to). I only have so much time left and there’s only so much space in our house for CDs (ask your parents).

 

MAYHEM

 

 

 

The great thing about getting past sixty – in addition to the wonder and astonishment that one has actually managed to reach and surpass that age – is that you realise you really don’t give a toss, except for the people and things that matter. Fashion? Pah. It isn’t 1990, when I wasn’t yet thirty and used to purchase last-season primary-coloured suits for £40 a throw from a stock surplus shop on Kensington Church Street called Amazon, any more. We seek our refuge in memory and its renewal. Nor is it any longer 1987, when I would doggedly look at Melody Maker and Sounds (and occasionally the NME, but not so much as before) and treat them like tick sheets – all those wonderful-sounding bands and artists to see or records to chase up. When London was London and you could get on a number nine bus from work and alight from it fifteen minutes later in perfect symmetry with the side of Tower Records Piccadilly blub blub old man medication who’s the Prime Minister.

 

One thing that hasn’t changed is that, when I hear great new music, I sense its greatness pretty immediately, even in this purposely-devalued world. I plan to write about some of it here. I stumble across somebody like Geordie Greep, who was barely born into the very end of the twentieth century, and what I see is a new Bowie. Perhaps I see the twenty-five-year-old me I could have been if the world had been fairer to me and I had been braver.

 

And there is Lady Gaga, whom I have always regarded as a kind of marker in the life that Lena and I have been building up here in Britain. When Lena arrived in London on Thursday 18 December 2008 she brought with her, among many, many CDs, The Fame which at that point was only available in North America. We were probably among the first people in Britain to listen to Gaga.

 

Since then, she has never really let us down. To pick just one instance, we associate “Bad Romance” with a confused Reggie Yates on Radio 1’s Sunday Top 40 show who couldn’t make up his mind whether he liked the song or not, and also with the last time we were at a Club Poptimism night, upstairs in a pub in Lambeth North which no longer exists, me bellowing along with the song and reaching all the high notes. We had absolutely no problems with the Tony Bennett or Bradley Cooper stuff; quite the reverse. She has been less the new Madonna, more an unspoiled Streisand.

 

And music critics have never but NEVER known what to do about her, how to go about her work. The looped pattern always repeats itself – Born This Way isn’t as banger-consistent as The Fame, Artpop lacks the strength of Born This Way, Joanne is a refreshing change from Artpop’s dead end, Chromatica is a stunning return to honest form following the kwazy kountry adventurezzz of Joanne, MAYHEM (she likes it capitalised) is an improvement on the help-mummy-my-EARS Chromatica. And so forth. They don’t do that with Sharon Van Etten or even St Vincent – not so often, anyway - and you and I know exactly why that is.

 

By my imperfect count, we’ll be writing about Gaga seven times (so far) on Then Play Long (provided I live long enough to do the writing) so we can go all in-depth about the records there. MAYHEM, though. This is a splendid pop record and I need to make some mention of it now.

 

In her liner note, Gaga makes no secret that with Michael Polonsky she has finally found true happiness and three cheers for that achievement wherever you see it. This joy is plainly, or more accurately extravagantly, palpable throughout the record. “Disease”! What a stentorian Roman demolition derby of a pop song; it really is like the Jolly Green Giant resuscitated and stamping out all mediocrity and compromise. It feels like the soundtrack to the fall of all Romes but what is it actually about? It’s about somebody coming to save the singer’s life, and what do you know, it could well be the singer herself!

 

There’s a lot of the old duende about MAYHEM. The chorus of “Abracadabra” seems to be making a pitch for bratdom but fuck, Charli was seventeen when Gaga broke through here and knows who actually invented that template. It’s a nice nod back to those who would follow in her fainting footsteps. Elsewhere “Garden Of Eden” and the rock-SQUALL of “Perfect Celebrity” even rouse hard-at-standing-up me out of my physiotherapy-designed ergonomic armchair – four songs in and we’ve already had two uncanny uses of the Picardy third. Yes, it’s yet more isn’t-being-a-megastar-hell soliloquising, but Gaga has a lot more right to wander down that worn trail than many others.

 

Look at “Vanish Into You” which is what “Fade Into You” would have sounded like if Shirley Bassey had had a go at covering it (“Highhhhh on a hiiiiiiiiiill…you call” over a rustling low drone – completely Dame Shirley, that bit). “Killah” is let’s face it “Sign "☮︎" The Times” with a bit of Depeche Mode flavouring but it’s fun. As for “Zombieboy”; well, if Gwen Stefani is going to go and make country albums from now on (AND WHY SHOULD SHE NOT?), someone has to step into her no’ bad right enough/lovely-on shoes and this is pop music in its highest form – catchy with that lovely Royksoppian celery crunch of a rhythm track, chanty times π to infinity and you just want to step out onto the street and yell the song into the air of the world, but guess what, it’s an elegy for a friend of Gaga’s who died (the Québécois dancer and performance artist Rick Genest, who appeared in the video for “Born This Way” and who in 2018 suffered the same sort of stupid accident that put paid to SOPHIE and Phillippe Zdar) – “Goodbye, I’ll see you in my dreams.”

 

MAYHEM’s second half dials down from that initial upbeat intensity, but not from intensity itself. Again, a lot of the songs see Gaga doing what she enjoys most; trying on different musical hats and seeing which ones fit. So we get her Lana del Rey song (“LoveDrug”), her smiling nod towards Taylor S (“How Bad Do U Want Me” with its definite Yazoo/Yaz musical undertow), her straight-ahead eighties AoR (“Don’t Call Tonight”), hyperactive eighties Michael Jackson (the great scythes of “Shadow Of A Man”) and neurotic nineties Michael Jackson (“The Beast” a.k.a. “Give In To Me”). All terrific stuff and I am absolutely aware that the “beast” to whom she is pleading and/or demanding could well be her own mirror.

 

But, Jesus H Cornelius Cardew, these last two songs (which are half the length and at least twice the value of the four ones Richard “I Did It Under Sufferance” Strauss wrote) – well, they sound like the final two songs ever to be sung on a rapidly-disintegrating Earth. Yes, “Blade Of Grass” is sung about and to Michael Polonsky, who has clearly been the answer to all questions Gaga could find, but…I think of the Cornel Wilde movie No Blade Of Grass from 1970, which was a pretty horrible post-global virus action thriller with a gloomy theme song by Roger Whittaker. It was like 28 Days Later but with flares and Wendy Richard. I saw it one late Monday night on STV in the mid-seventies and was depressed for the rest of the week.

 

And I also think of a decimated world, hurtling towards anti-existence, in the midst of which this astonishing and powerful song is sung with desperate beauty. “Come and wrap that blade of grass/Around my finger like a cast” (there are no rings left to be found), “Even though the church burned down/I’ll be your Queen without a crown” – it is terribly, terribly moving. “This is the lawn of memories I mourn” – and the song grinds slowly, like the negative of “Good Luck Babe,” down and down until the machine of life stops.

 

Maybe that might have proved too bleak an ending to MAYHEM…which is why the Bruno Mars duet “Die With A Smile” makes perfect sense as a closer (or even Closer – here is the still-young Bruno, but where has he been?) for here are the same sentiments sung from the other lover’s perspective (see also the conflicting accounts of Buckingham’s “Say Goodbye” and Nicks’ “Goodbye Baby” which concludes Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will), here is another voice.

 

And what a beautiful and nigh-perfect pop song “Die With A Smile” is, like a reborn Bacharach – and those quiet 6/8 interludes of uncertain guitar between verses even make me think a little of the Cocteau Twins. Its video would suggest some familiarity with Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You,” which latter is not so much retro-nuevo fifties pop but more an implanted replicant memory of what “the fifties” might have been like – that’s what makes the song so great. In both cases, the latent emotion burns through the mask. “If the world was ending…I’d wanna be next to you.” This, you collecting doughnuts, is what pop music, let alone being human, is all about. Remember that while we’re still here, and leave those last two songs in particular as monuments, or footprints, to tell whatever comes after us that once we were here and this is what we were capable of doing. THERE IS AND CAN NEVER BE NO HIGHER OR MORE NOBLE AIM.

ONE LIFE CONSTANTLY CHANGING AND BEYOND ANY KIND OF FATHOMING: BILL FAY

I first heard of Bill Fay in November 1998, when I was an inpatient at the John Radcliffe Hospital. I had been painfully transferred there from the Chelsea and Westminster after having been operated upon for injuries sustained in a contretemps with a 52 bus across the road from Knightsbridge Barracks. Laura would bring up copies of the monthly music magazines for me to peruse on the ward, as well as things like Time Out (which at the time you could get in Oxford). From the latter I recall, possibly inaccurately, radio presenter Bill Overton being interviewed about record shops in Primrose Hill (were there any?).

 

But from that month's MOJO magazine, in the reissues section, I came across Jim Irvin talking about a two-on-one CD reissue of the first two albums by Fay. One was self-titled and pictured him standing atop the Serpentine. The second was called Time Of The Last Persecution. Reference was made to names like Mike Gibbs and Ray Russell and my curiosity bell rang.

 

Upon my discharge from hospital I painfully made my way to HMV on Cornmarket Street where they had one copy of the CD in their racks. I swear to goodness that HMV and Virgin, facing each other on the same street like gunslingers, only ever got one copy in of certain CDs because they knew I was likely the only one who was going to buy them.

 

 

Certainly, in the process of recovering from a severely traumatic incident, and in the context of late nineties Oxford, I required quietly disturbing, yet fundamentally pastoral, music to ease my varying manifestations of pain; and this CD left a mark on me. English music, as much as or more than any other, demands of its appreciation its relationship (real or imagined) to the environment in which you listen to it. And I still cannot listen to Fay's exquisitely tactile music without thinking of Oxford in that transitional, queerly sunny winter of 1998-9.

 

On that See For Miles CD were also included both sides of Fay's solitary single from 1967. The B-side "Scream in the Ears" is a surprisingly volatile take on electric Dylan, but the A-side "Some Good Advice," painfully perfect in its two minutes and eighteen seconds, is, I am convinced, one of the most punctuating singles I have ever heard. And it is so fragile; a repeated descending minor key piano chordal range with melodramatic drumrolls every eighth beat and a mellotron floating above the music like Banquo's ghost. Lyrically it is what the title suggests; advice to a young child, more probably advice to himself. "If you want to build a shed/Then go ahead/And bulid your shed...And if you want/To paint a gate/It's not too late/To paint your gate." Sounds like a Junior Choice reject? No...it's so frail and hopeless a scenario, so shattering in its humility. Hear how the guitar suddenly shreds halfway through the track before disappearing again. The final lines, sung with evident relish, are: "Don't listen to/Anything anyone tries to tell you." Except he doesn't. It's one of the most striking singles of its, or indeed any, year. You may weep at it should your mind be framed in a certain way.

 

 

Then nothing for three years, until he emerged, clean-shaven atop the Serpentine, for his 1970 debut. The sonic palette was magnified immeasurably (though not everyone agreed) by the involvement of  Gibbs as arranger. On the sleeve there is a telling commentary by Fay wherein he states that as a boy he spent five years constructing a small wooden box. When completed, he took it to his woodwork teacher, who proclaimed it the worst piece of woodwork he'd ever seen and smashed it with a mallet. This album, he stated, was the first creative thing he'd done since then. He would do what he needed to do, and then go away again to dodge any further mallets.

So this is what he needed to say, and he needed to say it all at once. Critics complain that Gibbs' orchestrations compete with and drown out Fay's songs, but here the large sonorities are to me as apposite as those Gibbs was later to devise for Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. One only has to hear how the strings and brass rise and fall with terrible suddenness behind Fay's vocal on "The Sun Is Bored." The record is much more explicitly bleak than anything *insert doomed turn-of-the-seventies singer-songwriter of your choice here* did, but not terminally so.

 

The brief but biting "The Room" is the nearest the record comes to the atmosphere of "Some Good Advice," but here Fay presents us with a black and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction which again and again finds no respite in the unresolved graveyard of its minor chords battling against his fatalistic, semi-croaked "forever." "We Want You To Stay" is pretty unambiguous in its message, too, though Gibbs lifts us out of the despair with his radiant sunlit chords, as well as an uncredited but instantly recognisable John Surman blowing soprano saxophone. The desperate faux-Cockney of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May" is reminiscent of the John Cale of Helen of Troy tackling "Yesterday Once More" - who the hell am I? Yet there persist hope and light until the end, with the mildly rebuking but essentially positive message of "Be Not So Fearful," sung in a tone somewhere between Mick Softley and the Singing Postman - a song which somebody will someday cover and take to number one.

The record didn't sell - was barely promoted - but Fay still had further things to say, and say them he did, albeit ten million times more brutally, on his second album, Time Of The Last Persecution. This record was scarcely even reviewed, let alone promoted, and its cover depicted a now long-haired, bearded and very weary-looking "Billy Fay." Out went Gibbs' lushness; in came what was essentially the working band of guitarist Ray Russell, who had appeared, albeit relatively restrained, on the first album, but who was now given licence to do whatever was needed. And certainly in that strange period between 1970-73, bookended by comparatively conventional careers, Russell was as near as this country ever got to producing a guitarist as proficiently fiery as Sonny Sharrock.

How worst to describe Persecution? The name of Syd Barrett immediately springs to mind, but more pertinently, imagine a Syd Barrett who, in a rare moment of utter clarity and lucidity, saw his situation, saw the world and for 30 or so minutes was able to make complete and articulate sense of it. Not so far from Roger Waters? Perhaps not - and there's certainly an element of Waters' later misanthropy in songs like "Let All The Other Teddies Know." But there is a severely scarifying assuredness to the brutality into which this record more often travels, especially on its second side. The songs on side one, including bruised ballads with divine Beatles chord progressions like "I Hear Your Calling" or "Don't Let My Marigolds Die," give us an idea of the suppressed immense rage at which Russell's guitar intermittently and immaculately scratches. The focus on the very Barrett-esque "Laughing Man" is as sharp as last Thursday afternoon's snow. A horn section - two of whom worked with Keith Tippett's Centipede - appears on "'Til The Christ Come Back" but its repeated fanfares become increasingly higher-pitched and more discordant. The track fades out just as it's about to explode. 

And detonate the music does on side two, most pronounced on the title song over which Fay's Cale-like croon (and even Bryan Ferry in a sour mood-anticipating croon) over stately Sunday school piano chords is increasingly subverted and finally drowned in a freeform whirlpool, Russell taking off for atonal space; trombonist Nick Evans and tenor saxophonist Tony Roberts not far behind him. "Come A Day" is the equivalent of the previous album's "Be Not So Fearful," but no easy salvation is to be found here as again the track disintegrates into shards of noisy improvisational causality, the piano continuing sternly underneath the apocalypse. The album concludes with the still terrifying lullaby "Let All The Other Teddies Know" (with its sinister aside "be ready when the cupboard explodes"). This song is relatively peaceful, but Russell cannot resist adding some more Sharrockian runs towards the end, just to let you know that the demon, and death, still exist. 

And, for a long time, that was it. Fay released nothing more in the interim and until the 1998 CD reissue (see its liner note, if you can find a copy) had been assumed to have vanished without trace, into some sort of *insert doomed singer-songwriter etc* type of self-imposed hell; another casualty of causality. But stories are not always so facile. With the renewed interest, Fay bemusedly re-emerged to say that actually he had been holding down a perfectly good day job for the last quarter-century, and yes he did still write songs but didn't feel any great need to put them out on record; because (he didn't say it, but we knew it anyway) everything he had, was driven, to say had been said, definitively and finitely. The malletphobia out of his system, he could then resume his life. Art, music, as catharsis. He didn't die, didn't go mad, didn't do drugs. He lived.

 

"Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."
(Shakespeare, The Scottish Play, V.v.19-28)

 

If a sense of closure was detectable in Time Of The Last Persecution, we were subsequently confronted with what sounded like a renewal. It is hard even in this unlimited space to articulate how completely I have been affected, emotionally and otherwise, by the third Bill Fay album, Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow, which was released in 2005, a quarter of a century after it had been recorded. It is a record which would have sounded as out of step in 1978 or 1981 as it would have done in 1971 and perhaps only fractionally less so in 2025. No record company in any of those years would have known what to do with this kind of a vision. Listening to it, as I still do twenty years on, I not only think of all those avant-MoR operatives whose careers were curtly curtailed by punk - John Howard, John Carter, Gilbert O'Sullivan - but also of things yet to be promised, of the late Elliott Smith and the later Mark Hollis. Perhaps the only way to view Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow is in the same way as Wilson's SMiLE - a singular masterpiece, relieved of any time zone, standing both outside and over much of the rest of popular music.

 

What remains most immediately apparent about Tomorrow - apart from the fact that it is not credited to Bill Fay the solo artist, but to the Bill Fay Group - is a sense of calmness which is made all the more Olympian by its having been being so hard-earned. Although this record is capable of bewitching the listener on its own, it should be heard in tandem with his two Deram albums, which were made available on CD again not long afterwards - I was personally thanked by Fay in his liner note to both. The overwhelming spiritual aura of this record is made more poignant - made more Alice Coltrane rather than made more Cliff Richard - by the pungency of its predecessors, especially the violent and tumultuous Time Of The Last Persecution with its explicit references to "The Christ."

The "Group" aspect of the Bill Fay Group cannot be under-emphasised; whereas on Persecution Fay worked with Ray Russell's group, here he appeared with improvising trio the ACME Quartet, featuring bassist Rauf Gulip, drummer Bill Stratton and Gary Smith, subsequently one of the leading names in European improvised music, on guitar. In many ways Smith comes across as the natural successor to Russell; the anger remains present in his playing but is tempered by compassion and the overall need to, as Fay puts it in his brief sleevenote, give service to the music. As Fay goes on to state, the Group did not work towards the hope or expectation of receiving a recording contract; it was enough that the music be played and recorded, even if no one else got to listen to it (there are parallels with my own blog writing). Thankfully, everyone could now get to listen to it - and it is still, to deploy a very Bill Fay type of adjective, astonishing.

The opening track in particular, "Strange Stairway," is sufficiently poignant for me to want to pause from living, even if only for the three minutes of the song's duration. Smith's vulnerable tremelo picks a high-register motif against an indescribably moving chord sequence, while Fay's only slightly less vulnerable voice comes in, trying to clamber back into the world: "I feel, in myself, the river run, the ocean swell/And miles above me, a strange stairway/And one thing I know for sure/The only thing that'll get us up off the floor/Is the love inside we." Stratton's cymbals tick away in Robert Wyatt-esque quiet insistence throughout, but the symbolism which sets the tone for the rest of the record is already clear; an upward journey towards salvation and deliverance. Best heard while walking up Dunstan Road towards Headington Cemetery on a fresh Wednesday spring mid-morning. The religiosity is accentuated in "Spiritual Mansions" ("Lifegiver/Blessed Redeemer") but is not unquestioning; Fay's quiet voice trembles: "There's a woman in labour/The Creation awaits you," before the music suddenly swells with his more urgent pleas: "To close/These bodies/These souls/In immortality," the last syllable of which is punctuated by an abrupt booming Moog synthesiser before receding just as rapidly. Stratton again soundtracks the nagging doubt with dub-like rimshots.

 

"Planet Earth Daytime" is the sort of song you wish could have been number one instead of "The Lady In Red"; the first ninety seconds have "hit" written all over them, with what begins as a small urban tableau ("She leaves her apartment/About midday/And the colour of the pavement/Is the colour of her face") before the music gathers in intensity for the chorus, where Fay indicates the hint of imminent apocalypse ("Planet Earth daytime/Maybe the last time/Who cares?").

 

But then the initial music dies away, or is supplemented by another melody coming in from the right channel, lending the piece some bitter bitonality as Fay tacitly howls "Our world" before embarking upon a not too decipherable monologue ("So many flags...Pray for the sergeant major who only had orders to give - nothing else") which in turn is briefly supplanted by a shocking flare-up of atonal improv noise (flashbacks of the Persecution hell?). This too quickly disappears as Fay launches into what sounds like a dry run for the soundtrack to Local Hero with its optimistic guitar lines shadowing (or shielding) words which are still to do with the apocalypse; Fay bargaining for a place on the Ark ("Dangerous sailing/In a ship that's going down"). Over the sunset major key ending he dimly intones what could either be: "Let's all aboard" or "Let's go home." It's up to us to decide - or listen to the strikingly similar, albeit more jauntily articulated, themes of Duncan Browne's unexpected 1972 hit "Journey."

 

"Goodnight Stan" revisits the disassociated war veteran theme of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May," though there is now a touch of George Harrison about Fay's petitioning of Stan to "take a watering can to protect yourself," since "Soon they say/They'll be taking us away/To another place/Was it Mars/Or was it Jupiter?" The effect is plangent as well as poignant, and the song is terminated by an unearthly lament of a howl which turns out to be Fay's own voice. At this juncture there is nothing to add apart from the prayer which is the title track, a modified "May Each Day" (not to mention an updated "Some Good Advice") where Fay, alone over a simple piano and synthesiser line, advises his child (?) "May you have faith/May you have hope/May you have life/And a skipping rope/To turn with you/And see you through/Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow." The faintest glow of hope in a torrent destined never to end.

 

And here is where the album "proper" disappears into the background, as we are now presented with an extraordinary collage of nine song fragments clearly taken from demos and home recordings - an album within an album, or the hidden fourth album, like a lo-fi take on side two of Abbey Road, which even on its own betrays more invention than can be found in...well, I'll leave it to your discretion to fill in the names of your choice. As though the anaesthetic has taken effect and you drift into a pellucid dream of the album. "Just A Moon" manages to predicate the work of Roddy Frame and Aztec Camera (listen in particular to that "Round and ROUND you" line). Some fragments, for example "To Be A Part" and "Turning The Pages," exist only as barely audible minutiae, coming indistinctly from the right channel only ("Nothing lasts forever," the sleeve remarks ruefully, "Tape deteriorates in time"), like unanticipated ghosts. With "Sam" we are again in the world of Scott Walker's "Two Ragged Soldiers," as Fay tries to remind his aged colleague of who exactly he is - "When you walk down the street, does it feel like a dream?.../Hard to recall where you've been?/...It's an ill punch that knocks into no one no sense" - over a Wyatt-type keyboard figure as the progenitor tries to deny the possibility that both he and Sam are slowly but steadily disintegrating, both physically and mentally.

 

This segues swiftly into "Lamp Shining," or the ending of the song "Lamp Shining," a song as venomous as Lennon at his blackest: "In our stalls, there's nowhere for you to play!" yells Fay. "At our table, there's nothing we want you to say!" before ironically advising "Keep your lamp shining as you journey on your way" as the song is instantly engulfed in more spiky freeform chaos, a life already terminated. Then, via the curiously Bacharach-ish "Love Is The Tune," we reach the positively vituperative "After The Revolution" where Fay's protagonist has just shot the enemy ("With my guns still smoking"). The victim's dying words - again explicitly paralleled with the Passion of the Christ ("There is no peace unless you bleed!/Bleed for Christ!") - give the impression of Lennon's "Revolution" with its acid content quadrupled and set against a restless "Whiter Shade Of Pale" organ riff. "A voice that in its time vomited forth a thousand words in anger" reflects Fay as he realises the uselessness and waste of his gesture, and by extension that of "revolution" in inverted commas, as he is finally driven to overflow the barlines and launch into another bitter spoken monologue into which the music disappears, though one feels it could continue eternally. Finally "Jericho Road" sees Fay wry over the possibility of an ending to everything ("I may get the chop from Kung Fu fighters/...I pray if I do, the Samaritans will find me") before returning to the opening "Strange Stairway," here noticeably faster, sounding like a Wings outtake, but its humble message undiminished, completing the cycle.

 

Then we return to the "album" with Fay's spiritualism heightened and intensified to new levels of poignancy. "Life" finds him asking fundamental questions over a lugubrious organ and Smith's guitar, mimicking seagulls ("Who are we? Where do we stand? Who holds the key? Who holds the plan? When you hear no voice, no sign of land. Who are we to say we are?") before launching into a passionate chorus (echoes here of what the vastly and sadly underrated Ultrasound would go on to do years later with songs like "Best Wishes") wherein Fay acknowledges the facade but refuses to diminish his belief in its potential effects - "So let the world make believe/That life is risen/That life is conquered/So that the world might believe/And feel the power of the life and love we see!" This anguish is brilliantly articulated by Stratton's frequently freeform drumming (very reminiscent of Laurie Allan on Wyatt's version of "Song For Che") and Smith's squealing, raging and weeping guitar solo, perching on the verge of chaos but always stepping back when required.

 

"Man" is an indistinct echo of Nilsson's "One" where piano is again succeeded by distant guitar squalls ("Nobody knows when you are gone"), while "Hypocrite" will make you shake your tears in disbelief that a song with lyrics as elemental as "Love is like a rose" can make your soul collapse, particularly when the lament vanishes into a pronounced late seventies synthesised drone.

"Cosmic Boxer" sums up the tenor of Fay's message on this album; the ordinary human, venturing into the world every day, struggling to stay in the contest even if, as the song admits, they are only boxing their own shadow, but finally succumbing to the Beckettian leitmotif of I-can't-go-on-I-go-on ("It's true he viewed the cocoon with despair/Yet he boxed on"). At the end the song slows down into a regretful minor/major key seesaw as Fay pointedly states that the "boxer" will "always find a way through" but "not by your own merit." Note Stratton's solitary gong/cymbal crash towards the song's end - the world forever treading on our heads.

 

It's getting near the end, now, and so must Fay sing of passing from this world into another. "We Are Raised" starts out as a simple Dr Dykes hymn - so damned simple, the sentiments "We sit beside Him now" and "Thank you for the life you gave," so damnably poignant that I can't listen to it without dissolving into floods of mourning. And then, right at the end, the Sunday school piano segues into a 1978 synthesiser - and the latter sounds, chillingly, exactly like PiL's "Radio 4." Two different and distinct routes towards the same heart. See what he did there?

To end, and no other song could end this remarkable record, there is "Isles Of Sleep," no doubt deliberately placed at the end to speak to 2005 listeners as much, or more so, than any potential 1981 ears. Over a cyclical piano motif which foretells of "Sleepy Song" by Tindersticks (and also sounds like the prelude to a Meat Loaf song), Fay finally turns to address you:

 

"After all these years/I emerge from the darkness."

(Dylan - not dark yet)

"I dwelt in the Isles of Sleep/Banished as a shadow/Where no light could reach/No teachers' arrows"

(remember that one of Bill Fay's day jobs was as a teacher)

"The purpose now is plain/To not have lost and not have strayed/Would have borne me far away/From my true nature"

But we all have to come back to the world, even if at the end.

"Bereft of spear/Naked...(the voice lowers to humility)...harmless."

Then a new piano motif begins, and if I tell you that it anticipates, by twenty or more years, the similar closing section of Pulp's "Sunrise," you might not believe me.

However:

"Nothing has changed.

Only me.

The world's still the same.

(pause)

(pause)

But I'm not the same."

 

Nor could I ever be. In 2005 I thought that this record had saved me from myself. Again.

 

"O my lord, when I was last at Messina, I looked upon her with a soldier's eye, that liked, but had no leisure for loving; but now, in this happy time of peace, thoughts of war have left their places vacant in my mind, and in their room come thronging soft and delicate thoughts, all prompting me how fair young Hero is, reminding me that I liked her before I went to the wars."
(Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing)

The interest in Fay magnified. Other studio compilations appeared: From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock (1966-70 demos) and Still Some Light (2009 - a two-CD collection, one of band demos from the seventies and another entirely solo album recorded at home the previous year). I think Fay was more relieved by his reacceptance than he let on, but the tenor of his music eased towards contemplative and spiritual - his Christianity invited the listener in, as opposed to scolding them.

Three further albums followed in his later years - Life Is People (2012), his first hit, which saw him reunite with Russell and drummer Alan Rushton as well as younger acolytes; "The Never Ending Happening" is one of those songs which sound so bloody simple until you realise how hard it is for anybody to express the plain wonder that Fay manages so expertly. Who Is The Sender? (2015) continued down the same, increasingly intangible path (Fay sounds as though walking into a dream, or another life, but his buried anger is barely abated - "The Freedom To Read" is so relevant a composition it could have been written last week), and 2020's Countless Branches turned out to be his swansong - the music brushed down to its essence, largely just the man and his voice and piano, as though picking up from the ashes and cherishing what survived that last, apocalyptic persecution. It came out in very early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, just before normal life was ending, hence it feels like a last will and testament on behaf of humanity.

 

There are pauses so long and deep in places (e.g. "In Human Hands") as though he were composing these songs before our ears. When other instrumental voices appear - the electronic keyboards at the climax of "Salt Of The Earth" for instance - the maximalism of this newly-attained peace balances out the noise and torture of Persecution and gets back to the relegation of fearfulness. The closing song - Fay's last song (although he was apparently working on a seventh album a month before his passing yesterday, aged eighty-one, so some words may yet need to be said) - "One Life," sounds three hundred years old and is likely still to be sung three hundred years hence, if we permit ourselves the option to do so.

 

When we know that our time is almost up - we don't always know that - we look back at our lives and ask ourselves what difference our existence made to the world. Me? I was perhaps the third person to write about Bill Fay when he remained a semi-open secret (I doubt even Kate Bush knew about him back in the seventies). He came from the Archway and when you heard him genially converse you knew that. But he wasn't much of a fuss about audiences, or exposure. When he appeared on Later With Jools Holland in 2012 he stipulated that he would only perform if the studio were cleared of people and other distractions. Let's leave Bill Fay there - stooped at the piano, somewhat baffled but thankful to be given this chance of expression, making cross-hand playing seem like the simplest thing (when, as pianists know, it's one of the most difficult things), his voice cracking with the miracle of astonishment, and the not yet forlorn hope that it can drive away and banish the things which make life, here and elsewhere, not worth living. Be at peace with yourself, everyone.

(Elements of this piece were extracted and reworked from two previous blog posts; The Church Of Me, originally published 4 February 2003, and Koons Really Does Think He's Michelangelo, first published 18 April 2005. This current piece supersedes both.)