Bill Fay
Time of the Last Persecution

Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Ray Davies, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon.

This is not a list of my favorite songwriters, but of the personalities likened by those few critics who felt the need to describe by sound associations the elitist (still for how long?) acoustic experience caused by the Folk epic of Bill Fay, an unknown English author, singer, and pianist who started recording in 1970. A progressive epic, with influences gathered in visits to the sanctuaries of the most refined '70s songwriting (do Highway 61, Tanworth in Arden, Village Green, Chelsea Hotel, and the snowy villa from the "Imagine" video ring a bell?) and psychotic compulsions for electric guitar spread across various passages of the album by the evocative Bluesman Ray Russel. This results in the difficulty of classifying a rare album in its enveloping delicacy: Prog-Folk, Psych-Folk, etc., etc. However, it can be said, drawing from the lyrics that contain constant spiritual and religious references, that this music is certainly better than the God it evokes.

Published at a young age by Decca, which discarded it as soon as they refuted its almost nonexistent sales potential, it has been the subject of recent reissues by Wooden Hill Records and Durtro of David Tibet, mentor of the Current 93 project and the focus of growing attention, thanks both to the Revival Folk in vogue and the intrinsic quality of an album that could not remain hidden much longer. Further evidence is that Wilco and Jim O'Rourke have drawn from Fay's repertoire, revisiting the acoustic and existential memory of a man who, still living, has left no trace of himself or of where he might currently be found, although rumors of a new album in the works circulate. However, not everyone who mysteriously disappears from the scene is automatically enshrined as a legend: portrayed as a psychotic loner whose music "was clearly the result of paranoia and assorted drugs," the reputable magazine "The Wire" went so far as to write of him as "a mad bearded Rasputin resembling Charles Manson."

"Time Of The Last Persecution" sails in a world of Christian symbols, among harmonious piano lines and feverish electric raptures. Composed at the age of 28 in the grip of a creative trance following the "Kent State Shootings", where 4 students were killed in clashes to "repress and disperse the protesters" gathered to protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, (which also led Neil Young to compose one of his most intense pieces, "Ohio"), it is a visceral album that manages to be both deeply lyrical and soft, in the evocative sounds ranging from the softest ballad ("Tell It Like This") to the angriest rock ("Inside The Keepers Pantry").

The album's entrance is marked by "Omega Day", between Buffalo Springfield-like atmospheres and timid guitar hints reminiscent of John Cipollina of Quicksilver fame, with the brass and the final liberating chant unfolding like a celestial vault over the elegant and mature sonic digressions to come.

In "Don't Let My Marigolds Die", the previously calm singing is now reduced to a slender desperate plea, the seductive and dreamy acoustic guitar accompanies it all like dusk to darkness.

In the astral velvet of "I Hear You Calling", where an airy piano mantra reverberates the crystalline voice immersed in distant memory with precious nostalgia.

Passing through "Dust Filled The Room", a pleasant Dylan-esque interlude (we are in the vicinity of Nashville), and the growing dense sonic mass of "'Till The Christ Come Back", we reach the first tip of the triangle at the compositional peak of the album, "Releases In The Eye" with its pristine lyricism of vastness filled by a climber of emotional vortices with an instrumental and vocal climax, soundtrack music, for end credits, we await with anticipatory sorrow that some commercial will take it forever, although in the instrumental tail, the guitar has its first true psychotic access of the album, shredding the listener into a dense magma of sparking notes.

In the middle of the album appears "Laughing Man" and a gentle piano accompanies Fay in a piece reminiscent of Phyton Lee Jackson's "In A Broken Dream", with budding guitar hints.

I have already mentioned the angry "Inside The Keepers Pantry" with echoes of Neil Young in that end-of-the-run aching voice, and "Take It Easy", a slumbering and enchanted melodic cloud that would refresh the darkest of days while in "Plan D" the more pop soul of Fay emerges with a song that sets the conditions to heaven for a happy dawn from rooms where unrest often rests.

The true masterpiece of the album is "Pictures Of Adolf Again", a profound reflection on the cycles of history, on the pain of an observer aware of further pain to come, aware of the unawareness of others, annihilated by an apparent choice. A dream ballad that would crown the career of many great musicians and songwriters. Fay's voice is in compassionate contrast with the harmony of the music: the latter so sweet, the former so lucidly suffering, in a contrast that exemplifies the passion of such sharp sensibilities forced into the chill of tired times in naturally warm hearts and eruptive in their propensity for love.

The Title Track, the third diamond of the album, devours like a plague the scattered delicacy in the record, the pure piano drawing capitals of grace on ruined columns.

Hope, fleeing under the bombs of blind modern rationality: it is the collapse of modern society, the scraps of progress it grants us in the name of an invisible god on earth and victim of terrible extortion of pity. The reign of chaos has torn apart the vain attempts of order, pleasure, and love. All this in less than 4 minutes of poetic hurricane.

Overwhelmed by the one-two tension by Fay & Russel, a joyful piano enchantment returns, now predictable as an untiring mother to caress our eardrums. In "Comes A Day" we see the flames extinguish, yet the mind leads us into schizophrenic guitar flashbacks, angry spits on dissolved harmonies.

Like in a Canterbury dream, comes the most enchanted of endings, an intimate caress to the listener. In "Let All The Other Teddies Know" Fay’s vocal register, rigidly evocative, unexpectedly shows gentle breadths. The piano sends ripples of sound waves crashing on guitar reverberation rocks, a string gong closes the experience, with the authority of someone who felt a vision descend upon them, making us a precious gift of it.