Bill Fay's distrust of the public is not unfounded. After his two recordings "Bill Fay" and "Time Of The Last Persecution" were flopped at the beginning of the seventies, he was dropped by his record company, was not given a foot on the floor anymore and fell into oblivion. The two albums were re-released in 1998. Suddenly it was musicians like Nick Cave, Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Jim O'Rourke or Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) who carried the news of the forgotten English artist into the world. Fay was shocked, confessing in one of his few interviews that he hadn't expected it in his wildest dreams.
And he didn't trust peace either, kept a low profile and didn't take any new pictures for the time being. But then more albums appeared with outtakes, homerecordings and other apocrypha, all celebrated by the critics. In 2007 we had a joint performance with Wilco in London. Tweedy's offer to record together in Chicago was initially rejected by the shy singer-songwriter. But there was no way around it: Bill Fay had to go back to the studio to record new songs. It took more than forty years after "Time Of The Last Persecution" until Fay forged a follow-up album with "Life Is People" in 2012.
But this time the reactions were completely different than at that time. The press was overturning. The great melancholiac was named in the same breath as Randy Newman, Joe Henry and Mark Lanegan. The record consisted partly of new recordings of some homerecordings already released on the compilations. And he thanked Tweedy for his tireless help with a cover version of Wilco's "Jesus etc.".
