Reviews: Bill Fay | The Cramps
Bill Fay and Time of the Last Persecution are back on vinyl, plus three from the psychobilly originators.
We’ve got two reviews today to kick off your week. First up are the two incredible albums Bill Fay recorded in the early ’70s, newly reissued by UK’s Proper Records. And then we took a spin with the three recently re-released LPs from the Cramps, two of which come on novelty colored vinyl.
Bill Fay: Bill Fay & Time of the Last Persecution
The Cramps: Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle & Bad Music for Bad People
To briefly follow up on Thursday and Friday, it looks like more info is available regarding Analogue Productions’ 45 RPM line of Rhino reissues. A more complete list has been circulating, although Analogue Productions has not released anything officially online. This comes from posters and print catalogs that were circulating in and around the WFMU Record Fair in New York this past weekend.
America: America
America: Homecoming
George Benson: Breezin'
Ry Cooder: Paradise and Lunch
Ry Cooder: Chicken Skin Music
Ry Cooder: Paris, Texas
Foghat: Foghat
Genesis: Wind and Wuthering
Genesis: Duke
Jethro Tull: War Child
Jethro Tull: Minstrel in the Gallery
Jethro Tull: Songs from the Wood
Jethro Tull: Heavy Horses
KC and the Sunshine Band: KC and the Sunshine Band
Gordon Lightfoot: Sundown
Little Feat: Sailin' Shoes
Little Feat: Dixie Chicken
The Meters: Rejuvenation
The Meters: Fire on the Bayou
Montrose: Montrose
Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
Van Morrison: Moondance
Van Morrison: His Band and Street Choir
Gram Parsons: Grievous Angel
The Ramones: The Ramones
JD Souther: Black Rose
Seals & Crofts: Summer Breeze
Seals & Crofts: Diamond Girl
Tony Joe White: Tony Joe White
Tony Joe White: The Train I'm On
It’s a pretty odd list, with punk classics like The Ramones and overlooked gems like Tony Joe White sitting alongside dollar-bin soft-rock staples like America and Seals & Crofts. I believe the most significant titles are the two Genesis albums, because the original LP sides on those are in the 27- to 28-minute range and could really benefit from a 2-LP cutting. (Maybe once this slate is done, they’ll get around to ...And Then There Were Three..., which suffers from the same issue of overlong vinyl sides.)
As for the others? We’ll just have to wait and see. Two of the Van Morrison titles, Astral Weeks and Moondance, were available for purchase at the WFMU fair and at the other events label head Chad Kassem hosted in the NYC area over the weekend, so those should be available for order from Acoustic Sounds soon. Surprisingly, those two were cut from digital, as the analog master tapes were apparently not in good enough shape.
All right. Enough prefacing. On to today’s reviews.
Bill Fay: Bill Fay; Time of the Last Persecution
Review by Ned Lannamann
On February 22 of this year, English singer/songwriter Bill Fay died at age 81. His career arc was a fitful one, beginning with promise with a 1967 single and two brilliant full-lengths for Decca’s subsidiary label, Deram Records: 1970’s Bill Fay and 1971’s Time of the Last Persecution. But following those album’s commercial failure, Fay disappeared from the public eye for decades, recording an unreleased album in the late ’70s but otherwise living an ordinary and uncelebrated life.
But it often takes time for great work to be acknowledged, and crate-diggers can always be trusted to uncover the forgotten gems. After slowly earning cult reputations, the two albums were re-released on CD in 1998, and Fay’s music suddenly cultivated a newfound appreciation, coming in particular from other musicians—his songs have since been covered by Wilco, Pavement, the War on Drugs, Okkervil River, and A.C. Newman, among others. And following decades of silence, Fay got the chance to record three new LPs for American indie label Dead Oceans during the 2010s, with some of his archival recordings also seeing the light of day. But the towering achievements of Fay’s career remain those two Deram albums—utterly neglected in their time, but slowly and steadily earning admiration from a growing flock of converts.
The two albums bear striking differences, although they’re both built around Fay’s succinct, sober-eyed tunes. Bill Fay (one of a small number of releases in Decca/Deram’s short-lived Nova series) is full of Ray Davies-esque character studies on those inhabitants of the other England—the older, tradition-bound one that was disappearing gradually beneath the sociological and economic shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. But Fay infuses his sketches with a philosophical search for understanding how people can interact with the natural world around them and how the loss of connection to it can lead to the loss of meaning in our lives. The photo on the back cover of the album finds Fay sitting on a park bench, covered with leaves to look as though he’d been there for ages. It reminds me of Lord Snowdon’s 1972 photo of J.R.R. Tolkien, which positioned the writer reclining amid the gnarled roots of a tree as if he’s a guardian spirit of the forest.
On Bill Fay, the songwriter’s piano and unaffected, unshowy voice is accompanied by players from the London jazz scene, laying down a simple pop-rock backing to Fay’s ballads. Ray Russell is the standout contributor, and his electric guitar exhibits a remarkable sympathy for Fay’s densely woven songcraft. Most notably, the album features a 27-piece orchestra arranged by Michael Gibbs, adding a bright, swinging, urban feel that’s slightly at odds with Fay’s relatively dour delivery. That friction creates an unsettled quality that actually becomes a more-than-fitting backdrop for this batch of songs, with the instrumental activity accentuating the intensity of Fay’s vision rather than distracting from it. It’s the perfect aural depiction of a city dweller ruminating about one’s place in time and nature.
1971’s Time of the Last Persecution is something else altogether. Gone are the technicolor horns and strings; Russell is now Fay’s co-producer, and they create something leaner and more foreboding, with biblical overtones that make the album play a little like an Anglican version of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, with scenes taking place in Britain’s cities, villages, fields, and forests instead of the Wild West. Fay’s humanism is still the dominant feature, but it can take several listens to recognize and extract it, as these songs are primarily about apocalypses, both interior and exterior. The title track is Fay’s reaction to the Kent State massacre, “Plan D” hints at nuclear holocaust, and “’Til the Christ Comes Back” depicts a not-very-reassuring version of the Rapture.
It’s a staggering document, far more unsettling than Bill Fay but also a more searching, more rewarding, and eventually more uplifting album. If Time of the Last Persecution sounds a little like a disheveled prophet dispensing warnings to a heedless crowd, its failure on the charts is a perfect realization of that concept. Fay’s ideas were not musically complicated, and his lyrics weren’t puzzles that required listeners to “solve” them—but these are challenging songs nevertheless, not settling for easy sentimentality, cheap rhymes, or refrains that you can sing along to without sounding a little unhinged yourself.
But it hasn’t been very easy to absorb Fay’s worldview via vinyl. Mega-rare original pressings of the two albums command hefty prices on the used market, approaching four figures. Bill Fay received a limited repress by Decca in 2009, and Time of the Last Persecution was made available in the UK for its 50th anniversary in one of the Record Store Day drops of 2021. Both albums also received pressings in the early 2010s from the notorious Four Men with Beards reissue label, with those copies receiving the expected poor marks for quality control. And now, UK label Proper Records has licensed the albums from Decca’s parent company, Universal, and released new editions that anyone remotely interested in having Fay’s music on vinyl will want to track down.
Per a post on the Steve Hoffman forums, the discs come from existing 192kHz/24-bit digital transfers of the master tapes that Universal had in its archive. They were cut anonymously at GZ Media in the Czech Republic and pressed there as well. I have not heard these albums on vinyl before, in any of their previous incarnations, but I found the sound on these new pressings to be full, sweet-sounding, pleasingly musical, and boasting a wide range of dynamics (most clearly exemplified on Bill Fay’s opening track, “Garden Song,” which moves smoothly from a hushed beginning to full orchestra swells). They easily trounce any digital version I’ve encountered.
I noticed some very minor sibilance on Bill Fay but otherwise thought these were terrific-sounding renditions, especially considering their digital origins and that a mastering engineer has not been credited. On Bill Fay, the drums, in particular, reveal the ambience of the studio where they were recorded, and the massed violins never screech, and while the bass always remains subtle, the soundstage remains appropriately broad throughout. On Time of the Last Persecution, the smaller ensemble is rendered with appropriate levels of intimacy; “I Hear You Calling,” for example, starts off restrained but eventually blossoms into a wider soundstage, as each instrument is displayed with clarity and separation. The rest of the album is similarly treated, with a simple emphasis on revealing the group’s interplay rather than trying to manufacture sonic fireworks out of their straightforward sound.
My discs were perfectly flat and centered, but I did see some light scuffs on them, and there were numerous faint clicks and noise in the background during some of the quieter passages on both discs, so the GZ pressings are not flawless. Time of the Last Persecution was the greater offender, with some repeating ticks on Side 1. Considering how expensive original pressings are, it’s a tradeoff I’m happy with—I’d rather be with slightly compromised pressings of these excellent LPs than none at all. But if the presence of any noise on a new disc is a deal-breaker for you, then you may wish to pass these by. The albums come in reproductions of the original jackets, right down to the peephole on the back cover of Bill Fay that reveals the blue border of the inner sleeve, indicating that it is the stereo version of the album. (Bill Fay was also released in mono in 1970, although by that time it’s quite possible that they simply folded down the stereo mix rather than craft a dedicated mono mix. Time of the Last Persecution was only released in stereo.) While reproducing Decca’s inner sleeves of the era, these inners are printed on card and are not die-cut or poly-lined, as opposed to the original Decca inners.
Unlike albums by similarly lost-and-found artists like Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, copies of Bill Fay’s albums appear in very few vinyl collections, so all credit must be given to Proper Records for doing their part to remedy this. And these really are astonishing, affecting works, written and sung by a man who never fit neatly into existing musical disciplines but used his songwriting to explore his own metaphysical curiosities. Musically, his songs reach backward and forward in time, carrying on old English musical traditions while simultaneously being of a part with the folk, jazz, and rock scenes of the late ’60s and early ’70s—but also existing outside of all those disciplines in a realm of their own. Bill Fay had a unique perspective on the world, and he used his songs to share that perspective with anyone who cared to listen. It’s something to be celebrated.
Bill Fay | Proper/Decca 1-LP 33 RPM • lacquer cut from 192/24 digital file anonymously at GZ Media, Czech Republic • pressed at GZ Media • black vinyl
Time of the Last Persecution | Proper/Decca 1-LP 33 RPM • lacquer cut from 192/24 digital file anonymously at GZ Media, Czech Republic • pressed at GZ Media • black vinyl
Listening equipment:
Table: Technics SL-1200MK2
Cart: Audio-Technica VM540ML
Amp: Luxman L-509X
Speakers: ADS L980
The Cramps: Songs the Lord Taught Us; Psychedelic Jungle; Bad Music for Bad People
Review by Robert Ham
Just in time for Halloween this year, Universal saw fit to re-release a trio of albums by psychobilly paragons the Cramps: the group’s first two albums, 1980’s Songs the Lord Taught Us and 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle, as well as the 1984 singles compilation Bad Music for Bad People. It was a savvy marketing decision, to be sure, as the seamy creep of the music on these discs makes for a fine soundtrack for the spookiest of holidays. And it doesn’t hurt that folks hopefully still associate the Cramps’ cover of “Goo Goo Muck,” a 1962 garage-rock tune originally recorded by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads, with Jenna Ortega’s self-choreographed dance to the song in the first season of Tim Burton’s Netflix series Wednesday.
Other than those two cultural connections, the need for these re-releases is a bit lost on me. Previous pressings of all three albums, including a 2024 reissue of Songs the Lord Taught Us on black and purple wax, are still very much in circulation in record shops and the secondary market. Heck, even OG copies of these discs don’t seem to be terribly expensive. The only real attraction, beyond simply the music, is the novelty of being able to choose from a normal black vinyl pressing or grabbing Bad Music on glow-in-the-dark vinyl and Psychedelic Jungle on wax that is a perfectly sickly shade of green. Those two limited colored vinyl pressings also come with lithograph prints of the album art. Songs the Lord Taught Us, meanwhile, is a bare-bones re-release on black vinyl.
If sound quality is a concern, you’ll want to snag the black vinyl editions of these three. The pressings of Bad Music and Psychedelic suffer from a bit of background noise due to the nature of the colored vinyl. It’s especially noticeable on the former, as Universal opted to let the music suffer an added drop in sonic clarity for the sake of letting consumers have a record they could easily find in a dark room. Does that matter so much, though? At this early part of the Cramps’ history, the band was more than happy to try to capture the nasty, low-fidelity sound of the scratchy garage rock, rockabilly, and novelty 45s that singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy collected. The noise isn’t so overbearing as to make these unlistenable, but it’s there in the rare quiet moments and between songs. More frustrating was the small scratch on my copy, which resulted in an annoying tick that marred the first half of “Green Fuz,” the track that kicks off Psychedelic Jungle. For your sake, I hope that my copy is an outlier.
The album that comes closest to mirroring the grotty sound of the Cramps’ influences is Songs the Lord Taught Us. For that one, the quartet, then rounded out by drummer Nick Knox and guitarist Bryan Gregory, piled into Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis with local-boy-made cult Alex Chilton behind the boards. Recorded live to tape, the performances are perfectly trashy and wobbly around the edges, qualities that are on glorious display on this flat, well-balanced pressing from GZ’s Precision Record Pressing in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, the plant that handled the production of all three reissues.
The bottom line is that, if this is your first time picking up these albums, you could do a lot worse than these new pressings from Universal. It all comes down to what your local record shop is charging for these discs. My advice is to do a little comparison shopping online so your bank account isn’t getting gouged for no good reason. Chances are, whichever pressing you pick up will more than satisfy.
Songs the Lord Taught Us | UMe/Capitol/Illegal 1-LP 33 RPM • audio mastered from unknown source and lacquer cut by unknown engineer • pressed at GZ’s Precision Record Pressing • black vinyl
Psychedelic Jungle | UMe/Capitol/IRS 1-LP 33 RPM • audio mastered from unknown source and lacquer cut by unknown engineer • pressed at GZ’s Precision Record Pressing • fluorescent green vinyl (black vinyl variant also available)
Bad Music for Bad People | UMe/Capitol/IRS 1-LP 33 RPM • audio mastered from unknown source and lacquer cut by unknown engineer • pressed at GZ’s Precision Record Pressing • glow-in-the-dark green vinyl (black vinyl variant also available)
Listening equipment:
Table: Cambridge Audio Alva ST
Cart: Grado Green3
Amp: Sansui 9090
Speakers: Electro Voice TS8-2
