The 2kDozen 500: #295 - Bill Fay, "Time of the Last Persecution"

Black and white photo cover, big tramp beard and an obvious sense of, well, persecution. There aren't as many lyrics about Jesus and reconciliation, but this might be because those things weren't as immediate for young Bill then as they are for auld Bill now. Trite but it makes sense.

So "Plan D". "Soon Plan D/Will be released/And the seas will rise/And the skies open" it starts. "Is that not some cause/For worship/Being born/Among those trees/Though the Beast/Is lurking?" he says. His are windows out which things definitely happen, windows through which I would be nervous to look. When he sings about "Pictures of Adolph" on TV and in papers "again", he could be writing about Channel 5, but he opens up onto a more cosmic level - that there's a choice that will have to be made between Christ and Hitler, or "Christ or all the Caesars to come". It's like a great comic book, the way history and thought move out on a lateral plane. Can't quite summon the words to wrap it up.

"When you stand and face the gas masks and truncheons/You must know what it all really means." It's all about revelation and persecution and time and history jumbled into kaleidoscopic shapes. And Bill feels he's stood on the shores of Lake Antichrist. There's some tangled jazzy guitar, piano and sax mess boiling underneath his mournful song as well. You can see how all this wore the shit out of him. This is the astounding stuff; "Life Is People" is the washback, the galactic echo of this black hole being formed from bright star matter, the tidemark of a life lived with difficulty.

Rating: Galaxial Kaleidoscope out of Lake Antichrist