Normandy-based singer-songwriter Mark Fry will release his new album ‘Not On The Radar’ via Second Language on 16th May. To coincide with the release, Fry will make a rare live appearance at London’s Stone Nest on the same day (tickets available HERE). Mark Fry is perhaps best known for his debut album, the acid-folk benchmark ‘Dreaming With Alice’, recorded in Rome in 1972. After a hiatus of almost four decades, in which Fry focused primarily on painting, he began recording again, with a critically acclaimed 2011 collaboration with The A. Lords, ‘I Lived In Trees’, and a further album inspired by the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘South Wind, Clear Sky’, both released on Second Language. Produced by David Sheppard (Snow Palms, Ellis Island Sound), ‘Not On The Radar’ will be available on vinyl, CD and as a download. Heron Island Productions have unveiled a TEASER to their forthcoming full-length documentary about the singer-songwriter and painter entitled ‘Where The Water Meets The Land’.
HEAR TITLE TRACK ‘NOT ON THE RADAR’
The new album’s title speaks to both Fry’s rural isolation and his existential disconnection from the entrapments of modern life. “When I’m working, I need a sense of solitude in order to find that space towards the edge where there’s a point of connection between now and then,” explains Mark. “That’s where my songs and paintings are hiding. Some songs come so fast that I’m not even present, I don’t remember being there. Others I have to chip away at. I often write music very late at night or early in the morning – if I’m lucky I can catch myself unawares then. I always wanted to make an album like this, recording live with everyone playing together in the same room. It’s a spontaneous creative experience, and the intensity of it is quite different from what happens when you lay down tracks separately.”
In March of 2024, singer-songwriter Mark Fry staged a rare concert in the picturesque Normandy village of Varengeville-sur-Mer, once the rural hideaway of legendary painter Georges Braque, now home to a contemporary arts space with a capacious gallery that also serves as a striking performance venue. The sold-out show, featuring the singer and his four-piece band, would prove to be a tour de force, offering a timely audit of the 71-year-old Fry’s still-evolving songwriting canon. Indeed, several of the new songs aired at the show were the product of an extended 2023 and early 2024 creative roll, and, harnessing the momentum, Fry was eager to record them for what promised to be a bold new album. Having rehearsed for the gallery concert with his band – guitarist Iain Ross (Barry Adamson, Laika), double bassist John Parker (Nizlopi), keyboardist / vocalist Angèle David-Guillou (Piano Magic, Klima) and percussionist David Sheppard (Snow Palms, Ellis Island Sound) – in his painting studio deep in the Norman countryside, it seemed logical to use the same creative space to cut a new longplayer, with a nod to illustrious forebears such as The Band’s ‘Music from Big Pink’ or Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Trinity Sessions’.
The musical results would prove instantly persuasive and consistently magical: the quieter, more pastoral songs proffering an almost uncanny intimacy, the more up-tempo numbers zinging with dynamic immediacy. Most importantly, Mark’s singing voice (typically described by reviewers as some variation on “chocolate cream” when not being compared to his immediate forebears Nick Drake and/or Kevin Ayers…) seemingly buffed to a new radiance, his delivery taking on hitherto unheard shades of both delicacy and gravity and, here and there, a new-found urbane laconicism. It’s difficult to think of a comparably aged singer whose voice remains so unadulterated and affecting. These could be the vocal takes of a 35-year-old, even if Fry’s lyrics, many of them poetic disquisitions on ebbing time, mortality and nature’s waxing and waning cycles, here and there leavened with sardonic humour, tell a contrasting story.
The songs on ‘Not On The Radar’ are surely among the finest in his now considerable oeuvre. Whether it’s the touchingly ingenuous, vaguely Bill Fay-like ‘Only Love’ (a sort of ‘love song to love’) or the similarly numinous and romantic ‘Where Would I Be’ with its haunting choral coda, the aching nocturne ‘Daybreak’ or the atmospheric, piano-dappled ballads ‘Where the Water Meets the Land’ and ‘Big Red Sun’, this is timeless, personal and genuinely moving songwriting given wing by some beautifully restrained, simpatico ensemble playing.
While building on the fertile, acoustic guitar-based landscapes of earlier Mark Fry solo long-players, ‘Not On The Radar’ equally embraces some of the grainier pastoralism of ‘I Lived in Trees’, his 2011 collaboration with The A. Lords, and even allows the occasional waft of psychedelia to tint proceedings, notably whenever a plangent shahi baaja arpeggio ripples across the soundscape. But there are unprecedented Mark Fry dispatches here, too, not least the propulsive, guitar-less title track, its insistent percussive groove and electronic glints framing a vocal of dispassionate dislocation that’s more redolent of ‘I’m Your Man’-era Leonard Cohen or something by Serge Gainsbourg than anything identifiably ‘folk’. Likewise, the effervescent, African pop-tinged ‘Stormy Sunday’ finds Fry again abandoning his signature six-string while deploying meteorological metaphors against a colourful tapestry of tremolo and highlife guitars, buoyant percussion and wild penny whistles.
Elsewhere, ‘Jamais À L’Heure’ and the semi-ambient, spoken word, almost painterly ‘Rainbow Days’ evoke a tangible sense of the bucolic environment from which all the music on this sensuous album springs. The record closes with the spare but deeply affecting ‘If I Could’ – a sort of life audit as folk hymn, its two brief but perfectly harmonised choruses encapsulating what is, to all intents and purposes, Mark Fry’s ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’, its counsel, to embrace the darkness of life as readily as its light, offering a typically poignant note – simultaneously celebratory and rueful – on which to conclude an album whose meticulous marriage of the sanguine and the elegiac is perhaps its defining characteristic.
FRIDAY 16TH MAY – LONDON, STONE NEST (WITH SPECIAL GUEST DAISY RICKMAN) – BUY TICKETS
Mark Fry performs at Stone Nest with a full band: drummer Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Wreckless Eric), pianist / vocalist Angèle David-Guillou (Piano Magic, Klima), double bassist John Parker (Nizlopi), guitarist Iain Ross (Barry Adamson, Laika) and guitarist / percussionist David Sheppard (Snow Palms, Ellis Island Sound). Opening this one-off show is rising star Daisy Rickman, who weaves the spiritual history of her native Cornwall into hypnotic folk songs that feel like spells, speaking to something ancient and unknown.
