Tracklisting :
- Only Love
- Big Red Sun
- Stormy Sunday
- Where The Water Meets The Land
- Not On The Radar
- Daybreak
- Where Would I Be
- Jamais A L’Heure
- Rainbow Days
- If I Could
- Parallel Moon (Digital only)
“To observe the preparatory process is to be present in history and to watch the mind of the artist at work,” noted the great chronicler of Renaissance painters, Giorgio Vasari. Just as with painters, the initial sketches of composers and songwriters can also provide fascinating glimpses of what to the uninitiated can seem like the mysterious, alchemical business of
creativity.
Mark Fry is certainly no stranger to the preparatory sketch. An artist in the truest sense of the word, renowned equally for his decades-long career as a painter of vibrant abstracts and as a cult psychedelic minstrel turned intimate, evocative singer-songwriter, his atelier, housed in a converted stable building at his Normandy home, literally doubles as his music studio.
It was in this space that Mark’s fifth solo album, ‘Not On The Radar,’ released back in May 2025, was recorded in the summer of 2024, with the singer pushing back his easels to accommodate a four-piece live band and vanloads of miscellaneous accompanying paraphernalia. Before that, the studio had been a considerably emptier space in which working versions of the album’s ten languidly bucolic compositions were first demoed by the solitary songwriter (although some emergent tracks were also captured at Balintore – the home studio of Mark’s regular guitarist, Iain Ross, housed on the latter’s London-moored canal barge).
With those sketches presented here in the same running order as on the mothership longplayer, this new album stands as a document of process – offering the opportunity for track-by-track comparison for those already familiar with Not On The Radar. Crucially, it also makes for a very fine standalone album in its own right which, if nothing else, bears testament to the inherent robustness of Mark Fry’s songwriting.
With just guitar and (sometimes double-tracked) voice, supplemented by the odd smudge of Mark’s piano or tambourine, songs that would become album bulwarks like ‘Big Red Sun’ and ‘Where the Water Meets the Land’ are here revealed in more fragile, nascent form, often with work-in-progress lyrics still in place, while intimate, poignant ballads like ‘Daybreak’, ‘Where Would I Be’ and ‘If I Could’ are delivered with a raw immediacy that only deepens their emotional charge. By contrast, up-tempo essays like ‘Stormy Sunday’ and the title track are strummed work-throughs, almost unrecognisable from their pliant, percussive reinventions on Not On The Radar. ‘Rainbow Days’, meanwhile, an immersive, spoken- word nature meditation on the album proper, is here shown to have begun life as a drowsy ballad, replete with a repeated, angular guitar motif.
So, sure enough, this album is very much a case of watching ‘the mind of the artist at work’ – privileged access to the creative process – but, as Mark suggests, it also demonstrates how songwriting method lends itself to documentation, even at the most embryonic stage :
“With a painting, the starting point, the first tentative gestures, the endless paths you might have taken, are soon lost in the journey. When writing a song, those first moments when its taking form can be recorded. In that sense, the songs on this album are preliminary drawings to larger paintings.”
‘Not On The Radar (The Demos)’ is available exclusively from Norman Records here