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\u2019s still-evolving songwriting canon, with a track list judiciously plucked from both his 21st century solo albums and his cult 1972 acid-folk benchmark ‘Dreaming With Alice’ alongside a tranche of previously unheard material, including one song that had begun life in the course of Fry\u2019s 1980s travels in Mali, West Africa, to be completed, just a touch belatedly, a month before the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, several of the new songs aired at the Varengeville 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, his first since 2014\u2019s ‘South Wind, Clear Sky.’ Having rehearsed for the gallery concert with his band \u2013 guitarist Iain Ross (Barry Adamson, Laika), double bassist John Parker (Nizlopi), keyboardist\/vocalist Ang\u00e8le David-Guillou (Piano Magic, Klima) and percussionist David Sheppard (Snow Palms, Ellis Island Sound) \u2013 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\u2019s ‘Music from Big Pink’ or Cowboy Junkies\u2019 ‘Trinity Sessions.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With David Sheppard producing, assisted by gifted sound engineer\/musical wizard Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Wreckless Eric), the majority of the album was to be captured live, the emphasis on spontaneity, the occasional sonic intrusion from Norman weather and wildlife welcomed as part of the documentary feel of the recording. Several hundred metres of cabling, some vintage microphones, an Indian harmonium and an ethereal-sounding shahi baaja were installed in the sun-dappled studio, alongside guitars, amps, drums and Mark\u2019s upright piano, and recording would commence during an idyllic Norman heatwave in mid-June 2024. Remembering to turn off a nearby electric cattle fence that produced what for a while was a baffling hum, the ensemble worked their way through just shy of a dozen new Mark Fry originals in a little over a week, the opportunity to investigate a variety of different approaches and arrangement ideas, without the pressure of a ticking studio clock, a blessing for all involved \u2013 as were unhurried, alfresco meals taken in the shade of an ancient quince tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s singing voice (typically described by reviewers as some variation on \u201cchocolate cream\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s lyrics, many of them poetic disquisitions on ebbing time, mortality and nature\u2019s waxing and waning cycles, here and there leavened with sardonic humour, tell a contrasting story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The songs on what was to be dubbed ‘Not on the Radar’ (an album title speaking to both Fry\u2019s rural isolation as well as his existential disconnection from the entrapments of modern life), are surely among the finest in his now considerable oeuvre. Whether it\u2019s the touchingly ingenuous, vaguely Bill Fay-like \u2018Only Love\u2019 (a sort of \u2018love song to love\u2019) or the similarly numinous and romantic \u2018Where Would I Be\u2019 with its haunting choral coda, the aching nocturne \u2018Daybreak\u2019 or the atmospheric, piano-dappled ballads \u2018Where the Water Meets The Land\u2019 and \u2018Big Red Sun\u2019, this is timeless, personal and genuinely moving songwriting given wing by some beautifully restrained, simpatico ensemble playing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/secondlanguagemusic.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Mark-Fry-Not-On-The-Radar-s-1024x1024.jpg\")