Not On The Radar

Second Language Music, 2025

Not On The Radar, released in May 2025, is my first LP release for 11 years. 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.

The ten tracks on this album were written in Normandy and Paris over a period of a few months in the autumn and winter of 2023. The album really started to take shape when I performed the songs at a sold-out concert in Normandy with my 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). It was such a lovely experience that we decided to record the songs in my painting studio.

My easels were moved aside, a drumkit installed on the other side of a connecting door and the multi-talented Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Papernut Cambridge) engaged as engineer. With David Sheppard’s sensitive hand on the production tiller, the whole album was recorded in one cloudless week in June.

“His most captivating music yet” – 9/10 Uncut

“Considered musings on time passing from late blooming singer songwriter” – ★★★★ Mojo

“A thoughtful reflection on a life well lived, completing a lovely album that provides a mature answer to Dreaming with Alice’s youthful questioning” – The Times

“A quiet, reflective set of songs… intimate pastorals beautifully sung and performed, with expressive, poetic lyrics evoking the cycles of nature and time” – ★★★★ Songlines

“A delicate, finely chiseled, airy work that evokes the serenity of the later Bill Fay, and whose gentle melancholy envelops and warms” – 8/10 Rumore

“Both reassuringly familiar and unpredictably inventive, Not On The Radar delightfully encapsulates the benevolent organic power that can be drawn from a combination of reclusion-borne songcraft and open-minded collaboration” – Freq

“Fry doesn’t often return to his musical roots, but like, say, a Leonard Cohen, when he does it’s cause for celebration and Not On The Radar is a welcome addition to his sparse but brilliant catalogue” –  Terrascope

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