Next release in Bill Fay cover series – Hear MEMORIALS’ version of Bill Fay Group’s ‘Just A Moon’

“Bill Fay exists as a secret handshake amongst us musicians. Those of us familiar with his body of work are obsessed with it. When I first heard him, years ago, I felt as if I was rediscovering something I had lost and had long been looking for.”  – Kevin Morby

Experimental pop band MEMORIALS have shared their version of Bill Fay Group’s ‘Just A Moon’, the latest installment in a special singles series featuring different artists celebrating and interpreting Fay’s work. Previous covers in the series have come from Steve Gunn, Kevin Morby, Julia Jacklin, Mary Lattimore, Hiss Golden Messenger, Jeff Tweedy, Marlon Williams and James Heather.

‘Just A Moon’ can be found on Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the ‘lost’ Bill Fay album recorded between 1978 and 1980, which was reissued by Dead Oceans in 2024 for the first time in its entirety on vinyl. The album emerged from sessions Fay held with musicians Rauf Galip, Bill Stratton, and Gary Smith. Stratton and Smith had previously contacted Fay’s original record label to enquire about the whereabouts of the follow-up to his 1970 and 1971 classics, Bill Fay and Time of the Last Persecution, which ultimately led to their meeting.

On their cover of ‘Just A Moon’, MEMORIALS said:

“We worked on this cover right in the middle of writing our second album All Clouds Bring Not Rain at the start of 2025. While we’d been working on our own song ‘Watching the Moon’, we went through an extensive moment of sharing other great songs with a similar moon forward focus! This Bill fay song was something we’d been listening to a lot, so when the idea to do the cover was discussed with Dead Oceans it was the obvious choice. Bill’s version is wonderful, of course, and rather than recreating it, we decided to run with his brilliant song, changing the time signature and reframing it in our world. We recorded it at home and worked quickly! Bill’s songs have a way of saying a lot with very little, deceptively simple but incredibly deep and this is really hard to do well. He is an inspiration in so many ways.

Stream all of the covers in the series so far here:

About MEMORIALS:

MEMORIALS are an experimental pop band from the UK with a psychedelic sound that is both melodic and unconventional. They draw inspiration from all corners of your record collection, including folk, dub, post punk, experimental tape music, kosmische, spiritual jazz and Canterbury prog. Think Nico singing with Can produced by David Axelrod and you’re somewhere in the right ballpark, for a song or two at least. With their playful, genre-bending style they sit comfortably alongside Broadcast, Portishead and The Velvet Underground. Touring has taken them around the world, including invitations to open for Stereolab and Tortoise.

After releasing two acclaimed film soundtracks in 2023, the duo (Verity Susman and Matthew Simms, previously of Electrelane/WIRE) began recording their own more song-based music resulting in an assured and adventurous debut album, 2024’s Memorial Waterslides. Their follow-up was released March 2026 – the stunning album All Clouds Bring Not Rain. The duo locked themselves away in a studio in a barn secluded deep in the woods in southwestern France and re-emerged with a beautiful, unusual record that is both melodic and unconventional. For such an ambitious album it’s striking that it was written, performed, recorded and mixed solely by the two of them