Not On The Radar, by Mark Fry

Not On The Radar

by Mark Fry

supported by

	Not On The Radar 00:00 / 03:19

Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Limited edition solid blue vinyl album with full colour inner lyric sleeve. 500 copies only.

Includes digital pre-order of Not On The Radar. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

shipping out on or around May 16, 2025

Purchasable with gift card

£20 GBP or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Limited edition 10 track CD with 8 page lyric booklet. Full colour throughout.

Includes digital pre-order of Not On The Radar. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

shipping out on or around May 16, 2025

Purchasable with gift card

£10 GBP or more
Streaming + Download

Pre-order of Not On The Radar. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

Purchasable with gift card

Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

releases May 16, 2025

£7.99 GBP or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
3 Mark Fry CDs for just £22 (£4 off the normal price) : 'Not On The Radar,' 'South Wind Clear Sky,' 'I Lived In Trees' plus the digital download of all 3 albums and the bonus 'Leaves EP (Fragments From Normandy and England 2010 - 2011).' Note : the download codes for all 3 albums will be sent to you on release day (16th May 2025).

Includes digital pre-order of Not On The Radar. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

shipping out on or around May 16, 2025

Purchasable with gift card

£22 GBP or more
'Not On The Radar' test pressing signed by Mark Fry
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
'Not On The Radar' test pressing signed by Mark Fry. Limited edition of 3. Limited to one per person.

Includes digital pre-order of Not On The Radar. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

Sold Out

1.	Only Love
2.	Big Red Sun
3.	Stormy Sunday
4.	Where The Water Meets The Land
5.	Not On The Radar 03:19	lyrics	buy track
Not On The Radar Somebody’s talking in my ear But I don’t hear a thing Somebody’s trying to call me up But I don’t hear the phone ring They’re all trying to track me down But I’m not on the radar I’m going faster than the speed of sound I’m heading for the stars And they shine so bright And they shine all night They shine all night Somebody’s trying to catch my eye But I’m up and gone Somebody’s trying to reel me in But I’m rolling on They’ll never get me in their sights Oh I’m not on the radar And it won’t be long until I’m out of sight I’m heading for the stars And they shine so bright And they shine all night They shine all night
6.	Daybreak 03:57	lyrics	buy track
Daybreak Daybreak Take this night’s heartache I can’t stand it any more Oh it drives me crazy Come quickly, quickly Bring the morning sun to my door Oh I can’t take night’s heartache Any more I close my eyes I try to dream But I know I’m in too deep I’m too far down the stream I lie awake Light a cigarette Oh I know it’s far too late Too late for regrets Daybreak Take this night’s heartache Oh I can’t stand it any more Oh it drives me crazy Come quickly, quickly Bring the morning sun to my door I can’t take night’s heartaches Any more And if I said I would do it all again Even if you stole the sun Only left me cloud and rain Rain for the rainbows And clouds for the storms Come and take the moon away Bring me the dawn Daybreak Take this night’s heartache I can’t stand it any more Oh it drives me crazy Come quickly, quickly Shine the morning sun through my door I can’t take night’s heartache Any more Come quickly, quickly Shine the morning sun through my door No, I can’t take night’s heartaches Any more
7.	Where Would I Be
8.	Jamais À L’Heure
9.	Rainbow Days
10.	If I Could
11.	Digital only bonus track : Not On The Radar (Richard Norris Remix)

about

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, 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’s 1980s travels in Mali, West Africa, to be completed, just a touch belatedly, a month before the show.

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’s South Wind, Clear Sky. 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.

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’s 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 – as were unhurried, alfresco meals taken in the shade of an ancient... quince tree.

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 what was to be dubbed Not on the Radar (an album title speaking to both Fry’s 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’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 longplayers, 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’ (preceded by Angèle David-Guillou’s endearing reading of the traditional French ballad Aux Marches Du Palais, sung against the clinking of glasses at one of those quince tree-shaded meals) 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. more

credits

releases May 16, 2025

All songs written by Mark Fry
Produced by David Sheppard
Recorded by Ian Button
Album recorded in Mark's studio in Normandy, 23-30 June 2024

The band :

Mark Fry
John Parker
Iain Ross
Angèle David-Guillou
Ian Button
David Sheppard

Mastered by Guy Davie at Electric Mastering
Sleeve : Triple Counterpoint (I) by Mark Fry
Photo © Mark Fry
Design : Angèle David-Guillou, Roxy Fry
Artwork : Lisa O'Meara, Lokate Design
Artist photos on this page : © Jackson Pearce White

license

subtotal
taxes calculated at checkout

about

Mark Fry Normandy, France

Mark Fry’s 1972 debut album, the acid-folk benchmark ‘Dreaming With Alice’, was followed four decades later by a critically acclaimed 2011 collaboration with The A. Lords, the pastoral ‘I Lived In Trees’, and a further album inspired by the life of Saint-Exupéry, ‘South Wind, Clear Sky’, both released on Second Language. ... more

markfry.co.uk

contact / help

Contact Mark Fry

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Top

If you like Mark Fry, you may also like:

Last April
by The Declining Winter

supported by 15 fans who also own “Not On The Radar”
go to album
Isotech
by Future Conditional

supported by 15 fans who also own “Not On The Radar”
go to album
Theory Of Ghosts - EP2
by Theory Of Ghosts

supported by 14 fans who also own “Not On The Radar”

When Nobody Knows Who You Are hits me. It is vibefull and it is the core of Glen magicanship. Love from first noise to the last. Maybe not a lot of folks seeks you but those who do will respect you even when you will be "over the hill" Maciej Sochoń
go to album
The Resonance Sessions
by The Resonance Sessions

This 35-track survey of Western North Carolina's vibrant folk scene doubles as a fundraiser for post-Helene rebuilding and relief efforts. Bandca...mp New & Notable Mar 14, 2025
go to album
innocent as a rose
by Hanna Leess

A Teutonic art-pop paradise rich with finely-woven folk arrangements, whimsical, Björk-esque vocals, and classical accoutrements. Bandcamp... New & Notable Jan 16, 2025
go to album
Sorry I'm So Sensitive
by Bea Stewart

The second EP from Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bea Stewart runs from gentle folk to pillowy pop ballads, all perfectly executed. Bandcamp... New & Notable Apr 15, 2024
go to album
The Allegory Of Vanity
by Cédric Pin/Glen Johnson

supported by 13 fans who also own “Not On The Radar”

Once again, a wonderful work of gloom and romanticism. Been a long time fan of Piano Magic and all their related projects and every time is a pleasure to enter their world. xabitan
go to album