During Fry's time in Italy he was introduced to the record producer Vincenzo Micocci. On hearing some of Fry's songs, Micocci signed him to record label IT Dischi, a subsidiary of RCA. Dreaming with Alice was recorded by Fry and a band of session musicians in Rome over a three-day period in the summer of 1971. Following the recording session Fry toured Italy supporting singer Lucio Dalla.
Fry left Italy in autumn 1971 to return to England before Dreaming With Alice was released. He was sent a box of the records following the release on IT Dischi records in Italy in 1972, and had no further dealings with the label. For several years, Fry continued to perform music with various musicians including drummer Pete Thomas (later of Elvis Costello's band The Attractions), but without any associated record releases. In the early 1980s, after a long period of travel in the US and West Africa, Fry decided to return to London and pursue his career as an artist.
Unknown to Mark Fry, the album Dreaming With Alice had been developing cult status over the ensuing three decades as a psychedelic folk classic, garnering acclaim from critics and a new generation of musicians as diverse as Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), Colleen and Plastic Crimewave. Fry was to discover this by chance in the early 2000s (decade).
Dreaming With Alice is included in Record Collector’s Top 20 Strange Folk Albums (Strange Folk Revisited, August 2009).
Mark Fry and Dreaming With Alice are featured in the anthology Galactic Ramble (Foxcote Press, 2009) as well as in Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid, Psych and Experimental Folk by Jeanette Leech (Jawbone Press, 2010).
The highest price paid at auction to date for an original copy of Dreaming With Alice was £2,327 in May 2009.
LIFE (Text Mark Fry)
For me, painting and music have always walked hand in hand.
When I left school in 1970 I set off for Italy to study painting, but I took my guitar with me and ended up recording Dreaming With Alice in Rome.
Back in England in 1973, I joined up with Ben, an old friend from school, and together we formed a band. For a couple of years it seemed as though we were always just a whisker away from being signed up. But the music industry felt very cut-throat, there was a lot of pressure to be commercial, and slowly I began to feel I was losing my way.
In 1975 I decided to go travelling and spent six months working my way across Canada from Newfoundland to Vancouver. At that time in Canada it seemed that everyone was listening to The Beach Boys, which felt a little incongruous on the prairies or up in the Rocky Mountains. I looked forward to getting down to California.
By Christmas I was in Los Angeles and eager to try and get something going. I wrote songs, recorded some demos, played a few gigs and pushed the tapes I had of our band in front of anyone who would listen. Even Phil Everly lent them his ear. He said “Sounds great, man, keep going”, which is what I did, but nothing quite clicked.
By 1977 the band I’d formed with Ben had drifted apart. I went back to painting, although I never stopped writing songs.
Early in 1980 I went travelling again, and spent six months living in the Inner Niger delta in Mali. Africa renewed my love of music.
I used to buy cassette tapes in dusty streets from market hawkers, and that’s how I first came across musicians like Ali Farka Toure, Baba Mall and Youssou N’Dour and the Super Etoile de Dakar. Because I had my guitar with me I was received like a travelling griot and asked to play wherever I happened to be.
One memorable night I was invited to play for a group of Touareg who were camped on the banks of the Niger just south of Timbuktu. I played until my fingers bled and there were only four strings left on my guitar. Their favourite songs were Johnny B Goode and Rock Island Line, but they also quite liked All My Life.
I spent most of the 1980s moving between London and New York, trying to make ends meet and painting when I could. At the end of the decade I got my first painting break. The London art dealer Christopher Hull took notice of my work. Suddenly I had a good gallery that wanted my pictures. I started spending a lot of time in France and it was there that I really started to paint in a quiet and concentrated way. Through the act of painting, songs began to come to me again.
In 2006, things began to conspire to get me recording. I wrote more songs. Somehow, I got to grips with digital technology. I built a little home studio and started work. Old and new friends encouraged me to keep going. A new album of songs began to take shape.
As it turned out, the Sunbeam reissue of Alice in November 2006 was a kind of catalyst. To wake up one morning and suddenly find yourself back in the arms of something you created so long ago has been a strange but magical experience. I realized I would come to regret it if I didn’t follow Alice’s path and see where she would lead me again.
Since Shooting The Moon was released in 2008, I’ve played in all sorts of places, including London, Paris and Chicago, seen another album, I Lived in Trees, released in 2011, and have a fourth in preparation in 2013. Meeting and working with other musicians again has been a wonderful contrast to my solitary life in the painting studio.
You could say that when I’m painting I’m a painter, and when I’m writing and playing music I’m a musician, but for me they are so tangled up together in the creative process that I find them hard to separate: each feeds off the other. The thing is to keep going and see what happens.
By Mark Fry
The Witch:
Dreaming With Alice: Full Album (only to see on YouTube): http://youtu.be/yWtxr-C_LvM
Discography:
Albums:
Dreaming With Alice LP (IT ZLST 70006), RCA / IT Dischi, 1971
Dreaming With Alice CD (SBR CD5028), Sunbeam Records, 2006
Dreaming With Alice LP (SBR LP5028), (includes 2 bonus tracks), Sunbeam Records, 2007 and 2010
Shooting the Moon (IDLECD001), Boredidlebaby, 2008
I Lived In Trees (SL013), Second Language Music, 2011
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