Mark Fry

English psychedelic folk songwriter Mark Fry first gained notice through his debut album, the 1972 acid folk classic Dreaming with Alice, now regarded as one of the genre’s most striking early achievements. Born in the modest British town of Epping to a family whose lineage traces back to prominent chocolatiers, Fry completed his schooling in the U.K. before traveling to Italy to study painting. There he encountered producer Vincenzo Micocci, who responded strongly to Fry’s songs and promptly offered him a contract on the IT Dischi imprint, an Italian affiliate of RCA. A studio ensemble was convened to lay down the tracks that formed Dreaming with Alice during the summer of 1971, after which Fry performed a handful of concerts across Italy. The album appeared the following year, yet Fry kept traveling and making music until he settled back in London in the early 1980s, shifting his focus toward a career in visual art. Even as his reputation as a painter grew, the lone LP developed a devoted cult audience among collectors of rare psych-folk recordings, its limited Italian pressing becoming increasingly scarce. As the record came to symbolize the acid-folk sound, original copies escalated sharply in value, with certain online sales reaching thousands of dollars. After devoting several decades primarily to painting, Fry reentered music in the 2000s upon discovering the stature Dreaming with Alice had acquired. The first in a series of reissues surfaced on Sunbeam Records in 2006, followed in 2008 by his second album, Shooting the Moon. Three years later he issued the collaborative I Lived in Trees under the name Mark Fry and the A. Lords, with Nicholas Palmer and Michael Tanner joining him in its composition. During this period Fry performed live far more frequently than before, including a tour of Japan whose three Tokyo shows were documented on the 2013 release Mark Fry Live in Japan. The next year brought another collection of original material, South Wind, Clear Sky.