Vashti Bunyan’s story has long since become a myth. An English songwriter feted by The Rolling Stones’ mercurial manager Andrew Loog Oldham, she turned her back on fame for a cross-country quest. Together with her partner Robert Lewis, the two hitched up an old cart and horse for a remarkable adventure, taking them from the fringes of London to the Outer Hebrides and then back again. Fortunately, she had a guitar to tell the tale. Recorded alongside revered producer Joe Boyd, her album ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ is shot through with innocence, a bucolic fairytale suite whose pastoral hymns were simply too rich for the cynical, brash early 70s. The album stiffed, and Vashti was never heard from again.
Well, not quite. As her enchanting new memoir Wayward makes clear, Vashti Bunyan was never a simple puzzle to unlock. A riveting book, it up-ends old myths, and re-asserts fresh truths – what emerges is a depiction of a woman who grappled with failure, only to emerge decades later as an unlikely, but wholly deserved success. When Clash meets Vashti Bunyan at her London hotel she’s quiet yet assured, open to conversation but still eager to pin down her truth. The evening before she emerged onstage for a packed out show at the Barbican venue, her first London concert in almost a decade.
“I had hoped it would be my very last time onstage… because I was just terrified!” she gasps. “I made all kinds of mistakes, like dropping my capo. But I needn’t have worried because I loved it! It was a great night, with a wonderful audience. It was the warmest evening!”
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For a long time now, Vashti Bunyan’s music has attracted a devoted community, with fans in thrall both at her spectral songwriting and the narrative that exists behind them. Wayward tackles these stories with care, preserving the romance while adding in some of the gritty facts – long periods without warm meals, a reliance on the kindness of the strangers, while avoiding the sullen glances of those who didn’t quite appreciate their question.
“With songs, you just put them up and that’s that,” she observes. “But with writing prose, that’s different, it’s a whole different thing. It was an interesting process, and at times really frustrating… but also a really good lesson in how other people perceive the words.”
“The details are really fresh in my mind. And sometimes I think are they the right memory? Or have I just made them up? But no, they are right. I know they’re right. I just know!” she laughs. “I have very, very distinct memories of some of the things that happened to me along that journey, simply because it was so extraordinary. But I didn’t want to write it about it as if it were a sort of Enid Blyton adventure story, because it really wasn’t. It was much muddier than that.”
“Also, I didn’t want to dwell on how difficult some of it was. I think it’s been romanticised as a story, and the reason I wanted to write the book was to put that a bit right, without spoiling it for people, because a lot of people have really liked the romance of it. And yes, it was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do – and extremely hard! But the way that it has grown into some kind of story for people, I didn’t want to ruin that. But I also didn’t want it to be too pretty. It wasn’t pretty.”
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If the journey relied on happenstance and kindness, then so too does Vashti’s life as a whole. The new book digs into her childhood, and explores a chance meeting that saw her cross paths with Andrew Loog Oldham. Taking time out from his rebellious West London charges The Rolling Stones, he attempted to mould Vashti into a kind of Mod pop heroine a la Marianne Faithful. The industry, as she points out in the book, wasn’t kind to her.
“I didn’t navigate it very well,” she reflects. “I was not the right kind of person to take it on. I can look back and think yeah, that was really unfair… and it would have been better if I’d been a boy. But on the other hand, Nick Drake was not a girl and quite similar things happened to him as to me.”
Together with her partner Robert, the two were drawn into the orbit of Donovan, and the psychedelic folk troubadour told them of an artistic community he was intent on building on the Hebridean island of Skye. “I really liked his lyrics,” she says. “His songs were in my head, so I’m sure he was influence. Looking back, some of it in my phrasing, too. But I didn’t really know him well – only his music!”
And so they set off. Wayward is often at its most gripping when illuminating the hardships they faced – the fantasy of life on the road being somewhat different than waking up to torrential rain with an uncertain roof over your head. One lasting relationship Vashti Bunyan made along the way was an enduring respect for traditional travelling communities, who proved vital in keeping the young couple adrift of danger.
“It would have been possible, but it wouldn’t have been so much fun!” she exclaims. “They knew all about us. I think we represented a past they had moved on from, or a world their parents grew up in. But they were very kind.”
“Other people – non-travelling people – were kind, too,” she points out. “I remember being in the Lake District, and we were suffering – really suffering! It was cold, really wet. And this couple gave their house over to us! Some people would embrace what we were doing without knowing too much about it… we represented something courageous, I think.”
“But we did experience some negativity,” she says. “From people we met, from the police. A lot of prejudice. And of course, they’d hear our accents and that all changed. But to experience what travelling people were experiencing was really an education.”
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The book drifts across the country, the cart – and faithful, ever-energetic horse – winding its way across England, through the Scottish West Coast, and over the sea to Skye, before washing up on the island of Berneray. On their arrival, the two found that the promised artistic haven wasn’t quite as concrete as it could have been, and after a short – if fruitful – sojourn on the island, the two returned. Finding their way to London, Vashti Bunyan was invited into the studio with Joe Boyd, an uber-hip producer whose role alongside Fairport Convention and John Martyn gave him impeccable credentials.
Vashti Bunyan’s debut album ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ fell into place in an incredibly short period of time. “It was maybe three days, three evenings,” she recalls. “My main memory is that I’d be on my own for so long, writing music with a guitar, and that made it so extraordinary to be around other musicians. It was quite overwhelming at times. It felt too shy to say: oh, could we do it another way?”
“I didn’t want it to sound folky, because I wasn’t a folk singer – I didn’t sing at folk clubs. But it all happened so quickly, with other musicians who were confident and competent… whereas I was not!”
The final recordings utilised members of the Incredible String Band – fresh from their Woodstock performance – and arranger Robert Kirby, who of course worked on Nick Drake’s material. Of the composer, Vashti gushes that Robert Kirby was “just such a lovely, lovely guy. And it was extraordinary to me – he arrived with these arrangements for the songs, and they were just what I’d heard in my mind! I remember we disagreed on the arrangement for ‘Rainbow River’ – I was so protective! But we met years later, and when I brought it up he just smiled. It was so sad when he died, as we’d been discussing new music, and he was going to help on my next album.”
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Yet Robert’s magic couldn’t bring Vashti’s dreams into focus. “I didn’t hear it until it was finished. It was all mixed and mastered without me. And while I do love it now, for years I couldn’t even listen to it. I can forgive it for what it is. Sometimes I read people saying all these lovely things about the album, and I think: are they really talking about it…? It can be hard to accept, but I’m truly grateful.”
The album was released in the winter of 1970, and disappeared without a trace. An immediate footnote on broader careers, it received scant reviews, and even more desultorily sales. For its author, that – it seemed – was that. “My music had been so completely rejected,” she points out. “As far as I was concerned, I was a total failure. And I didn’t like that feeling. I never sang to my kids, and the only music we had in the house was Bob Dylan, or perhaps Bob Marley. But then a different generation came around, and saw the album for what it was. And that was a wonderful feeling, to be accepted.”
A Google search in the mid 90s illuminated Vashti Bunyan’s enduring cult following – her strange, Biblical name, the Nick Drake associations, and of course that singular, extraordinary album. Brought back into print, ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ was retrospectively anointed as a classic of the era, a position it retains to this day, soundtracking global ad campaigns in the process. “It remains very surprising to me,” she says. “I remember once, I found myself singing at an Esquire event in Moscow, as the Editor of Esquire Russia liked my music. I mean, how does that happen? I’m somebody who disappeared, how do they hear about it?”
Clash ends by looking back over that Barbican show, and notes that her initial return brought one collaboration – alongside Anima Collective, no less – and studio albums. Could she – would she – ever return to the studio, to add to that slim catalogue?
“I recorded those two albums myself,” she notes. “I taught myself Pro Tools, and Logic, and I was quite proud of myself for being able to do it. I haven’t written anything for a while, except for the book. But it was good to pick up the guitar again for the show. Perhaps some songs will appear… who knows?”
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Vashti Bunyan’s memoir Wayward is out now.
Words: Robin Murray
Photography: Rachel Lipsitz
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