It’s never too late for success to come your way, even in your seventies.
Musician Vashti Bunyan is proof of that.
Her Sixties songs, some penned on the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides, are now achieving cult status.
There were high hopes for Vashti when Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham met her in London in 1965 and took an interest in her fragile, ethereal presence and voice.
She recorded a single written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, ‘Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind’, with her own song, I Want To Be Alone on the B side, but it flopped.
Oldham said he saw her as “a continental waif” in the genre of French singer Francoise Hardy with “a body Mick Jagger would have wished on his other self”.
But Marianne Faithfull was to take that role, while Vashti’s ‘girl with a guitar and a sad little love song’ singles flopped.
Disillusioned, Vashti turned her back on the London music scene and hit the road north with a horse, wagon, dog, guitar and then-partner artist Robert Lewis.
She said in an interview that she was looking for a different kind of education from the relatively sheltered one she’d had growing up in central London.
“And I surely got it. No other way could I have learned about life the way I did.
“Living outside most of the time, cooking on fires on the ground, washing in rivers and burns, walking miles every day and watching the landscape slowly change through industrial and rural England to the moorlands and highlands of Scotland.
““Understand, the songs were the dreaming in verges of grimy roads”,
Vashti inspired by life in Hebrides
By the time she reached the Hebrides, she says she had learned about the realities of farming and was an aspiring vegetarian.
Her neighbours, Catherine and Wally Dix took her under their considerable musical wing, introducing her to Gaelic song-writing tradition.
Vashti recalled how Catherine would bring her milk from her own cow every day.
She never performed in Berneray because she said: “I was so overwhelmed by respect for the ancient music I heard there that my own songs seemed irrelevant.
“I was looking for something different and certainly found it in the enormous wisdom and humour, and the story-telling, amongst the more elderly members of the island communities.”
Along the way she wrote the songs that would lead to her album Just Another Diamond Day, released on Phillips Records in December 1970.
Creating music while living the hippie dream
With minimal instrumental accompaniment, the album highlighted Vashti’s vocals in songs penned while she was living the hippie dream.
Catherine Dix was credited as co-writer of the song Iris’s Song for Us, while Wally even translated one verse of the song into Gaelic and found the tune.
Vashti was joined by a wealth of leading folk musicians on the recording and later noted that she lost control of the production under the heavy influences of people like Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band, Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol of Fairport Convention.
The album went largely unnoticed, selling only a few hundred copies and suffering from lack of advertisement.
Vashti had a new baby, and the demands of caring for her child prevented her from promoting her album.
The flop prompted Vashti’s disillusionment and self-imposed exile from the music industry for the next 30 years.
She went to live with the Incredible String Band in a vacant house at Glen Row, south of Innerleithen.
She didn’t pick up a guitar again or write songs until 2002.
Critical acclaim
But despite her decades of exile from the scene, Vashti’s musical stature grew slowly but substantially, until Just Another Diamond Day was issued on CD by Spinney Records in 2000, to great critical acclaim.
Now it’s achieved something of a cult status, considered by many to be one of the best works in British folk.
Inspired to write and sing again, Vashti released two more albums, Lookaftering in 2005 and Heartleap in 2014.
In an interview with popmatters.com Vashti was asked ‘who is the fictional character most like you?’
She answered tellingly: “The person who went to the Outer Hebrides in a horse and wagon and stayed there bringing up kids and animals and being an earth mother.
“The real one didn’t stay in the Hebrides more than six months and was never much of an earth mother.
“Mother yes, earth no. Just mud. Mud, wind and fire.”
She added she’d never had much of a plan but was proud of having learned “how to live with nothing and not being afraid and finding a way to feel safe in the world without a house or a job or knowing how things were going to work out”.
Vashti has written her story down in Wayward: Just Another Life To Live to be published on March 31 in hardback, e-book and audio.
To mark the release of the memoir, she will be performing a career retrospective concert at the Barbican on April 2.
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