Diamond In The Rough

A VISIONARY SINGER-SONGWRITER IT TOOK THE WORLD 40 YEARS TO RECOGNISE, WHO QUIT MUSIC TO TREK BRITAIN IN A HORSEDRAWN CARAVAN, AND QUIT AGAIN TO RETREAT INTO DECADES OF DOMESTIC SECLUSION, Vashti Bunyan IS SHROUDED IN MYTH AND PICTURESQUE LEGEND. BUT AS HER EXTRAORDINARY NEW MEMOIR REVEALS, THAT’S ONLY THE HALF OF IT. “I KNOW WHERE THE TRAUMA LIVES,” SHE TELLS Andrew Male.

PHOTOGRAPH: Phillip Harrington

IT WAS SPRING 1966 AND VASHTI Bunyan was in London’s Olympic Studios, recording Mann and Weil’s call-and-response love song The Coldest Night Of The Year with harmony duo Twice As Much. It was the 20-year-old’s next potential single for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records label and she was on a high. “Oh, I just loved it,” she tells MOJO today. “We’d been rehearsing and doing overlays. We wanted a Beach Boys kind of sound, and I think we got it. It was great.”

In the two years since she’d been thrown out of Oxford’s Ruskin School Of Drawing And Fine Art, this West London-raised “wild child” had been introduced to Rolling Stones manager Loog Oldham and recorded a brace of singles, a defiantly introspective cover of Jagger/ Richards’ Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind for Decca and her own gorgeously bereft Train Song for Columbia. She’d been through a whirlwind of TV, radio and press, but all for nothing. No sales. Shelved singles. Coldest Night felt like her last chance.

“But it never happened and I was never told why,” says Bunyan. When another potential single was shelved, Bunyan’s world fell away. “It was a series of things going wrong,” she explains. “The singles that didn’t work, the recordings that weren’t released, combined with various other heartbreaks. I had no idea it was depression. Just this sensation of an abyss opening up next to me. It had never been there before but after that it was always there.”

Prescribed Librium and Valium, she turned her back on singing and, in the early summer of 1968, left home with her dog Blue and went to live under a rhododendron bush on Bromley Common, south London, with her artist friend (and soon to be lover) Robert Lewis. When police moved them on they bought an old horse-drawn baker’s van and a black horse called Bess with money loaned to them by Lewis’s friend Donovan.

“He’d just bought a place off the west coast of Scotland,” explains Bunyan, “where there’d be this renaissance of writers, painters and musicians.”

Romanced by the idea of an artistic community in this remote corner of the UK, Bunyan and Lewis decided they’d travel up by horse and cart, doing odd jobs, putting on shows. A chance to escape all her dark thoughts, the journey would come to shape who Vashti Bunyan was and influence and inspire her defining works, the lilting, pastoral love songs of 1970’s Just Another Diamond Day. It also brought a weight of subsequently-spun myth and misinterpretation.