Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (Fat Cat)
UK release date: 22 October 2007
track listing
Disc One
1. Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind
2. I Want To Be Alone
3. Train Song
4. Love Song
5. Winter Is Blue
6. Coldest Night Of The Year
7. I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind
8. Winter Is Blue
9. Girl's Song In Winter
10. If Is In Winter
11. Wishwanderer
12. Don't Believe
13. 17 Pink Sugar Elephants
Disc Two
1. Autumn Leaves
2. Leave Me
3. If In Winter (100 Lovers)
4. How Do I Know
5. Find My Heart Again
6. Go Before The Dawn
7. Girl's Song In Winter
8. I Don't Know What Love Is
9. Don't Believe What They Say
10. Love You Now
11. I Know
12. Someday
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past
few years, you'll know, ad nauseam, that after an
unsuccessful career in late '60s folk-pop and despite
being championed by everyone from Andrew Loog
Oldham to Robert Kirby and the
Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan retired
from the music industry in 1970.
While she lived in blissful hippiedom on the Isle
of Skye, across various seas her one and only album
Just Another Diamond Day was slowly influencing
an entire generation of singer-songwriters from
Devandra Banhart to Joanne Newsom whose
gentle, pop-tinged and string-drenched melodies would
spawn entire genres of nu folk, folktronica, twisted
folk ... even the Magic Numbers owe something
of a debt to her.
When her new century musical progeny sought her out
and welcomed her back into a mainstream ready to
appreciate her, it seemed the music industry went
wild. A female Nick Drake, alive and well and
only too eager to give us new tunes, she was a
folk-pop phoenix risen from the ashes of the
Haight-Ashbury via Canterbury dream.
All well and good but, on the back of one
unsuccessful 1970 album and a few equally unsuccessful
1960s singles, can she possibly warrant a 25-track,
double CD package of singles, outtakes, demos and
rarities? Remarkably, the answer is a resounding yes.
From CD 1's polished singles, released by Decca and
Columbia and shelved by Immediate, through hi-quality
unreleased demo tapes found in an attic by her brother
John to the sparse, pared down acoustic demos that
appear on CD 2, you may find it genuinely difficult to
understand how, even when they had Bob Dylan to
distract them, the counter-culture hippies of four
decades ago could have tossed this music aside.
There are some genuinely amazing songs here, not
least Girl's Song In Winter and 17 Pink Sugar
Elephants. Their titles alone conjure up the scene.
They also highlight perhaps the most important quality
of Bunyan's work - there is a coldness about her music
which is diametrically opposed to the summer sunshine
that is meant to shine over folk.
Listen to the pained, spoken Leave Me at the
beginning of the song of the same name, for a start.
There is a creeping frost in Bunyan's music, a black
dog of the soul at a time when youth culture was about
to explode in a rainbow soaked psychedelic wonderland.
And then remember that CD 2's demos were recorded in
1964 - 18 months before Rubber Soul was
released. She had tuned in and dropped out years
before the phrase even existed.
Keep that in your mind as you listen to this music.
It look the record buying public the best part of 20
years to understand Nick Drake, and Vashti Bunyan had
a 10-year head start on him. She was singing to people
who had only just realised it was okay to have hair
that covered their ears, and she was singing from the
midnight of a winter that was at least ten years away.
Of course they had no chance of understanding her.
Andrew Loog Oldham did, but he saw the potential in
the Rolling Stones before anyone else did, too.
Song titles such as Coldest Night of the Year, Don't
Believe, Go Before The Dawn and Girl's Song In Winter
were not made for the summer of love and certainly not
for the spring leading into it. Just thank a
combination of fate and the musical visionaries of
today that they were kept on ice long enough not to
melt away completely.