Take Me To The River

Vashti Bunyan fled the 1960s music business to roam Britain on an horse and cart, leaving behind one lost single and an album of such intense beauty that it became an international cult hit 30 years later. Sylvia Patterson welcomes back nu-folk’s most talented absentee

There are hippies, dreamers, eco-vegan sensitive souls and then there’s Vashti Bunyan. “The pure life is a very difficult life to live,” chuckles the 60 year old minstrel down a transatlantic phone line, “and you can become so extreme. I became very extreme. To the point of apologising to vegetables before I cut them. Y’know? I’d be ‘everything has the right to be on this Earth therefore what gives me the right to stop this broccoli from reproducing itself by cutting its flowers off?’ Extreme! It got to the point where I could barely be alive myself…”

Imagine a music so pure, so delicate, it darts through your window like a single sunbeam, dancing through the dust, scattering in slow motion like a handful of wheat across the gingham bedspread of a bare-foot goddess in the summer of 1969. Vashti Bunyan’s music is far less tough than that.

Her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, was released in 1970 to universal silence. It began selling, finally, in 1997 as a bootleg on eBay for a decidedly impure £600, before its re-release in 2000. A beguiling, pastoral sound-scape of almost-Elizabethan vocals, over flutes, harpsichord and acoustic guitar, it painted a sun-streaked water colour of the rustic fields of Britain, all rivers, peat, magpies, lily ponds and pebbles transforming into sand.

Thirty-five years later, her second album, Lookaftering (2005) was surely the most belated follow-up in musical history; her winsome atmospherics turned widescreen through piano, strings and emerging confidence in a melancholic rumination on love, loss and motherhood.  She’s the toast, today, of the global nu-folk uprising with a personal new friend in the Larry the Lamb of Folk, Devendra Banhart, who had her guest-vocal on his album Rejoicing In The Hands Of The Golden Empress.

Today, the London-born, now-Edinburgh-living sprite-of-the-wind is in Los Angeles, a surprisingly giggly 60-year-old awaiting the birth of her first grandchild while reeling, still, from the shock of creative acceptance, at last.