Reviews
Guardian - Friday Review July 21st 2000
****
Roll up for one of the great lost artefacts of Britfolk. Vashti's one and only album was recorded in 1969 and featured such folkishly inclined luminaries of the era as Robin Williamson, Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol. The disk was released in 1970 and promptly vanished - rather like Vashti herself, who had retired to rural Scotland with her new baby. Rescued by Spinney, Diamond Day is now striking for its intricate miniaturist arrangements and the wide-eyed wonder of Vashti's songs, which are like dreams from a child's picture book. Her voice is barely a whisper, confiding shy intimacies to the microphone about animals, tress and sunsets. Extraordinary.
Adam Sweeting.
Time Out - July 26th 2000
It's a story of its time, and it starts on the day art student Vashti Bunyan and her boyfriend Robert heard about this island on the Outer Hebrides owned by Donovan, where a load of artists were gathering together to form a new society. Vashti was already a prolific songwriter, but after two solo singles failed to make any impact, it seemed a good idea to leave everything behind. Donovan had even lent them the money to buy a wagon and a horse. So that's what they did.
It took them two years to get there, by which time everybody had buggered off back to London. Not that it matters. The songs on 'Just Another Diamond Day' chronicle the odyssey north, which explains the unquenchable optimism that propelled them along. It's tempting to pick out specific tunes - well, today's favourites are the pastoral title track and the timorous recorders that frame 'Rainbow River' - but like any of Nick Drake's three albums (with whom this shares a string arranger), the whole transcends its constituent parts. Alive and content as she may be, the comparisons aren't without foundation. There's something strangely mythical about the world these songs inhabit that correlates to none of your workaday problems, yet somehow delivers you from all of them. Perhaps that's why I can't bring myself to remove Just Another Diamond Day' from my turntable.
Peter Paphides.
New Musical Express - August 12th 2000
By the end of the '60s, plenty of British hippies had given up trying to recreate a Utopian idyll in the cities and made a break for the countryside. One such was the formidably named Vashti Bunyan, a singer/songwriter discovered by Andrew Oldham and - briefly - hyped as the new Marianne Faithfull.
In 1968, her career going nowhere, Bunyan did what must have seemed the logical thing - set of for an artist's community set up by Donovan on the Isle of Skye in a gypsy caravan with a horse, a dog and a boyfriend in tow. The journey lasted a year and a half, and ended when they discovered Donovan had given up on the whole plan.
What remained however, were a dozen or so tremendous songs she'd written on the way, the kind of songs that evoke a gentle, innocent, bucolic life that only ever existed in the played out fantasies of a few ambitious hippies. Recorded in London with various straw-chewing reprobates from Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, plus Nick Drake's string arranger Robert Kirby, 'Just Another Diamond Day' was briefly released and roundly ignored, in 1970. Bunyan, by now completely fed up with the game, stuffed off to the west of Ireland and didn't come back.
If her life was as free of urban shit as this blessedly reissued album suggests, who can blame her? Those suspicious of fol-de-rolling may want to tread carefully here, but 'Glow Worms' and 'Swallow Song', especially, are gifted with a beauty and purity rare even in her contemporaries. And all strangely fashionable too, thanks to Kathryn Williams' nomination for the Mercury fandango. To the bothy, kids. (7)
John Mulvey
Sleaze Nation - July 2000
Imagine a world without irony or sarcasm. A world where people dream of leaving the city and living in a gypsy caravan with only their families and other animals for company. Imagine a world that's never heard of cocaine, Hip-Hop, Internet porn or WAP phones. Sounds shit, right? Well, on this evidence, its fucking great. Recorded in 1969 with many of the people who assisted on the Nick Drake albums, JADD revels in its own, unwitting, uncoolness. Vashti sings in an unhurried, totally pure voice, accompanied by piano, guitar, whatever's around. It is a forgotten Brit-folk classic and you need it more than sleep or money.
Rob Fitzpatrick
Mojo -August 2000
After being featured in a recent MOJO Buried Treasure (MOJO 77), this melancholic fragment of frail late '60s Brit-folk finally sees the light of day. Four years down the line from being managed by Andrew Loog Oldham and touted as 'the new Marianne Faithfull', in 1969 Vashti was recording with Joe Boyd and occupying the same winsome fairy-tale space as Donovan and the Incredible String Band - fireflies, swallows, rainbow rivers and laughing streams. Under-produced, with a certain ghostly fireside atmosphere, this collection - featuring some wonderful, unreleased acetates from '67 and'68 - will - for some, seem as beguilingly delicate as spiders' webs. For other, less delicate souls, it will seem as sick-makingly twee as a marathon Bagpuss session and a family-size bag of marshmallow twists.
AM
Select - September 2000
Championed by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley, this 1970 album from the lost folkie diva has changed hands for up to £900.
...
While her name sounds like a Californian religious cult, Vashti Bunyan actually occupies more rock'n'roll notions of cultdom. Discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham, she had the looks of Francoise Hardy, while her sole LP was produced by Nick Drake guru Joe Boyd and arranged by Drake collaborator Robert Kirby. When she left London to live in the Hebrides this perfected the mystique.
Consequently this album gained legendary status, but the reality can't match the myth, let alone its price. Unlike Drake, Bunyan's music hasn't dated well. The combination of her wide-eyed fragile vocals (which make B's Isobell Campbell sound like Courtney Love) and a lyrical preoccupation with worms, grubs and ponies can be cloying to say the least.
If you can suspend your disbelief, there's a peculiar charm to it all, particularly when Kirby's arrangements add a degree of robustness to the proceedings. 'Diamond Day', 'Swallow Song' and 'Rainbow River' are worthy companions to Drake, albeit at his most frail and waif-like. Take your shoes off at the door and tread very gently indeed.
Toby Manning
Sleaze Nation - September 2000
Folk music is unlikely to ever be the new rock'n'roll. No, folk music is unlikely ever to be the new anything. In fact, folk music will be lucky if it's ever modern enough to be other than the old folk music. There is a certain advantage to this staid rigidity, however, and that is that being out of date is not a problem. Good news for Vashti Bunyan, then, whose Just Another Diamond Day is now reissued on
space-groovers Quickspace's new label a mere 30 years after it first surfaced briefly. Produced by the legendary Joe Boyd and featuring members of Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band it's a collection of timeless songs, songs that could've been played around open hearths for the last couple of hundred years and sounded much the same and songs that make your spine tingle when Bunyan's golden voice floats off the vinyl. Sure, she faa-laa-laa's now and again but that's a small price to pay to jettison your prejudices and hear music so beautiful.
Jim
Record Collector - September 2000
Under the name of Vashti, Ms Bunyan was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham in the mid-6os, and given an Immediate contract and a murky Jagger -Richard song. Five years later she cut this solitary album, before retiring to the Outer Hebrides. The album duly became a £2oo rarity - hence the excitement in collector's circles about this re-issue, which also adds a quartet of earlier rarities.
And the music? It's whimsical, sometimes eerie folk, as if a children's entertainer was out to give her charges a week's worth of nightmares. Robin Williamson, Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol are among the musical guests, while Joe Boyd is the producer; but the vision is very much Bunyan's own, the closest comparison being with Donovan's "A Gift From A flower To A Garden".
Peter Doggett
Q - October 2000
Rare Joe Boyd-produced folk opus from the one-time "new Marianne Faithfull".
Vashti Bunyan's career got off to a flying start in 1965. Managed by Andrew Loog Oldham, she recorded a Jagger/Richards single and made an appearance in the Pink Floyd movie Tonite Let's All Make Love In London. However subsequent demos led to nothing. Then in '69, producer Joe Boyd coaxed her back into the studio to record her minimal, airy folk songs with Fairport Convention's Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol. Bunyan's ethereal tones failed to ignite public interest and obscurity and a £400 price tag for the vinyl version of the album ensued. Legend aside, Just Another Diamond Day is something of a gem. Bunyan's voice is lonely, lovelorn and fragile, and with three tracks scored by Nick Drake arranger Robert Kirby this remains an achingly memorable outing.
***
Dave Henderson
GUARDIAN
Pop ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Down the Dustpipe
Royal Festival Hall, London
David Peschek Monday April 21, 2003
Intended to celebrate the rampant Anglophilia of former Pavement ideologue Stephen Malkmus, and highlight transatlantic cultural exchange, Down the Dustpipe is, effectively, a mini Meltdown festival over two nights. Friday offers the less successful bill, but gains kudos for including Graham
Coxon's first appearance since leaving Blur - if he has actually left, that
is. Blur chose American alternative rock as their route out of the Britpop
ghetto, so this feels like the repaying of a debt.
Last seen in the building being introduced, by a bewildered Arthur Lee, as
Gram Caxton (during one of the recent Love shows), Coxon treads a fine line between elemental indie loser and overwrought fifth-former. Mumbling,
sniffing and rubbing his face, he looks like he might have trouble tying his
own shoelaces - which is worrying, since he's in his mid 30s. Though you
can't help rooting for him, the truth is he is an extremely able (if
unoriginal) guitarist who just can't sing. There's some charm in the first
few songs, performed acoustically, but once the band arrive all subtlety is
lost in a series of fierce but obvious Sonic Youth pastiches.
Saturday offers more marvels. Vashti Bunyan may only play three songs, but she carries a substantial part of the evening's expectations. Veteran of
only one album, Just Another Diamond Day (from 1969, impossibly rare until reissued in 2000), Bunyan's timorous, spectral folk is utterly captivating, though her nerves are obvious. To her right, playing perfectly judged delicate guitar, is Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who has been working with her on new material. Hopefully this tantalisingly brief turn isn't the last we shall see of Bunyan.
Super Furry Animals have just completed a new album, but play only a handful of new songs (such as The Golden Retriever, a marvellous rock'n'roll romp oddly reminiscent of Hawkwind, is accompanied by film of said dog, leaping).
Instead, they construct a languorous set of gently anthemic ballads. They
are simple and fantastic: elegantly eccentric, lush with soaring trumpets -
unique in British music.
On record, it can be hard to tell when Malkmus is being sincere, and when
he's slyly winking. Live, he is just having fun (which he certainly wasn't
during the miserably tense final Pavement shows). Friday's set is lighter,
poppier and mainly from his rollicking new album Pig Lib. Saturday is
rockier, proving it is not so far from the vertiginous shifts of prog rock
to the angularity of post-punk. Dark Wave sounds like mid-1970s Sparks, all staccato exclamation; many of the songs sprawl into muscular workouts
powerfully redolent of Television. Drummer John Moen is clearly the
reincarnation of The Lovin' Spoonful's Zal Yanovsky: an inspired musician
and an inveterate clown. Who knew being the don of nerdish art-rock was such a riot?
TIMES
April 22, 2003 Down the Dustpipe By Peter Paphides Pop Festival Hall
TELL your parents where you went and they'll think you had a great time,
suggested Stephen Malkmus on the second night of Down the Dustpipe - an allusion to the venerability of some of the acts appearing at this
mini-festival of British underground music curated by the former Pavement
frontman. Since rising to prominence a decade ago as the collegiate
poster-boy of grunge, Malkmus has made no secret of his Anglophilia.
In Pig Lib, the second album by his new band the Jicks, the Californian
singer intensified his love affair with folk-rock and intricate soloing.
Certainly, there was no shortage of the latter when the Seventies power-trio the Groundhogs took to the stage. The years may have conferred upon them a resemblance to the male couch potatoes played by French and Saunders, but somehow this seemed to accentuate the impact of Tony McPhee's resolutely unpretty blues rock.
If the Groundhogs served to remind us what rock was left with when the hippy dream died, Vashti Bunyan's first appearance in 34 years effortlessly
revived that dream again. Though ignored at the time, her sole album, Just
Another Diamond Day, written while journeying to a Hebridean commune in a horse and cart, has been hailed as a lost classic. The years have been so kind to Bunyan that when she introduced 'a song I wrote in 1966', a voice responded: 'You aren't that old!' The ensuing folk lullaby, Winter is Blue, was magical, setting off a Mexican wave of goosebumps as she intoned: 'If my heart freezes, I won't feel it breaking.'
Like Malkmus, Super Furry Animals wear their debt to rock's hairy years with pride. Crucially though, everything the Welsh quintet does seem to beat with a pure pop heart. The passing years have lent Gruff Rhys's voice a grainy soulfulness that has done them no harm. Indeed, their new song, Bleed Forever, would have sounded comfortable on any album from the Isley Brothers' peak, suggesting that this is still a band drunk on fresh
possibilities.
If a function of Down the Dustpipe was to set Malkmus's own direction into a new context, then it was a clever conceit. Having suffered unfavourable
comparisons with his old group, the Jicks set out their stall formidably. On
Do Not Feed the Oysters, Malkmus opted for a one-note solo which exploded magnificently into a riot of powerpop pyrotechnics. He swapped with drummer John Moen on a shambolically pretty version of the Byrds' One Hundred Years From Now, and looked humbled at the ovation it inspired. Next year we'll bring our parents.
TELEGRAPH
A pilgrim's progress
(Filed: 23/04/2003)
Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Vashti Bunyan at the Festival Hall
There was a collective shiver of joy and disbelief from the Festival Hall audience as Vashti Bunyan steppped on to the stage to perform in public for the first time in more than 30 years. In that intervening time, this enchanting singer - as beautiful as Nico, as beautiful a singer as Annie Briggs - has become a spectral figure, about whom strange and magical stories circulate.
Discovered by svengali Andrew Loog-Oldham, she appeared on Ready Steady Go!, but released a mere two singles before deciding to pack in pop music and travel by wagon and horse up to Skye to live in a hippy commune. The journey took nearly two years, and, by the time she arrived, the commune had shut down. An album of the songs she'd written along the way, Just Another Diamond Day, was released in 1970 and promptly disappeared. Copies now fetch up to £900.
Only when the album was reissued three years ago did Bunyan's soft and hauntingly pastoral songs finally get their critical dues. Invited to play live by indie hero Stephen Malkmus (thereby confirming the role Americans such as Alan Lomax, Bob Dylan and Joe Boyd have played in drawing attention to the riches of British traditional musics), she performed a tantalisingly brief set that was, nonetheless, utterly bewitching.
At first nervy and fearful, despite her still imposing presence - tall, dressed in black - she seemed almost reluctant to surrender songs such as Diamond Day and Winter is Blue. They're intimate and eldritch, lullabies so private that they bear only a passing relationship to the more hearty and public idioms of folk-rock. Her singing is as gossamer-thin as a dream, so whispery that the whole audience leans forward, eager to catch every subtle melody.
The original album featured a stellar cast of roots musicians: Robin Williamson and Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol. But Bunyan's band on this occasion - Fiona Brice on violin, and Kieran Hebden and Adem from electronica outfit Fridge on acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and auto harp - offered a plangent and sympathetic backing to each of the songs. A new one, If I Were, was quite magnificent and whetted the appetite for the follow-up album she is rumoured to be working on.
Leaving the venue, dazed and aglow, I recalled a story about the time Bunyan once asked folk luminaries Euan MacColl and Peggy Seeger for advice about getting a record deal. 'Beware of the ephemeral,' they said dismissively after hearing her sing. On the contrary: to hear Vashti Bunyan even once is to be haunted for ever.