In April 2007 I borrowed a reel-to-reel tape deck to listen through some old quarter-inch tapes my brother had found in his attic a few years before. I was listening out for some recordings I knew he'd made of my songs in 1966. I did find them and some of them are included here on Disc One.

To explain the presence of Disc Two – in the same box I found a different looking tape, tried to play it but found it was running way too fast. I didn't recognise the songs at first but then it began to dawn on me that this was my first ever studio recording from back in 1964.

I had been thrown out of art school that year for (they said) wasting all my time writing songs and playing guitar. I’d then spent the summer in New York where my older sister lived - and found the album 'Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' in a village store. Although I had been trying to write love songs that said a little more than the Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson singles I had listened to so much – Bob Dylan’s words began to fill the air in my young head and to educate me more than anything in my life had ever done. I came back to London with a certainty that there were momentous changes ahead, though I could not articulate my thoughts. For myself I had big ideas of recording my own songs, dreams of freedom and fame - and absolutely no money. My older brother was brought in by my despairing parents to ask me what I was doing with my life and how I intended to make a living.

'I want to be a pop-singer.'

My brother laughed his big drain laugh - one I came to love later and so miss now he is gone - but at the time it only served to narrow my eyes and fix my resolve. I borrowed some money and booked an hour in a studio around the corner where I recorded twelve songs straight, one after another, just voice and guitar. I had four of the songs put onto a seven inch acetate record and this was my only demo. Nobody - neither agents nor producers – would have had reel-to-reel tape machines in their offices and I did not have one either and so this one demo was all I had to play to people. Mostly I just sang with my guitar in producer's offices and they had to shut their windows, shut out the traffic noise in order to hear me at all. I was as uncommercial as I could be and many doors were shown to me - and not the opening kind. Until I met Andrew Loog Oldham that is - who opened the door to the rest of my life by giving me the Jagger-Richards song ‘Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind’ to record as my first single for Decca, promising to use one of my own songs for the B side and any further singles. Recording the songs with such a huge orchestra felt surreal but I loved every moment. (I have heard it said that Andrew Oldham took this fragile little folk-singer and tried to make her into a pop-singer against her will. No he didn’t. Too fragile for his world I might have been, but that was no fault of his.) There followed six weeks of whirling promotion and TV and radio and then – nothing - the single went nowhere. Thinking I had made a big mistake and that I should have kept to my original quieter ideals I left - to record on my own with just guitars and cello, making ‘Train Song’ for Columbia. I wanted to bring simple acoustic music into mainstream pop – but didn’t seem to be making a whole lot of headway. Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder then invited me back when they were starting up their independent label, Immediate. I had so missed the glorious world that I had glimpsed through Andrew the visionary - and I went back. Immediate lived up to its name. Anything that didn’t work instantly just got left behind in the wake of their brilliance. I made three further singles for Immediate but none were released. By this time my brother was my greatest advocate and he recorded several of my songs himself, always frustrated that no one else seemed to know what I was on about.

This all took place over years which felt like centuries and eventually my music dreams ran out - so I left for good. Left London, my family, everything familiar and took off for oblivion. By horse and wagon – but that’s just another story.

Disc One includes the first released and unreleased singles from 1965, ‘66 and ‘67 as well as the tape recordings my brother made. I have some old seven-inch acetates from that time also - but we were only able to rescue one – ‘Wishwanderer’. The other acetates are different versions of some of the songs on my brother's tape but they were too damaged - scratched and green from lying for years in damp sheds and barns. I had no thought that they would ever be of interest to anyone.

To Disc Two again - I didn't hear that first studio tape from the time I recorded it in 1964 until last week. Mandy Parnell (who has mastered all the old songs) and I went to get the tapes transferred and we sat listening to these twelve songs with my young and very English voice announcing each title as I went. It felt like finding teenage poetry at the back of a drawer. Some of the songs I had forgotten completely. At the back of a drawer is where I could keep them of course or I could just take out the better songs and leave the rest. I have that choice. But FatCat, Spinney, DiCristina and I decided to include the whole tape just as I recorded it – all in one take - songs that embarrass me and all.

When I listen to them now I know how little I have changed and how many similar stories are told in my later songs. That love is changeable, that you cannot pin anything or anyone down in this world - and if you try it mostly won't work. I still feel the same, suspended in a life that has turned and twisted in many unexpected ways, some good, some not so good, but always and still filled with hope.

The newspaper cuttings and photographs that Dave Thomas has wrought into the artwork here were in an old suitcase that I left with my brother when I went off on my travels. My brother contacted me when I was living in one of the many beautiful no-wheres I have lived and said he was about to sell his house and would I come and collect my stuff. I couldn't get from no-where to London in time and so said to just get rid of it all. He left it out in the shed - where it was found five years later when he bought the same house back again.

Since then it has moved from shed to barn to shed to underneath a drip in an attic - and then back to the city where I now live - until finally I took a look at it all one day and decided I was glad it had not been thrown away. It maybe helps me prove my argument that I was not – and am not - a folk-singer. To some it might confirm that I was. I am hoping not. Vashti Bunyan 2007