Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (Album)
Vashti Bunyan’s life has seems something of legend.
In the mid – ‘60s, after quitting art school to focus on her music, Vashti was discovered by English Rock and Roll producer and one time manager of The Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham got her signed to Decca, and recorded the single “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind” written by Jagger and Richards. Though touted as the “new Marianne Faithfull” and “female Bob Dylan”, Vashti claimed to be neither. Despite such exclamations, further singles went unreleased leading to disillusionment in the music industry. So she gave the industry the forks, bought a horse and cart (as you do), and headed for Donovan’s “creative colony” on the Isle of Skye. She recorded the album, “Just Another Diamond Day” (aided by members of “The Incredible String Band” and “Fairport Convention”) which was quietly released and promptly forgotten, where Vashti faded into obscurity, with “Just Another Diamond Day” building a cult following over the years.
In the late ‘90s, after typing her name into an internet search engine, Vashti became aware of her cult status among the underground enlightened, tracked down the rights and master tapes, and re-released “Just Another Diamond Day”, to huge critical acclaim, a mere thirty years after “abandoning it and music forever”. Unless you lost your head in a ploughing accident (sorry Uncle Derrick, it had to be said), you should by now know all this.
So one E.P. and one well received album later, Vashti has decided to re-release this compilation of her earliest recordings, in “an attempt to both open and draw a line under the past, and also to try to set the record straight about the disparity between how Vashti viewed (and still views) herself against the way she has been popularly perceived.”
So, upon the first listening of “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind”, I am struck with the pure folk influenced innocence of the recording, laced with that beautiful alto sadness that has long been Vashti’s style. It’s typically ‘60s sounding, dreamy, melancholic, and deeply moving.
Each song seems to reflect a lonely, yet fragile hopefulness toward each step of her future, often using Europe’s imposing Winter elements as backdrops to her stories. The lyrics are honest and sensitive, unadorned yet poetic in their delivery, which was until recent years a difficult thing to find in today’s metaphor filled music.
The later demo versions of “If in Winter(100 Lovers)”, “Girl’s Song In Winter” and “The Winter Turned My Bare Bum Blue”(okay I made that last one up), sound even more intimate and attracting, with just her voice and guitar, than the produced and lightly orchestrated commercial versions. These songs seem like a prediction of the hardship she was to face in her future, and the eventual hope that she would be found again. And she was.
