Wayward - Vashti Bunyan

WAYWARD - JUST ANOTHER LIFE TO LIVE -

VASHTI BUNYAN

Like a lot of other people I was quite late in coming to Vashti Bunyan, perhaps even later than most? It was on YouTube where her name first popped up and a picture of her standing in a fur coat next to a brick wall that was used for the cover of her Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind compilation LP. The black-and-white photograph was reminiscent of Rita Tushingham in A Taste Of Honey, or football pools winner Viv Nicholson even, and it immediately caught my eye. Algorithms can be a curse but every once in a while they might also be a blessing?

Vashti Bunyan is an English singer, often labelled as a folk singer but actually having more in common with Nick Drake though it's a comparison she would immediately shy away from just as she would vehemently deny the folk singer label.

During the 1960s, Bunyan was heard singing at a private party and her name then mentioned to Andrew Loog Oldham, the twenty-one year old manager of the Rolling Stones and ex-manager of Marianne Faithfull, who subsequently invited her to his Mayfair office to meet and for her to sing him some of her songs. Oldham immediately offered to make a record with her but insisted it had to be a Richards/Jagger composition called Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.

To a lot of singers back then, this would have been a dream come true but Bunyan wasn't best pleased because what she really wanted was to record and release her own songs. Oldham advised that one of her compositions could be the B-side, and on the advice of her father to "compromise, dear girl", Bunyan went ahead with the deal.

Despite various appearances up and down the country for local TV stations the record failed to capture the public's imagination and so sunk without trace though to listen to it nowadays, in hindsight it's a veritable pop gem - a veritable pearl before swine.

Bunyan was sucked into the machinations of the music business of the 1960s where it became clear to her that all Oldham wanted was for her to become a replacement for Marianne Faithfull, a role she was eminently unsuitable for and that went against all her instincts and desires to be a songwriter and musician in her own right.

Come 1968 she'd just about had enough of it. Tired and broken by the constant male chauvinism of the music industry, tired of being pushed every which way by those who thought they knew best and all to a distinct lack of any sort of success, Vashti Bunyan walked away from it all. Not to take up another career or to marry and have children or any of that stuff but to simply walk away. To escape. So, Bunyan went off to live in a bush in a wood.

It's too easy to say that Bunyan had a mental breakdown ala Peter Green or Syd Barrett. She admits to not being well at that time and had been diagnosed by her family doctor as being hypoglycaemic though how accurate that diagnosis was is impossible to tell. The bottom line of it is that after an accumulation of events, something snapped inside of her and Bunyan turned her back on everything, including not least the promise of pop stardom and Andrew Loog Oldham's plan to sell her as the next Marianne Faithfull.

Into the wilderness she went. To live in a bush. In a wood. In Bromley. To join a student boyfriend who was living likewise in a bid to save money. It didn't last as they were soon discovered and evicted by the landowner whereupon they then had the bright idea to purchase a horse and wagon and head to the Outer Hebrides to live there.

Into the wilderness. Like Christopher McCandless heading off into Alaska for a new life, as depicted in the film Into The Wild. Potentially like Lawrence Oates on Scott's expedition to the Antarctic, leaving the tent one night with the words 'I am just going outside and may be some time'.

This strange, long trip by horse and cart from London to the Outer Hebrides is what the bulk of Vashti Bunyan's book Wayward - Just Another Life To Live is about, bookended by tales from her childhood (at one point describing a backstage encounter with a young, unsmiling and angry Cliff Richard looking at her with hatred) and from 1997 onwards which is when Bunyan went on to the Internet for the first time and discovered that not only was her debut album she'd recorded in 1970 (of her own songs) now a collectors item but even that a cult audience had developed around it.

Vashti Bunyan's story is ultimately one of triumph over adversity, of how talent will always out, and of the importance of being true to oneself. Being 'wayward' is simply another way of describing being singular of vision. A way of describing the importance of keeping safe the flame inside even when it's but a flicker. A way of describing the importance of when having a dream to hold onto it forever even if it's but a memory of a dream thought long dead. Being 'wayward' is just another way to live your life but on your own terms. And Wayward is a good book and a joy to read.

John Serpico