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Vashti Bunyan

Vashti Bunyan

The folk singer who abandoned a horse-drawn wagon journey's worth of songs to a decade of obscurity, only to become a touchstone for a new generation of freak folk artists.

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The folk singer who abandoned a horse-drawn wagon journey's worth of songs to a decade of obscurity, only to become a touchstone for a new generation of freak folk artists.

MOODS · pastoral · wistful · intimate · gentle · hushed · nostalgic · delicate · rustic · dreamy · tender · wandering · folk

BIOGRAPHY

Jennifer Vashti Bunyan was born on 2 March 1945 in South Tyneside. She studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing but was expelled at 18 for spending more time writing songs than painting. A trip to New York introduced her to Bob Dylan's music, convincing her to pursue music. Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham signed her soon after, giving her a Jagger-Richards song, 'Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind,' for her 1965 debut single, with Jimmy Page on guitar. In 1967, inspired by Donovan's idea of a creative commune on Skye, Bunyan and partner Robert Lewis made a 650-mile journey by horse-drawn wagon. Songs from that trip became her 1970 debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, produced by Joe Boyd with help from Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick and the Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson. Poor sales led her to leave music for thirty years until the album's rediscovery around 2000 prompted a revival, two further albums, and a 2022 memoir.

WHY THEY'RE COOL

Bunyan's story is one of music history's great slow-burn redemptions: an album so overlooked on release that she quit music entirely, only for Just Another Diamond Day to become a cult touchstone decades later. Rob Young, in Electric Eden, called her voice 'still, small' and her wagon trek 'a powerful symbol' of Britain's non-mainstream folk tradition. Her rediscovery by Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Animal Collective helped define the freak folk movement, cementing her as a foundational, if quietly overlooked, figure in British folk.

GEORGE'S PLAYS

First time on the station.