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Vashti Bunyan.
 To rattle off the story of Vashti Bunyan in a few sentences would be to risk tainting its rich and endearing quality. In 1970, the then 24-year-old released 'Just Another Diamond Day' to little acclaim. For years it was assumed to be her first and last full-length record. However, when re-released in 2000 the album found its way into many a new heart and home - then, in 2005, she gave us the follow-up: 'Lookaftering'. The natural continuity which spills from one collection of songs to the next suggests she was never gone.
A honey-voiced Bunyan greets me with a rosy maternal laugh. Along with Al Campbell, her partner of the last 12 years, she finally has the house to herself. Their six children have each embarked on their own personal journeys, like Bunyan's now-famous horse-drawn navigation across Great Britain to the Isle of Skye. It was during that two-year trip that she was inspired to write the songs that would appear on her first album. Humbly accepting the admiration of kindred spirits, among them Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective, Bunyan is glad her first record can sit snugly in the arms of a new generation of appreciators.
"I'm of course thrilled to bits about it; although I think it's more as if '...Diamond Day' found them rather than they found '...Diamond Day. It's as if they have made a collective in a way that '...Diamond Day 'fits into rather than it having spawned a whole new generation. I think that they made it themselves perfectly well. And then '...Diamond Day' found its way to them in some extraordinary way, certainly with no help from me. And I love it. I love that '...Diamond Day' is finding the people that it never had when it was first around. That is a wonderful warm feeling for me."
With the release of 'Lookaftering' Bunyan is still acknowledging her belated rise to fame. "I feel no age at all. It's very strange because, all of this has happened and it's what I ached to happen when I was 19. It all seems very topsy-turvy and peculiar to me. But it's wonderful. It's not that I feel younger, it's that I feel like I've got a completely different lifetime, that I've stepped over into somebody else's life. It's quite extraordinary."
Fat Cat recording artist Max Richter, who produced 'Lookaftering', features prominently throughout on piano and more. Further contributions come from the aforementioned Banhart and Newsom as well as Adem, Mice Parade, members of Espers and Currituck County, and Robert Kirby, who arranged the strings on '...Diamond Day' and is best known for his work with Nick Drake. Bunyan is forever grateful that the UK-based Fat Cat label allowed herself and Richter so much freedom with the piecing together of 'Lookaftering'.
"They didn't hear anything that Max and I had come up with and we were almost at the end of it... they never asked to have any input. They had complete faith that we would come up with something that they would like. And when they did hear it they were really pleased. But how many labels would do that?"
From the 'Wicker Man'-like hare on the cover, drawn by her daughter Whyn Lewis, to the eleven songs within sung in her gentle evergreen style, 'Lookaftering' is a term playfully coined by Bunyan and her kids. It's about taking care and looking back. While she has now come full circle, living as she was born, in the city, the songs reflect the 25 years she spent in the countryside. She looks back upon those days fondly.
"I had a very pastoral life, living on farms mostly, and always a mile off the track up into the hills... We lived a fairly unusual existence in that there were always a lot of people around us who used the space that we created to make what they made and then we would sell it on the farm or we would we sell it at markets or whatever. And we had a lot of people around."
She played no music during these years for her foremost interest was to raise her children. Bunyan and kin made furniture and stuff to sell. There were horse drawn carts for travel, nomads came and went and farm animals trod the earth. She never had a cow, she says, but she had plenty of goats. Her laugh is absolutely captivating. She is indeed ageless, at once a wise sage and a giggling sprite, a folk maiden whose music and elocution is as beautiful now as ever.
Lenin Simos
 | 'Lookaftering' is out now through Inertia. |
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