‘Enjoying my first compliments’

You can say a lot about the internet. That it is a depressing sewer full of ugly opinions, where people uninhibitedly show their worst side, where fake news is rampant and an insult or threat is fired like that. All true, but there is also another side. The internet brought a turning point in the life of Vashti Bunyan, an English folk singer who had already forgotten that she was once a folk singer.

She describes her magical internet moment in her autobiography published this year wayward – Just Another Life to Liveabout which she on Friday Crossing Border is interviewed in front of the public in The Hague by her publisher Lee Brackstone.

It was 1997. Bunyan called in, surfed a search engine, typed her name and read warm, lyrical words, mostly from young folk lovers, about her flopped and forgotten LP from 27 years earlier, Just Another Diamond Day (1970). When released, the album had not brought her any joy or pride, rather the complete opposite.

“Sweet words about my songs…,” she says, still with a hint of disbelief in her voice. ‘In 1970 nobody said anything. No one bought the record, there was no feedback, just a few reviews. One reviewer wrote that my songs made him depressed, another that they were lullabies. And now, nearly three decades later, I was sitting in front of a computer enjoying compliments. My first, actually.’

She now speaks herself through a computer screen. In the Zoom window, a beautiful 77-year-old woman softly and calmly tells her wonderful story, in lively, happy sentences. She laughs at herself, displays an irresistible self-relativity. She says a few times that she always talks like this, but in reality she tells as she writes: without frills, accurate, from a warm heart.

Behind her, through the window, we see the Georgian facades of the Old Town of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she lives with her lover, Al Campbell, the man by her side for decades.

wayward is the story of a disillusioned English pop singer, who was discovered in mid-sixties London by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham (who was only 21, a peer herself), who launched her as a ‘dark-haired Marianne Faithfull’ .

“The first recording session was the best moment of my life,” Bunyan says now. ‘I was surrounded by musicians and instruments. I glowed with hope and expectation. I didn’t know at the time that it wouldn’t work.’

The euphoria did not last long. To her sorrow she was not allowed to choose her own songs, although – come on – her own I Want to Be Alone on the B-side of her debut single, the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards supplied Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind (1965).

It didn’t work out for 20-year-old Vashti Bunyan. Singles flopped, concert bookings came in sparse. Disappointed and hurt, she turned her back on the music. She completely disappeared from the radar for two years with her then-partner Robert Lewis. With horse, cart and dog they traveled like nomads through the country, away from everything and everyone: north to the Scottish Hebrides. To Ireland, too.

On the way she wrote the folk songs that she wrote after coming home Just Another Diamond Day would form. Finally her own LP with her own songs, but it turned out to be another disillusionment.

‘I had grown accustomed to writing alone, with my guitar, under the Scottish sky. It was supposed to be my album, but in the studio I was sitting with a lot of people I didn’t know. The Incredible String Band accompanied me, but I had never heard of them. Nothing sounded like I had it in my head. During the recordings, it made me intensely sad: my own record and it didn’t feel right again. The total lack of response after the appearance was the death blow. I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore.’

In wayward she finally wants to tell her story herself. Until now it has been recorded by others, with errors and without the right feeling.

‘I wanted to show that that journey by horse and carriage was not only romantic and beautiful, but also hard and problematic. I didn’t want to write that I was depressed and suffering from post-traumatic stress, because those words and diagnoses didn’t exist then. It was, though I had no idea myself. Besides, the trip was beautiful and romantic in a way. It was good. Educational.’

Also important: she wanted to say that the thirty years after Just Another Diamond Day were not years of bitterness, during which she sat at home disillusioned and doing nothing.

‘In some publications those years are portrayed as my ‘nothing years‘while it’s just my’everything years‘ were: I had three children, found love and happiness precisely because there were no fans or record labels waiting for me. In retrospect, that was a gift, because I think I could have coped extremely badly with success around 1970.’

That success came after 1997, exactly on the scale she wished for in her fifties. From Just Another Diamond Day A remastered CD version was released in 2000, which has now found an enthusiast audience of some substance. She went on tour, played in beautiful halls all over the world, for mostly young people. Young artists like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom wanted to work with her. And she made two new studio albums, not superfluous but beautiful: look aftering in 2005, heartleap in 2014. Plenty of inspiration: a very ordinary people’s life spanning three decades. Beautiful, but na heartleap she was ready as a songwriter.

And now there is a book, her memoir, because publisher Lee Brackstone, who gave the English music book an important impulse with his young publishing house White Rabbit, discovered via via that she had already started writing her story somewhere in the nineties. . He encouraged her to complete that job.

“I liked writing… quite fun. It got more annoying when editors went through my text. I thought they misunderstood that I was writing from a 1960s perspective and adjusted my wording accordingly. I no longer recognized my own voice after their editing. I argued about that a few times.’

That outpouring is funny and ironic, because it was precisely that stubbornness, that stubbornness, and that unwavering idea in her head of how she wanted things to be that, from 1965 to 1970, left her with nothing but disappointment.

‘I was stubborn and believed in the quality of my songs, but I didn’t communicate, I sulked in silence when I didn’t like something. At the same time, I was extremely sensitive and vulnerable. And yet, when I think about that girl, I’m proud of her: she was also strong, self-confident, stubborn, a little bit rebellious. She made no compromises. Rather go away.’

Is she still stubborn? She says yes (“I’m a control freak, according to my husband”) and the fights with her waywardeditors also point in that direction. ‘I still think that in some cases I was right about my writings, but I have also learned to understand that as a writer you have to take your readers into account. That you must be clear. That was a learning process. I’m happy with my book.’

And therein lies the crux: as a musician it took her thirty years to arrive at a comparable mildness about her own work. She needed the compliments of young internet users to give her record another chance and to forgive.

‘I haven’t been able to listen to that album for three decades, and I haven’t really listened to any other music either. I didn’t even sing to my kids. And now I think he’s beautiful. Those Robert Kirby arrangements! Crazy, isn’t it, how that works?’

Shortly after 2000 she bought a music magazine with an article about her. Included with the magazine was a free DVD containing early, rudimentary software for home music recording. ‘A kind of proto-GarageBand, so to speak. I started working on it. It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for: with that software I could finally record music all by myself. That was not possible in 1970. That’s how I look aftering and heartleap although we did eventually record them with real musicians in a studio. Finally I could feel good about what I was making, although after that always came the fear: didn’t I hand it over too much? What will people think?’

She considers her return to the stage after 2000 to be the best time she has known as a musician, but if she has to call it the pinnacle of her life, she chooses something else. “I have three: the birth of Leif, the birth of Whyn, and the birth of Ben.”

Even with the early years of her musical career, she has made peace in recent years. With Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager at the time, she has friendly contact again. ‘A sweetheart. You hear terrible stories about young women in the dreaded music industry. I can imagine anything with that, but I was never a victim. Things were decided that I didn’t want. The things I wanted didn’t happen. My dream was shattered and it certainly hurt me, but not because I was a girl between men, nor because people wanted to hurt me. It happened because I was me, I think now.’