Vashti Bunyan

Jennifer Vashti Bunyan (born 2 March 1945) is an English singer-songwriter.

Bunyan was born in South Tyneside in 1945, the youngest of three children of John Bunyan, a dentist, and Helen Webber.

She was told that she was named after a boat that had belonged to her father.

'Vashti' was also a nickname for her mother, inspired by the Biblical Persian queen Vashti.

She has been said to be descended from John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, but she has denied this.

The family moved to London when she was six months old.

She began her career in the mid-1960s and released a debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970.

The album sold very few copies and Bunyan, discouraged, abandoned her musical career.

In the early 1960s, she studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, but was expelled in 1964 for focusing on learning guitar and writing songs instead of art.

At age 18, Bunyan visited New York, discovered the music of Bob Dylan through his The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album, and decided she wanted to be a musician.

In London the following year, an actress friend of her mother's introduced her to The Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who signed her up to fill the gap left by recently departed Marianne Faithfull and gave her a Mick Jagger/Keith Richards song to record, "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind".

This was released in June 1965 as Bunyan's first single under the name 'Vashti', with Jimmy Page contributing on guitar.

Her own composition, "I Want to Be Alone", which she had wanted to be the A-side, was on the B-side.

She released a follow-up, "Train Song", produced by Canadian Peter Snell and released on Columbia in May 1966.

Both singles received little attention.

Bunyan said later that she had specifically wanted to be a pop singer, not a folkie, and that the choice had been hers.

She recorded more (unreleased) songs for Immediate Records, and made a brief appearance in the 1967 documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London with her song "Winter Is Blue".

She said she enjoyed performing on TV pop shows, but felt as if she was "watching from the outside".

In the spring of 1967, Bunyan left her job in a veterinary practice in Hammersmith and set off with guitar and dog to reconnect with a rebellious art student, Robert Lewis, she had met two years previously, with whom she was later to have three children.

She heard from singer-songwriter Donovan that he was planning to set up a commune on Skye, a "Renaissance community" of artists, musicians and poets and Bunyan, whose "mother's grandmother had been a Romany", and Lewis bought an old wagon and a horse from a Romany gypsy, constructed a cabin and set off on a 650-mile trek to Skye from south London.

During the trip, Bunyan began to write the songs that would appear on her first album, Just Another Diamond Day.

"It was a way to escape. It felt ephemeral, but with a purpose. We didn’t know where we were going to be tomorrow, but it’d be somewhere down the road. What saved me was that I didn’t have to think too hard about anything except wood for the fire, water for the horse. Immediate things.”

She said later that she and Lewis had wanted to re-shape their lives and reject a world in which they felt they did not belong.

“I had wanted to go back and find out how things used to be before the internal combustion engine, without thinking how hard life could be.” On their journey, she recalls, they discovered the kindness of strangers.

"I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary."

Her distinctive vocal appeared on "The Coldest Night of the Year" by Twice as Much on their second and final LP, That's All, released by Oldham's Immediate Records in 1968.

In the harsh winter of 1968, Bunyan took a break from the journey in the Lake District and went to the Netherlands to try an unsuccessful tour performing in pubs and bars.

There she met a friend of Donovan's, American folk-blues musician Derroll Adams. When Bunyan sang for him, he told her, "You have to let people hear these songs. You mustn't hide your light."

She immediately returned to England.

The song "Diamond Day" came to her on the train from Dover to London.

A friend introduced her to producer Joe Boyd, who offered to record an album of her travelling songs for his company, Witchseason Productions, and introduced her to folk musicians The Incredible String Band.

Bunyan and Lewis resumed their pilgrimage northwards in March 1969, surviving on very little, and reached the Scottish highlands and finally the island of Skye, where they found that the "Renaissance community" had dissolved and there was nowhere for them to live.

They settled instead on the nearby island of Berneray, where Bunyan recalled being inspired by the spartan lives of the old women who befriended them, one of whom sang ancient songs to them in Gaelic and "made up stories to tell visiting Scottish folklore collectors."

In late 1969, Bunyan returned briefly to Boyd in London and recorded fourteen songs for her first LP over a six-week period in his Sound Techniques studio, with assistance from guitarist Simon Nicol and violinists Dave Swarbrick of Fairport Convention and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, and string arranger Robert Kirby.

She later discovered that she had been pregnant with her first child while recording the album.

She left Berneray with Lewis in April 1970 and returned briefly to London in an unsuccessful attempt to resume her musical career.

Just Another Diamond Day appeared on Philips Records in December 1970 to warm reviews, but struggled to find an audience.

Bunyan said that for decades after that she saw it as a failure and could not listen to it.

By 2000, her album had acquired a cult following; it was re-released and Bunyan recorded more songs, initiating the second phase of her musical career after a gap of thirty years.

She released two more albums, Lookaftering in 2005, and Heartleap in 2014.