Groomed to be a 60s pop star, the singer instead headed for the Hebrides in a horse-drawn cart and then withdrew from music for 30 years. She recalls those fraught, naive but incomparable years
On paper, what Vashti Bunyan did in the late 1960s sounds like the ultimate hippy dream. A young female singer-songwriter leaves London for the Outer Hebrides with her boyfriend, travelling in a wagon drawn by a black horse called Bess. The 650-mile trip takes two years; she makes an album about it, 1970’s Just Another Diamond Day, full of precise, quietly sung songs such as Glow Worms and Rainbow River, conjuring atmospheres of innocence and wonder.
Only a few hundred copies were pressed before it disappeared almost immediately into obscurity. Thirty years later, it was rediscovered, reissued and Bunyan’s career was revived. Two new albums, international tours and a 2008 documentary followed, plus collaborations with young artists she had inspired: Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective and Max Richter among them. Now comes Wayward, a book Bunyan began in 1994 “to explain to my kids why they had lived a life less than ordinary – although then I sent out my synopsis to silence”. Returning to it during the first Covid lockdown, a story steeped in trauma, grief and poverty emerged – not just a dream.
