Vashti Bunyan

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #128 (February/March 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Vashti Bunyan

Quietly

by Lahri Bond

There are few artists who have taken a road less traveled than has British singer/songwriter Vashti Bunyan. How is it that a woman who has made only two albums in the last 35 years has become so vastly popular in the early part of the 21st century? In an era of urban rap and rock music that assaults the senses, Bunyan is a woman who has found success making unfashionably "quiet music."

A direct descendant of John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, Vashti Bunyan was born in London in 1945. After a brief trip to New York, where she was inspired by the music of Bob Dylan, she returned to London and was "discovered" by Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham. She recorded her debut single, the Jagger/Richards-penned "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind," simply as Vashti. Another single, "Train Song," was released on Columbia Records, and for a very short while in the fickle music scene of London in the 60s she was heralded as "the new Marianne Faithfull" and a "female Bob Dylan."

"I wasn't interested in traditional folk music at all," she said recently. "I wanted to bring acoustic music into pop music. I loved Bob Dylan, and the idea of a troubadour, being a traveling minstrel. At the time I felt I wasn't getting anywhere. Everyone wanted me to be something I wasn't." She made one more valiant try with the Immediate Records single "I'd Like to Walk Around in Your Mind," but clearly, disillusionment had set in.

[cover #128]