Vashti Vunyan: Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind - Singles and Demos (1964-67)

Before the remarkable resurrection of Diamond Day, even before her legendary late 60s horse-and-cart trek from London to the Isle of Skye, Vashti Bunyan was a figure from an older, weirder England: she was a would-be star at the very birth of British Pop. This charming compilation of lost singles and early demos makes plain what Bunyan has always insisted on: she wasn’t a pre-Raphaelite folk princess, but rather an aspiring singer-songwriter, an early, ambitious recruit to Andrew Loog Oldham’s “Industry of Human Happiness”. Unfortunately, in 1965 Bunyan could only be a kind of singing doll, as ALO evidently saw her like the next Marianne Faithfull, setting her up with 'Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind', a winsome Jagger and Richards number. Backed by her own ‘I Want To Be Alone’, the single flopped and Vashti left to pursue more pared-down ambitions, recording ‘Train Song’/‘Love Song’ for Columbia, with just voice, guitar and cello. Again foundering with no publicity upon its release in June 1966, Vashti left again, this time returning to Andrew Oldham and the Immediate label he had just started. She recorded three more singles between 1966 and 1967, yet each again remained frustratingly unreleased, leading to Vashti’s disenchantment with the industry and disappearance, bound for the Isle of Skye and a colourful if obscure existence in which she would not pick up a guitar again for over 30 years. But this anthology, compiled from mouldering old acetates and tapes, rescues several songs that hint at the kind of pop writer she might have been, and show the beginnings of the singer who recorded 'Diamond Day'. 'Winter Is Blue', an unreleased single from 1966, is an eerie, baroque number that might not be out of place on early Joni Mitchell album, while 'Coldest Night Of The Year', recorded with Immediate label mates Twice As Much, is a deliciously frosty British take on the Beach Boys. '17 Pink Sugar Elephants,' from a '66 home tape, have the exotic-minstrel flair of '66 Donovan. And the second disc, a whole set of 1964 demos, recorded straight through in an hour, reveal an oddly determined, genuinely peculiar talent. Now that Diamond Day inescapably rings out during every ad-break, perhaps, after a long detour, Vashti Bunyan has finally become the pop star she always meant to be. http://fat-cat.co.uk/, http://www.uncut.co.uk/
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Vashti performing Jagger/Richards' song 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind', back in the '60s:

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And here, the B-side 'I Want To Be Alone':
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