“Once I had a child/He was wilder than moonlight/He could do it all/Like he’d been here before,” sings Vashti Bunyan on “Here Before”, the second track on Lookaftering. It’s a simple enough melody, the verse continuing: “Once I had a child/She was smiling like sunshine/She could see it all/Like she’d been here before.” But the song is captivating. Bunyan’s vocals, whisper-like yet self-assured, sit atop gently plucked strings. They are soon joined by other, layered vocals – twinkling in the background like murmurs in a crowd – and a glockenspiel, which provides glimmers of sweetness.
If you know Bunyan’s story, the song holds an extra prescience. It is at once an ode to her children – a third child, born 13 years later, is the subject of the next verse and a nod to their influence on her musical rebirth. When Bunyan released Lookaftering in 2005 – a new reissue marks 20 years of this sublime record – she had herself “been here before”, having written and released songs decades earlier. But the experience hadn’t been easy, and so she had stepped away.
Lookaftering is only Bunyan’s second album, but she was 60 when it was released an extraordinary 35 years after her 1970 debut, Just Another Diamond Day. While recording that first album she found out she was pregnant with her long-term boyfriend Robert Lewis. “As soon as I knew I was pregnant I didn’t write another song,” she writes in her 2022 memoir Wayward: Just Another Life to Live. “It wasn’t that I didn’t try to write more, because I did – but nothing happened.”
At 24 she had longed for children, she continues, but wasn’t sure if she would be able to have them. “It felt as if all of that need and yearning had gone into the music, and once I had my child the songs never came again. And they really, truly, didn’t until my last one left home, 33 years later. I’m not proud of that. I should have been able to do both.”
Bunyan’s re-emergence on the music scene in her sixth decade is far from the only remarkable thing about the songwriter’s life. Jennifer Vashti Bunyan was born in South Tyneside in 1945, the youngest of three children to John Bunyan and Helen Webber. Her father was a dentist, and the family moved to London when she was six months old. She was never known as Jennifer. “Vashti” was a nickname her father’s father gave to her mother, after the wife of King Ahasuerus in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther, who is banished for refusing to appear at a banquet for the king. “He meant she was awkward and stubborn,” Bunyan writes of her grandfather’s impression of her mother, “but I like to remember it as the dark-eyed rebellion of a spirited young woman.”
Along with the name, Bunyan inherited her mother’s rebelliousness. She enrolled at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, but was asked to leave because she hadn’t dedicated enough time to her studies. Instead she had been hanging out with Michael Palin and Terry Jones, then in the early days of Monty Python, and playing guitar. Her first song was a tune called “I Don’t Know What Love Is”, which ended with the line: “Want you to be with me and wonder why, there was never a love for you and I.” Her father criticised it: “You and me, you and me – and after all I spent on your education!” But Bunyan knew her artistic mind, insisting: “You and me didn’t rhyme.”
Determined to make it as a musician, Bunyan went to play for producers on Denmark Street in Soho, London. “They had to shut their windows in order to hear me over the noise of the traffic outside,” she writes, “and one patted me on the backside as he showed me the door, saying, ‘Very nice but you’re just not commercial, dear.’” She was taken on by the 21-year-old Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who said the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards song “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind” was to be her first single. She was disappointed, wanting to sing her own songs. The recording – included on Bunyan’s 2007 singles and demos compilation – is a real bells-and-whistles affair, with flugel horns, strings, piano and even a marimba. Bunyan’s voice, still audibly young but with an endearing roughness to it, is at odds with her circus-like surrounds. She didn’t like the single and it wasn’t a hit. She “got into big trouble” for saying on radio that she thought she wrote better songs than Jagger – though she had meant they were better for her to sing. “I was not allowed to tour either – in case it gave me ideas and ruined me, they said.”
Dismayed and frustrated, she fell in with Robert Lewis, an art student she met as he was hitchhiking his way through Suffolk. The pair were “swept up… into this great gale of ideas for a future of like-minded people going to live in a remote and northerly part of the United Kingdom”, a movement spearheaded by the folk star Donovan, who had just bought property on the Isle of Skye. So Bunyan and Lewis procured a cart and a horse (named Bess) to pull it, and set off on the 650-mile trip to Scotland. It took them two years: along the way, strangers took them out of the cold and let them stay in their homes. When they could, Bunyan and Lewis picked up farm work to pay their board. Once they actually arrived on Skye, they learned there wasn’t space for them in the commune.
During the many cold days and nights in the cart, Bunyan had been writing. She headed back to London – this time in an old Morris Minor – where she made Just Another Diamond Day. Finally she was recording her own songs, but she felt her ideas were compromised, as producer Joe Boyd and the musicians he assembled put their own spin on her tracks. “Rose Hip November” is a wide-eyed, penny-whistle-featuring take on the English pastoral. “Jog Along Bess” could well be a song for children, as Bunyan sings of the animals that accompanied their journey in a straightforward tune doubled by piano. The album was released but was not a hit: Bunyan herself soon forgot about it, and for more than three decades she devoted her life to her children, totally apart from the music world.
Everything changed when, in 1997, Bunyan started using the internet for the first time. To her surprise, she learned that in the intervening years, Just Another Diamond Day had found cult appeal. Because of its rarity, the record was highly sought after – copies have sold for over £2,000 – and the mystery around this Sixties singer who had faded into obscurity had fans eager to learn what had happened to Bunyan. She tracked down her master recordings and worked on a reissue, which was released in 2000. For the first time, the music received warm reviews, and Bunyan felt confident in her writing. She picked up a guitar again.
Lookaftering – a word Bunyan’s family came up with, meaning to care for someone or something – was produced by the renowned composer Max Richter, and features the harpist Joanna Newsom, the Fridge musician and soundtrack composer Adem Ilhan, and the Venezuelan songwriter Devendra Banhart. Like her music from the 1960s, these are lyrically simple yet poignant songs. But the arrangements – this time designed with Bunyan’s approval – make them delightfully strange. On “Turning Backs”, Bunyan sings of the cruelty of indifference (“Indifference is the hardest blow/It is the wind and icy snow”) high in her range, like a chorister. A flute counter-melody adds a suggestion of unease before a cor anglais solo twists the tune into a darker, almost menacing piece. Meanwhile on “Same But Different” she sings with a steadfast breathiness, showing that confidence can be a quiet affair. The tracks showcase an artist who waited more than half her life to make the music she wanted. Finally doing it her way, she retains her charmingly unassuming style.
This new remastered edition appears in Bunyan’s 80th birthday year. It is expanded, with previously unreleased versions of the original songs throwing up such jewels as a 2001 demo of “If I Were”. While on the album recording Bunyan sings over strings. Here she accompanies herself on synth, resulting in a transcendental version of an already flawless love song: “If I were to go away/Would you follow me/To the end of the Earth/To show me what your love is worth?” On the 2002 demo of “Feet of Clay”, a melancholy love song whose album version features strings, guitars and horns, we hear Bunyan alone once more, vocals over synths. The warm electronic sound transfigures the track into a spacey number – utterly distinct from the naive folk sound thrust upon Bunyan in her twenties, and possible only because she taught herself to play the electronic instrument in her sixties.
In 2006, just after the release of Lookaftering, Bunyan agreed for her song “Diamond Day” to be used in a T-Mobile advert. Having once been dismissed as “uncommercial, dear”, Bunyan felt the offer was “a kind of validation”. Since then she has enjoyed a late-life renaissance, touring and releasing music, as well as her memoir. In 2014, she released her third album, Heartleap. It was recorded, edited, produced, arranged and mostly played by Bunyan – partly to prove, after all those years, that she could. She has said it will be her final album, the closing number to a musical career lived totally against the grain. In the context of this slim discography, this new edition of Lookaftering is all the more precious.
Vashti Bunyan’s “Lookaftering – Expanded Edition” is out on 7 February via FatCat Records
[See also: The end of the old world order]
This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex