Vashti Bunyan, Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964 to 1967

reviewed by dave heaton

Vashti Bunyan’s resurgence, boosted by musicians like Devendra Banhart and Espers, was based on love for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day. It’s now considered a classic, but I have to admit that I haven’t heard it. I have heard the newer music she’s made as part of her comeback, and I felt a level of distance to it that I just couldn’t break. Her voice is interesting but I couldn’t get close enough to it. What a revelation, then, to hear this collection of recordings she made 1964 to 1967, back in Swinging London when she was working with Andrew Loog Oldham and others.

Many of the songs on this 2-disc set are bare-bones demos, though the handful at the start of Disc 1 are the singles she released at the time, including the Jagger/Richards-penned song that gives this set its title. Whether it’s big, orchestrated singles or solitary, home-recorded demos, there’s a meeting here between her unusual voice and classic pop song styles. That connection makes this strikingly beautiful, strange yet sweet. It reveals the “folk” tag (or the trendier “freak-folk”) as incomplete. These are pop songs, albeit sung by a singer with a darkness to her voice that does bring to mind forests and castles and other worlds. The shining star here for me is the Mann-Weill-written, Phil Spector-like “Coldest Night of the Year”. While sharing the same melancholy, it’s a spellbinding departure from her basic style of singing and playing an acoustic.

All of the demo-type songs are remarkable too for the atmosphere of her voice, the way she inhabits these pretty, odd little songs. Whether dressed-up, like the unreleased single “Winter Is Blue”, or naked, they fill the room. Some have an element of fantasy, like “17 Pink Sugar Elephants”, but most are thoughtful, sad love/loneliness song. Some are quite dire, devastating (“Leave Me”), others rebellious (“Don’t Believe What They Say”). Disc 2 contains songs she wrote at age 18, no doubt in the youthful throes of infatuation and depression. They already show a strong, unique voice and a pop ear. You can hear all of these as great singles that could be dressed up as finely as “Coldest Night…”, yet there’s also lonely.

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