Vashti Bunyan at St Pancras Old Church
Kieran Gallimore
St Pancras Old Church, 8 October 2014
St Pancras Old Church, 8 October 2014
St Pancras Old Church is so intimate and cozy when Vashti Bunyan takes her seat in front of us, it feels more like a little gathering in someone's front room. There are tea light candles all around giving the tiny white and gold church a rather magical glow, while Vashti herself is so sweet, warm and bashful, like a dear friend you've prodding into singing a song for you.
Discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in the early 60s, Bunyan made an unsuccessful attempt at a pop career before releasing her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970 after over a year of travelling around Britain in a horse and cart. Met with indifference, it led to her giving up music for 35 years before the cult status of the album and the encouragement of a new generation of folk artists such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom convinced her to come out of retirement in 2000. Her latest release, Heartleap, is only her second album since then and is a rather lovely, gentle and fragile affair.
Tonight though is more an overview of her entire career. Despite being almost 70 years old, she still looks quite striking and beautiful, her dark brown hair replaced with a silver sheen. She begins, smiling, with Here Before from her last album Lookaftering. It was inspired, she tells us, by a gypsy woman who peered into the pram of her newborn daughter in the early 70s and told her "She's been here before!" She introduces Diamond Day as a song we might know from a mobile phone advert and explains that she "let it happen" because of all the days she spent knocking on doors in Denmark Street as a young artist only to be told "you're not commercial enough". Oh the irony! No one could blame her for that. Both songs sound sparkling and delicate with Vashti's breathy, barely-there voice quietly echoing through the small room.
She's helped enormously by her accompanist Gareth Dickson on guitar and backing vocals, who she tells us she met when she was asked to do her first solo show in years by the Barbican and he was suggested to her to help her. Back in the 1960s her management told her she couldn't tour so her live experience has been limited to her recent comeback. In some ways you can tell her live legs are still a little shakey but somehow it makes the show all the more charming. Plus, it's easy to admire the way she gamely forges through sound problems that threathen to blight the night. She rewards Dickson for his help (and us too as it turns out) by asking him to sing one of his own songs, a rather lovely, Nick Drake-sounding track that fits in with Vashti's songs perfectly.
Elsewhere there are three more songs from the 60s, the poppy and twee I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind (inspired by an old stubborn boyfriend apparently), Wishwanderer (about her dreams of travelling around with a guitar on her back) and probably her most famous song Train Song. She explains that the song started off a tune called 17 Pink Sugar Elephants, written with her roommate Jennifer Lewis, but became Train Song when she realised one of the poems that local poet Alasdair Clayre left for her in a milk bottle outside her home, fit with the music perfectly. We also get another Diamond Day song after all the sound problems, namely Rose Hip November, about a thankful winter spent in a house lent to her during her year old travelling in her horse and cart.
Surprisingly there aren't many newer songs overall. The gentle Across The Water (about becoming stuck in your life and sleeping through the day) sounds sad yet hopeful, with a beautiful shimmery guitar part courtesy of Dickson. Gunpowder is an autobiographical song about the last days of a long-term relationship, presumably with the father of her children and horse and cart companion, Robert Lewis, and the emotional traps she feels she fell into, "lighting the gunpowder trails that you lay" she sings, with a frail melancholy beauty.
One of the most moving moments of the night though comes in the enfore when she sings the title track of the new album, which also closes the record. It's positively ethereal and hymn-like, which couldn't be more fitting given the setting. Bunyan is never going to be a big, loud, flashy performer but there's something refreshingly charming and exquisitively beautiful about her delicacy. It's how these songs were meant to sound live and I'm glad I got to hear them this way in such perfect surroundings.
Supporting Vashti tonight was a Manchester singer-songwriter called Kieran Gallimore, whose beardy look, thick glasses and cable knit jumper made him look like he should be playing a New York folk club in the early 60s. His sound though fits more with the new wave of British folk artists like Nick Mulvey and others. He's certainly a more than decent guitarist and his songs are definitely pleasant if just a little unremarkable and I can't deny I felt my mind wandering through his short set.
Discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in the early 60s, Bunyan made an unsuccessful attempt at a pop career before releasing her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970 after over a year of travelling around Britain in a horse and cart. Met with indifference, it led to her giving up music for 35 years before the cult status of the album and the encouragement of a new generation of folk artists such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom convinced her to come out of retirement in 2000. Her latest release, Heartleap, is only her second album since then and is a rather lovely, gentle and fragile affair.
Tonight though is more an overview of her entire career. Despite being almost 70 years old, she still looks quite striking and beautiful, her dark brown hair replaced with a silver sheen. She begins, smiling, with Here Before from her last album Lookaftering. It was inspired, she tells us, by a gypsy woman who peered into the pram of her newborn daughter in the early 70s and told her "She's been here before!" She introduces Diamond Day as a song we might know from a mobile phone advert and explains that she "let it happen" because of all the days she spent knocking on doors in Denmark Street as a young artist only to be told "you're not commercial enough". Oh the irony! No one could blame her for that. Both songs sound sparkling and delicate with Vashti's breathy, barely-there voice quietly echoing through the small room.
She's helped enormously by her accompanist Gareth Dickson on guitar and backing vocals, who she tells us she met when she was asked to do her first solo show in years by the Barbican and he was suggested to her to help her. Back in the 1960s her management told her she couldn't tour so her live experience has been limited to her recent comeback. In some ways you can tell her live legs are still a little shakey but somehow it makes the show all the more charming. Plus, it's easy to admire the way she gamely forges through sound problems that threathen to blight the night. She rewards Dickson for his help (and us too as it turns out) by asking him to sing one of his own songs, a rather lovely, Nick Drake-sounding track that fits in with Vashti's songs perfectly.
Elsewhere there are three more songs from the 60s, the poppy and twee I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind (inspired by an old stubborn boyfriend apparently), Wishwanderer (about her dreams of travelling around with a guitar on her back) and probably her most famous song Train Song. She explains that the song started off a tune called 17 Pink Sugar Elephants, written with her roommate Jennifer Lewis, but became Train Song when she realised one of the poems that local poet Alasdair Clayre left for her in a milk bottle outside her home, fit with the music perfectly. We also get another Diamond Day song after all the sound problems, namely Rose Hip November, about a thankful winter spent in a house lent to her during her year old travelling in her horse and cart.
Surprisingly there aren't many newer songs overall. The gentle Across The Water (about becoming stuck in your life and sleeping through the day) sounds sad yet hopeful, with a beautiful shimmery guitar part courtesy of Dickson. Gunpowder is an autobiographical song about the last days of a long-term relationship, presumably with the father of her children and horse and cart companion, Robert Lewis, and the emotional traps she feels she fell into, "lighting the gunpowder trails that you lay" she sings, with a frail melancholy beauty.
One of the most moving moments of the night though comes in the enfore when she sings the title track of the new album, which also closes the record. It's positively ethereal and hymn-like, which couldn't be more fitting given the setting. Bunyan is never going to be a big, loud, flashy performer but there's something refreshingly charming and exquisitively beautiful about her delicacy. It's how these songs were meant to sound live and I'm glad I got to hear them this way in such perfect surroundings.
Supporting Vashti tonight was a Manchester singer-songwriter called Kieran Gallimore, whose beardy look, thick glasses and cable knit jumper made him look like he should be playing a New York folk club in the early 60s. His sound though fits more with the new wave of British folk artists like Nick Mulvey and others. He's certainly a more than decent guitarist and his songs are definitely pleasant if just a little unremarkable and I can't deny I felt my mind wandering through his short set.
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