Vashti Bunyan is a legendary folk singer-songwriter. The expanded reissue of her record Lookaftering will be out February 7 on Fat Cat. Her memoir, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live, is out now.
(Photo Credit: Christopher Fernandez)
I’m asked to choose one artist who has influenced me the most.
How far back to go? The choirboy Ernest Lough who sang Mendelssohn’s “O for the Wings of a Dove” in 1927? Buddy Holly in 1957 or Bob Dylan in 1964? Brandy and Monica in 1998? Out of all and every one of these, really, it’s very hard to decide whose influence was the greatest.
My father had an old battered and scratched 78 rpm of the recording by Ernest Lough. The fragile shellac was already over 20 years old from when it had first been pressed, but I listened to it over and over as a very young child in the early ‘50s. The voice seemed so completely unworldly to me that I found it hard to believe it was an actual boy. It made me want to be a boy so that I could sing like him, sing “far away, far away would I rove.” Even now when I listen to it sometimes, I still wish I could find those perfect notes.
Buddy Holly was my next great love and probable influence. A friend’s older sister had a collection of 45 rpm 7-inch singles, and this must have been the only way I heard Buddy Holly then, as radio plays of pop music were so infrequent in the UK in 1957. I instantly loved these records, especially the instrumental arrangements which were so uniquely his. The celesta on “Every Day” for instance — I don’t know of any recordings at that time that had such an instrument out in front like that. (Well, maybe Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”!)
“Every Day” was written by Norman Petty, and Buddy Holly, who plays acoustic guitar. The drummer Jerry Allison slaps his knees for percussion, and Joe B. Mauldin plays a standup acoustic bass. Vi Petty, Norman Petty’s wife, played the celesta on the recording. That must have appealed to me as I used a similar instrument myself in later years, a Dulcitone. This was a small keyboard manufactured in Glasgow, Scotland, invented by Thomas Machell (1841-1915). It had fold-up legs so that it could be easily transported, apparently made for traveling missionaries as the keys struck tuning forks which would never go out of tune — whatever the climate. I have one, dating from about 1900. It has the most beautiful soft sound and sometimes I lend it to other musicians who appreciate its uniqueness.
Bob Dylan. How could I not admit to huge influence. I was at an art school in Oxford in 1964 and had a boyfriend who wore a leather jacket, rode a Norton 500 motorbike, was wonderful on guitar, and worshipped Bob Dylan. He played “Blowin’ in the Wind” constantly, but would not teach me to play it as he said a girl should not be playing a Bob Dylan song. Big mistake! Not so romantic after all. I was expelled from that art school (for not turning up to classes and spending too much time either in bed or on my guitar) and was sent by my parents to New York where my sister was needing help with her three young boys. I saw The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan LP in a Village shop window, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the album changed my life. I’d had a fairly sheltered post-war upbringing in London and knew little of the injustices that suddenly now filled my young head, broke my heart, and then made me completely sure I wanted to be a musician. Of course, I taught myself to play “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“How many deaths will it take ‘til he knows that too many people have died.”
Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy is Mine” began my obsession with electronic instrumentation. The harp at the beginning — a synth played on a keyboard — just fascinated me and I spent hours trying to figure out how it was done. Then the strings come in, also synthetic, and I was spellbound. When my 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, was re-issued in 2000 I received royalties for the first time ever. I bought a Mac — a huge gleaming creature that took up most of my desk space — a Roland XP10 keyboard, and a little mixer. I downloaded some basic music software from a covermount disc on a computer magazine and thought I had found heaven. I moved on to Cubase, then Pro Tools and Logic, all the while delighting in being able to put together arrangements with sounds that could not be made by a human being. I was persuaded against this by Max Richter, who beautifully produced my 2005 album‘Lookaftering, as he insisted on using real musicians. But the demos I made with that big old Mac still appeal to me. My next (and last) album, Heartleap, in 2014, was just me letting myself loose with synths and guitar — and my beloved Dulcitone mixed with a synth celesta.
So where did the biggest influence come from? Maybe I always go back to the beginning, Master Ernest Lough (as he was known when he was a young chorister), as I feel for sure that his voice and phrasing — and all the emotion that made my young heart and soul soar — was probably the earliest and biggest influence on my musical life. Really, for me, nobody else comes close.
