Vashti Bunyan Lookaftering

A lengthy gap between albums can be a sign of many things. The Stone Roses' infamous hiatus between outings marked a bitter break with their record label, several false starts, and rather a lot of time spent mucking around in mini coopers round the backways of Monmouth. Brain Wilson spent even longer between starting and finishing Smile, and we all know why. Fancy a play in the sandpit, anyone? No, thought not. The recently, sadly, departed Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer gave up music and was making a living shining shoes in between his glory days in the pre-revolutionary era and his incorporation into Juan de Marcos' Buena Vista project.

Vashti Bunyan, however, perhaps holds the record for tardiness in recording her second disc. If you don't know this already, Bunyan was an art school student in the sixties who quit to make music. While hanging around swinging London singing and playing her guitar, she was discovered by a theatre promoter friend of Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones' mentor, and signed to Decca records, for whom she recorded a Jagger/Richards tune. Despite being promoted as a new Marianne Faithfull or even the female Bob Dylan, her music career reefed at this stage; subsequent singles went unreleased and she set off on a rural odyssey that took her touring to Holland and then to the Isle of Skye, where she and her boyfriend hoped to meet the singer Donovan to form a hippy-creative colony. By the time she got there, Donovan had left, but the experience inspired her album Just Another Diamond Day, recorded with members of the Incredible String Band back in London. Rather than promote the album, which Bunyan suggests wasn't so much as released as allowed to sneak out and disappear, the singer set off on another journey that took her, eventually, to Ireland, where she lived with wagons, children and dogs for several years.

The story would have ended their, had Bunyan not discovered the internet in the early 90s, whereupon she naturally typed her name into a search engine; she was pleasantly surprised to discover that the album had become a lost, cult classic, cited by a host of new artists. After the tricky process of reacquiring the masters and her rights, Vashti re-released Diamond Day, almost thirty years after giving up the album and music. Since then she has steadily acceded to her deserved status, working with Devendra Banhart, Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde, and Animal Collective, on the beautiful Project Hummer EP. Now signed to FatCat records, there is no excuse for the career that never took off now not to fulfil all its promise. The influence of Diamond Day has allowed Bunyan to work with a plethora of innovative modern artists, including the pianist and one-time Future Sound of London and Roni Size collaborator Max Richter, the electro minimalist Adem, Adam Pierce of Mice Parade, and the ethereal harpist Joanna Newsome. What anchors the album though is Vashti's voice, honest and diaphanous, at times soothing, at times heartbreaking. Her picked acoustic guitar and Richter's piano provide the backing, while a luxurious approach to production layers in sounds from the co-artists, with flutes, strings, harps and Rhodes filling in the gaps like warm sunlight filtering through the forest canopy. The result is a model of collective artistic creation.

Lookaftering demonstrates the power of allowing artists from different genres to work together, and shows too what a productive nexus can exist between folk and post-classical music. While tracks work individually, one can also listen to Lookaftering as a symphonic composition, and in that sense it's a proper, pre-CD album, functioning as a whole, yet with subtle shifts variations throughout; lyrically there's a unity to the stories told - travelling, loving, losing, caring, in short, lookaftering. In sum, a beautiful album, a fitting follow up, albeit years and years later, to a classic.