This, the more observant among you will notice, appears in the stramash of singles I put as the header image on the blog. The picture is actually much bigger, but I can't get it to fit. Ho hum. I've been trying to trace the video clip that heads this entry but no luck I'm afraid. I was shocked when I found it - it's so unlikely. Vashti Bunyan's story is very well-known now and is covered in greater detail elsewhere, but I'll go over it here briefly, as some background knowledge is required for this. Bunyan is remembered today for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day which was ignored on release but feted this decade, leading to her eventual and welcome return to music about five years ago now. Before all this however, she attempted a career as a pop singer. A proper pop singer, managed by Andrew Loog Oldham with a single (as this one was) written by Jagger and Richards, of Stones infamy. They were essentially trying to recreate the success they'd had with Marianne Faithful (who, incidentally, also disappeared from the music business for a long time, but that is, as they say, another story for another time). Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind dates from this era of her career, 1965. Vashti, as she was abreviatedly known then was not a success at all, which is why I'm so surprised to find this clip, in which she looks petrified, poor lamb. It's not a surprise that she found (very) belated fame as a folk singer, her voice made the transition wholly and is in full evidence here on what is a very mid-sixties folk-pop arrangement (although, if you were being unkind, you could say that the thing that stuck in Jagger's and Richards' collective mind was the melody to Blowin' in The Wind, to which this owes some debt.
But to the record itself. It's a lovely thing, but only a couple of years old, put out by Fatcat Records to promote their double album of Vashti's 60's work, singles and demos, and very nice it is too. They pressed 500 of them, and they are beginning to be a bit sought after in their own right, although the £5-£10 you'd pay for one of them is nothing to what the original would fetch. It's been done to resemble an old acetate test pressing, with labels and sleeve lettered with typewritten text and pen and ink on the B-side. It highlights the "from the vaults" nature of the release well, but also says something about the nature of the 7 inch single. If you had the acetate and this reissue you could play them both on the same machine. The deck I'm currently using is older than both of them. If you have the acetate then please God don't play it, of course, but the point is that you could - flick the switch and drop the needle and watch it spinning . It's a direct link back to the mid-sixties and the methods of consumption of pop music then - and we don't have many of them.
Addendum: It is in fact, I noticed as I lifted the record from the platter to put in the scanner, a facsimile of the original demo, which luckily strengthens my conclusion about the durability of vinyl more than anything, and doesn't necessitate a rewrite. Phew.
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