THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,821) Vashti Bunyan — “Winter Is Blue”
Winter is here, and winter is blue. Vashti’s (see #204, 1770) “haunting 1966 rendering . . . continues to inhabit the season existentially. Culled from an unreleased acetate . . . the track cuts right through sunny and 75 L.A. in January. Call it achingly beautiful aural sleet and snow.” (Aquarium Drunkard, https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2013/01/21/vashti-bunyan-winter-is-blue-1966-acetate/) Or, to put it another way, “Holy f*ck I just stumbled upon ineffable beauty”! (BoHorn, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fpw7Z0Nc) Oh, and Beck did a pretty nice live version.
“If my heart freezes, I won’t feel the breaking”
Vashti relates the song’s story:
I was going crazy with boredom after “Train Song” [see #204] and all it took was a phone call from Tony Calder and I was back in the studio making demos of new songs. . . . Andrew [Loog Oldham] chose “Winter is Blue” and sent it to Art Greenslade to arrange. Art changed a bit of the tune, which a year before would have had me stamping around in a rage, but I was beginning to lose the huge confidence I had started out with and just let them do it. I was somewhat terrified of Andrew, and just once found the courage to say I thought the guitars at the beginning needed to be played a bit softer, and he mimicked my little voice and I don’t think I uttered another word. . . . The first session I thought went well, and I have a demo of it which I like a lot. Andrew wasn’t happy with it however and we had another try. You should never go back over things! The second one was not so good, and this is the one which ended up on the soundtrack [of Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London*] sadly. It was to be a single, but one day I was called to the office and Tony Calder told me they were not going to release it because Cliff Richard wanted the song. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
https://www.terrascope.co.uk/MyBackPages/Vashti%20Bunyan%20PT30.pdf
Vashti says that “I like the simpler version . . . but the orchestral version makes me smile because it was so at odds with the way I was… remembering what seemed like a hundred musicians – and the operatic diva who sang the bit in the middle… crazy stuff.” (https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/2921568-i-have-been-typecast-as-the-eternal-hippy—vashti-bunyan-talks-time) The orchestral version is down below.
Then, there is always Richie Unterberger, calling the soundtrack full of “marginal incidental music by ummemorable pop acts produced by . . . Andrew Loog Oldham (Vashti and Twice as Much)”! (https://www.allmusic.com/album/tonite-lets-all-make-love-in-london-1990–mw0000317867)
Jason Ankeny tells us Vashti’s story:
Vashti Bunyan is an English singer/songwriter whose 1970 debut album Just Another Diamond Day was an overlooked gem in its time that later grew to be a defining classic of acid folk. Sluggish record saless discouraged Bunyan enough to give up music entirely shortly after its release, but as the years went on, more new fans grew enamored with the album’s hushed but surreal beauty. . . . Bunyan . . . first took up the guitar while a student at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing. She was ultimately expelled at age 18 for spending too much time writing songs and not enough time painting. A bit of a free spirit even then, she took a trip to New York and, while there, fell under the spell of Bob Dylan’s music . . . . Once back in London, Bunyan was committed to a career in music, and through theatrical agent Monte Mackay she soon met Rolling Stones manager/ producer Andrew Loog Oldham. . . . [H]e signed her to Decca Records and for her debut single brought her the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards-penned “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind.” The record earned little attention, and Bunyan moved to Columbia for the follow-up, “Train Song,” [see #204] released in May of 1966. She moved into the orbit of Oldham’s Immediate Records after its founding that year and recorded a brace of sides, mostly of her own music, none of which was issued commercially. She also cut one side with the Twice as Much (Immediate’s answer to Simin & Garfunkel) entitled “The Coldest Night of the Year.” The latter, with its Phil Spector-like production and beautiful harmonizing, showed off her singing at its most pop-oriented and commercial. Sometime after that, she left London in a horse-drawn wagon on a two-year journey into communal living in the Hebrides, with the ultimate goal of meeting folk icon Donovan [see #908, 1,036, 1,064] on the Isle of Skye. She later chanced to cross paths with American producer Joe Boyd, who had made his name in London recording acts such as Pink Floyd [see # 13, 38, 260] and Fairport Convention [see #1,199]. Throughout her travels Bunyan had continued writing songs, and in 1969 she teamed with Boyd to record her debut LP, the lovely Just Another Diamond Day, which included some assistance from such British folk notables as Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick from Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson. After completing the album she left for Ireland, dropping out of music to raise a family.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/vashti-bunyan-mn0000099104#biography
* Neil Genzlinger:
Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, a fast-paced collage of the ’60s scene in that city with a title taken from a Ginsberg poem. It is by no means a typical documentary; it strings together images and the occasional comment from celebrities like Michael Caine and Julie Christie to create a dizzying kaleidoscope that is open to interpretation. Mr. Whitehead could well be extolling the liberation of the period, but he could also be criticizing it as vacuous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/movies/peter-whitehead-dead.html
Here is the orchestral version:
From Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London:
Live ’07:
Here is Beck live (’11):
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