Vashti Bunyan

After leaving Nashville we drive towards Memphis (past Loretta Lynn's ranch, which we briefly stop at and buy postcards, carefully avoiding the lumpen pub rock of Van Lear Rose - a mere $20 to you guv'nor) and on through vistas of crimson and yellow maple, the roadside gorgeous in the weak, early winter sun. I have just bought Vashti Bunyan's new LP, and hearing it floors me. I feel renewed in these lovely, wintry folk songs, I can almost believe that my country has a traditional music as complex and soulful and gorgeous as country music, or bossa nova. It'll pass, but what possibilities open up! The British past is usually something best avoided: days of no deodorant, itchy sheets, greasy hair and damp rooms, mutton and vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. The idea of a music we all share, that there could be some kind of connecting thread running back, through that middle-class landscape of streetlamps, parks, duckponds, from their music to mine, all coming from a dark space at the back of the skull.. what a thought. All this I see in Vashti Bunyan's folk songs. For now.