Gig played on 04/06/06

Tonight, it's about time. "I wrote this song a very long time ago," Vashti Bunyan says more than once, perched carefully on a chair in all her shy sixtysomething grace. "A very long time ago, when I was very young…"

A long time, in fact, before most of tonight's rapt, knee-hugging, folk-is-the-new-rock'n'roll crowd was born. And as we lean forward to hear her tremulous voice drifting through tender, tentative songs jewelled with piano and squeezebox and slow fragments of guitar, it's quietly incredible that we're hearing these songs at all. Lost Britfolk classics don't come more lost than "Just Another Diamond Day", the achingly wistful album Vashti made in 1969…and then, with obscurity knocking, she disappeared off into rural life. Over time, though, its secret pleasures slowly attracted an A-list fanclub of Britfolk-loving musos - the likes of Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Adem - and a mere three-and-a-half decades later, their love and support helped persuade her to make a follow-up, "Lookaftering", that is every bit as guilelessly delicate.

But does it all work as more than a lovely faded memory? In a word, yes. Dragged from the preserved-in-amber world of obscure vinyl into the relative hurly-burly of a folk gig in 2006, Vashti Bunyan's performance still feels every bit as uncalculated, as timeless, as those lost grooves. Delivered in a voice that makes Nick Drake sound like Meat Loaf and Beth Orton like Ethel Merman, song after song has a hesitant, deliciously overheard quality. A lilting "Where I Like To Stand", a cracked "Feet Of Clay" and a frail, longing "Window Of The Bay" sound like nothing so much as a mother singing under her breath to a sleeping child. Which is apt: "Lookaftering", after all, is named for the years she spent in wife-and-motherhood, and tonight she introduces a flute-filigreed "Lately" and the Yeats-like mysteries of "Here Before" as songs written for her children.

But if time has wrought a change in Vashti, it's that beneath the ladylike melancholy and sweetly simple songs-to-a-child, there's a fleeting hint of something more rock'n'roll. With time nearly up, she leaves us with "Wayward": "a song", she laughs, "about how I hate housework." But that's not the half of it: as that English-rose voice blooms against the lacework melody, the lyric's wilder, charismatic, gypsy-rose tale emerges. It seems that over thirty-six years of "clouds of flour and white washing", she's been secretly dreaming of becoming someone who sounds rather like a distaff Keith Richards: "the one with road dust on my boots and a single silver ear-ring…and a band of wayward children with their fathers left behind".

At last, the wide world is beckoning to Vashti Bunyan, and it really is about time.

by Jennifer Nine