There are records you find and records that find you, and Diamond Day has a way of arriving exactly when you need something quiet enough to hear yourself think.
Vashti Bunyan recorded this in 1969 and 1970, mostly in London at Sound Techniques — the same Fulham studio where Nick Drake made Five Leaves Left, where John Martyn cut Stormy Weather, where the walls had apparently absorbed enough longing to give it back at a discount. Joe Boyd produced it, which tells you something immediately. Boyd had an ear for artists who existed slightly outside of time, and Bunyan was about as outside of time as anyone working in England that year.
She had spent two years traveling by horse-drawn wagon from London to the Outer Hebrides, trying to reach the commune Donovan had told her about. The songs on Diamond Day came from that journey. You can hear it — the open road, the rain, the specific quality of silence you only get when you’re very far from anywhere.
What Joe Boyd Heard
Robert Kirby did the string arrangements. He was twenty-two years old and was doing the same work for Nick Drake at almost exactly the same moment, and it shows — not because the two albums sound alike, but because Kirby had already developed a philosophy about strings that most arrangers twice his age never find. He used them as atmosphere, not punctuation. They don’t swell. They hover.
Simon Nicol of Fairport Convention played guitar on several tracks. Dave Mattacks, also of Fairport, handled drums — though “drums” is almost too blunt a word for what he does here, which is closer to suggesting rhythm than stating it. The record breathes in a way that only happens when every musician in the room understands that the space between notes is doing half the work.
Bunyan’s voice is the thing, though. It is almost impossibly delicate without being precious. She doesn’t push. She barely leans. On the title track she sounds like she’s singing to someone in the next room who is almost asleep, and she doesn’t want to wake them but she needs them to hear this one thing.
The Long Disappearance
The album sold almost nothing. Bunyan gave up music entirely, disappeared into domestic life for three decades, and only discovered in the early 2000s — via a message board, of all things — that the record had quietly accumulated an audience among people who traded rare folk albums like contraband. Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom had been citing her as an influence. She hadn’t known.
She eventually made a second album, Lookaftering, in 2005. It’s lovely. But Diamond Day has the specific gravity of someone who didn’t know they were making something that would last. That unknowing is audible. It’s why the album sounds the way it does.
The original UK pressing on Philips is genuinely hard to find and genuinely expensive when you do. There’s a 2000 reissue on Spinney that sounds fine. The album is also on streaming in a clean transfer, and honestly that’s where most people will find it — which is appropriate somehow, stumbled upon at midnight, the way it was always meant to be heard.
Put it on after everything else in the house has gone quiet. Give it the first song without doing anything else. By the second, you’ll understand why people kept passing this one along.