by Joe Moran
Sometime in 1970, Joe Boyd had tried to interest Drake in a songwriting partnership with his label mate, a young woman called Vashti Bunyan. “It wasn’t a very productive afternoon,” she said later, with sweet English understatement.38 The last time she saw Drake was in the office of their record company when they were both waiting to see Boyd. Drake stood facing the wall and said nothing.
Bunyan’s shyness was less life-hampering than Drake’s, but she too had a habit of going missing—like her namesake, the biblical Queen Vashti, who refused to show off her beauty at a banquet as her king demanded. Her habit first revealed itself in her brief time at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, when she stopped going to classes and tried to present her absenteeism as an artwork. She was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ producer-manager, and in June 1965 she released her first single, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind.” But when she sang it on TV, she hid her face behind her long hair and struggled to find something to do with her hands. Like Drake, she was a nervy performer, with the same problem of being unable to make her gossamer voice carry on primitive 1960s sound systems, and she was liable to break down in tears and flee the stage in the middle of gigs. The single flopped.
She went to live in a tent under a rhododendron bush at the back of Ravensbourne Art College in southeast London, where her boyfriend, Robert Lewis, was studying. In May 1968 they set off in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan for the tiny islets of Isay, Mingay, and Clett off the Isle of Skye, which their friend, the folk-pop singer Donovan, had just bought, intending to set up an artists’ commune. On the way there she wrote songs about homecoming fishermen, the smell of peat, the sound of seabirds, Hebridean sunsets—not songs with conventional narrative lines but series of images burning briefly like flares. They were written almost as charms or incantations, ways of blocking out the unbucolic nature of their actual journey, much of it on the busy A5, during which they were spat at by people in passing cars who thought they were gypsies. Having reached the Hebrides after a year and a half to find the artists’ commune long dispersed, Bunyan returned to London at the end of 1969 and, at Joe Boyd’s request, recorded an album of her songs at Sound Techniques over just a few days.
All her life Bunyan had wanted to be a disembodied voice. As a child, she had been obsessed with a recording, among her father’s collection of 78s, of the choirboy Ernest Lough singing “O for the Wings of a Dove”—one of the most loved of early gramophone records, capturing a beautiful treble voice at its peak. It was made in 1927 in the Temple Church in London’s Fleet Street, in the early days of electrically amplified recording, with Lough standing on two Bibles to reach the solitary mic of HMV’s new mobile recording unit. “I am quite sure that no boy’s voice has ever been recorded nearly as well as this,” wrote Compton Mackenzie in the Gramophone, “and I am equally sure that I have never heard such a beautiful voice.”39 Bunyan played the record over and over until her dad told her off for scratching the shellac and blunting the needle.
Little was known about Lough except that he had an exquisite voice and (at time of recording) a cherubic choirboy face, which appeared on the cover of new pressings of the record long after his treble had turned to baritone. The dearth of information inspired strange rumors: he had burst a blood vessel while singing the line “and remain there forever at rest” and dropped down dead, or had fallen and smashed his skull while playing soccer, or had been abducted by a rival choirmaster, or died of consumption, or been killed in a car crash. Bunyan’s first ambition was to be Ernest Lough—not the real boy to whom these strange things were said to have happened (and who actually lived into his eighties), but his acoustic effigy. The gramophone record, she felt, allowed a person to vanish while their voice remained, retained in wax.
Bunyan’s upper notes had something of the chorister’s treble about them, especially when, as in the intro to “Window over the Bay,” her voice was allowed to float unaccompanied, or, as in “Diamond Day,” she simply la-la’d as if it were another musical instrument. Boyd’s production is immaculate, with the sound of each breath and string given just the right weight in the mix, so Bunyan’s voice, which could easily have been smothered by overinstrumentation, comes beautifully through Robert Kirby’s delicate arrangements for recorder, dulcichord, and strings.
But it was Bunyan’s bad luck that, by the time she started making records, having an exquisite voice was no longer enough; the public needed to know who its owner was. Her album Just Another Diamond Day was not released until the end of 1970, by which time she’d had a baby son, who cried whenever she picked up a guitar, and she could not have toured even if she had wanted to. The album “just edged its way out, blushed and shuffled off into oblivion,” as she put it, selling only a few hundred copies.40 She learned, as Drake had done, that for the shy performer, being ignored feels worse than hostility.
She moved back to Scotland to raise her family, picking up a guitar again only to teach her son to play. Her three children, finding a tape of the album in the house, had to listen to it in secret in the car, because their mother could no longer bear to hear her own voice. She now spent her life “lookaftering,” to use the lovely coinage she used as the title of her long-delayed second album. Like many other hesitant women performers, child-rearing and maintaining a home gave her a pretext not to perform, to instead subsume her creative self into daily routine.
Bunyan was not the only shy woman musician from this era to leave behind a thin body of work and then vanish. In 1971 the Scottish folk singer Shelagh McDonald, having made two albums, went back up north and ended up living a nomadic, hand-to-mouth life, sleeping in tents around Scotland. Christina “Licorice” McKechnie of the Incredible String Band drifted to California, where she was rumored to have lived rough before, in 1990, writing a farewell letter to her sister from Sacramento and disappearing into the desert. The band’s other female member, Rose Simpson, also vanished, before reemerging in 1994 as the wife of the mayor of Aberystwyth.
The Nottinghamshire folksinger Anne Briggs spent most of the 1960s singing starkly beautiful arrangements of English folk songs unaccompanied in pubs, driving around Ireland in a horse and cart, living in a caravan on a Suffolk heath, and sleeping in woods. In 1971 she was coaxed into the studio to record two albums, and was forced to listen to her own voice, which she hated. She performed at the Royal Festival Hall that May but hated that as well, having no stage patter, finding it too formal after pub singing, and, worst of all, having to perform sober because she was pregnant. Leaving her third album unreleased, she moved to a remote village in Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands, with her husband and two young children, where being miles from anywhere and without babysitters put an end to her career. She was persuaded to do some gigs in the early 1990s, but she was jittery walking round cities and negotiating London’s tube system after a gap of twenty years, and her singing on stage was shackled by nerves. She retired again, this time to live self-sufficiently on the Inner Hebridean island of Kerrera, with no neighbors within a two-mile radius.
These musicians had vanished in an analogue world where it was easy to walk off the map and never be heard of again. Now, in the word-of-mouth cults and unlikely fan bases of the early-era Internet, they were ripe for rediscovery. This is what happened to Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican American folksinger who began performing in the smoke-filled clubs of Detroit in the late 1960s and who had a reputation for shyness because he always played with his back to the audience—although he said this was because the rooms were small and he was trying to avoid getting feedback from his amp. Without his being aware of it, he became a bootleg star in apartheid South Africa. Years later, in 1997, his daughter Eva found a website set up by a Cape Town record store owner, Stephen Segerman, dedicated to finding out information about him. To Segerman’s amazement, for Rodriguez was rumored to have set fire to or shot himself on stage, Eva was able to tell him that he was hiding in plain sight, renovating buildin
gs in Detroit and living in the same tumbledown house he had occupied for forty years.
In the same year, 1997, Vashti Bunyan bought her first computer and uncertainly dialed up, to bleeps and staticky feedback, the pre-broadband Internet. With two forefingers she typed her name into a search engine, and the first thing she read was an e-mail from Sacramento on a message board asking if anyone knew what had become of Vashti Bunyan. She discovered that so-called crate-diggers, collectors of rare vinyl, were searching for records by these lost singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They dubbed the genre “loner folk.” Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day was now a cult album, selling for hundreds of pounds. Emboldened, she persuaded a small label to re-release it, began digging out the old acetate demos she had left in her brother’s shed, and, momentously, started singing again.
She felt, she said, as if her voice had been “in a coma for 30 years,” and was unsure if any sound would come out when she stood in front of a mic.41 But her voice sounded exactly the same, almost as if it had been preserved in a peat bog of obscurity and neglect. In April 2003 she performed at the Royal Festival Hall, on the stage that had eaten up and spat out Nick Drake and Anne Briggs. Even singing close to the mic, her voice was wavering and whispery, reluctant to disturb the surrounding air. Listening to her revisit old songs like “Diamond Day” and “Winter Is Blue” was faintly nerve-jangling, since her voice, made shaky by stage fright, seemed to be on the verge of breaking, and she sounded as if she would run out of breath before the end of each line. The audience found itself leaning forward and willing her to make each note.
Bunyan discovered that the new recording technologies were ideal for sufferers of stage fright. With digital audio software such as Pro Tools and Logic she could make music on her own. She found that she sang louder and more freely if no one was around. An uncertain piano player, she could record left and right hand separately, playing them both right-handed, and use the software to merge them. The process made her aware of her affinity with a certain kind of middle-class woman of her own and her mother’s generation who did not perform except in that English parlor tradition of accompanying themselves on the piano. On one of her new songs, “Mother,” she recalled as a girl seeing her mother, through a door slightly ajar, dancing and playing the piano, believing herself to be alone.
According to the Italian historian Carla Casagrande, it was in western Europe, from about the twelfth century on, that male clerics promoted shyness as a trait that women should cultivate as a “providential instrument” to protect their virtue and to counter their innate tendency to gossip, whine, nag, and flirt. The clerics cited the nonpareil of chaste womanly silence, the Virgin Mary, and the authority of Saint Paul, who forbade women from preaching or teaching, allowing them only, if they needed specific information, to question their spouses behind closed doors. A woman keen to talk and perform in public was thought to be too engaged with the outside world and capable of promiscuity. On the rare occasions they had to speak, women were meant to do so quietly within their own house, church, or convent walls, according to the Benedictine code of taciturnitas.42 Perhaps a residue of these centuries-old habits of mind, which had discouraged women from appearing and speaking in public, led women of Vashti Bunyan and her mother’s generation to feel so exposed on stage.
Except for a brief turn on All India Radio during the war, Nick Drake’s mother, Molly, only performed in the music room at home for her family and a few friends. She wrote and sang her own songs, in the musical theater tradition of Noël Coward or Ivor Novello, but hers were darker and less melodic, a sort of middle-English blues, with strange chord shapings that clearly influenced her son’s eccentric tunings. Her singing sounded tentative and apologetic. It was never meant to be heard beyond her immediate circle, and never would have been had it not been captured on the same Ferrograph tape recorder her son had used for his drunken post-party ramblings. In 2013, twenty years after her death, a tiny New York label released an album of her songs.
Like Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, the writer and musician Charlotte Greig grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in an English family in which women sang and played the piano simply “as a domestic skill, like arranging a vase of flowers or laying a table.”43 When she heard Molly’s album, Greig recognized a voice that betrayed that same unwillingness of nice middle-class women to show off. Greig, too, was reluctant to tour and promote her work, because she was a busy mother and because she had a similar aversion to self-display, and similar insecurities emerging out of a rootless childhood as a naval officer’s daughter. She preferred music that betrayed this kind of self-doubt, by artists like Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan, who sounded like they were singing to themselves. It was a quality Molly Drake seemed to have passed on to her son, who half-whispered his songs, hoping his audience would happen to overhear.
Just as shyness often has no logic, impinging randomly on parts of your life and leaving others untouched, so stage fright ebbs and flows in erratic ways. Even the chronically nervous Nick Drake seems to have had little trouble busking in Aix-en-Provence or performing at Cambridge May balls and student clubs, and he was word- and finger-perfect in what many musicians find the most intimidating setting of all: a recording studio populated by hard-bitten, nit-picking session musicians.
But shy people are often surprisingly good performers, or at least can be drawn to the idea of performance. This is not as illogical as it at first seems. After all, the shy know as well as anyone that life is a perpetual performance, that when they step on stage, all they are doing is substituting one role for another. The psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan once suggested that stage fright’s most terrifying aspect was the actor’s sense of “a complete deprivation of his everyday poise-retaining mannerisms, which are about to be supplanted by the gestures of the performance.”44 The terror came, Kaplan thought, from facing others without those near-invisible gestures and postures that, in the course of our daily lives, make us feel like ourselves.
Perhaps shy people are drawn to the stage because they do not have this everyday poise, so they are looking to strike another pose that might work better for them. For the shy a crisis can be easier, or no more difficult, than the challenges of daily life. When the lights go down and the audience falls silent, they might be just as fearful as anyone else, but, in the same way that shy police officers or bus conductors are said to be buoyed up by wearing a uniform, they know they have been given another chance to impersonate a fully working human being.
I have long felt more at ease speaking in public than talking to a stranger. I am reassured by clarity and structure, by physical props and affordances that tell me how I should behave. When I am behind a lectern with a microphone, my script in front of me, a glass of water to my left and a clicker in my hand, I know I am meant to speak uninterrupted and have been given permission to do so. In a world where we have to pretend that most of our performances are natural, a performance that does not hide its status as such feels like a deliverance. Naturally, the fear returns if there is a question and answer session at the end, when I have to come out of role and face that left-field question from the audience that will induce brain freeze and a calamitous attempt to answer that ties itself up in tortured syntax before dissolving into terrifying silence. (This has happened only rarely to me in real life, but just often enough to fuel my catastrophizing imagination.) That moment when the trickle of applause dies down and the chair asks for questions marks the transition between two types of performance: one feels comfortingly fake, the other scarily real.
But until that moment comes and my cover is blown, I somehow manage not to get stage fright. As well as having an excellent word for stage fright, the Germans have an equally excellent one for this opposite feeling: Maskenfreiheit, the freedom that comes from wearing masks. Heinrich Heine used this portmanteau term in his Letters from Berlin (1822) when he wrote that we feel most liberated and most fully human at a masked ball, “where the waxen mask hides our usual m
ask of flesh, where a simple Du [the familiar form of address in German] restores the primordial sociality of familiarity, where a Venetian cloak (Domino) covers all pretensions and brings about the most beautiful equality and the most beautiful freedom.”45
Of course, standing in front of a lectern is not the same as wearing an actual mask and claiming the mask wearer’s traditional license to party in anonymity. But on stage you are still making up a version of yourself that you feel more comfortable with, real but not real, natural but with a naturalness you have amplified and enlarged. Your shy self may have thrown up in the dressing-room bucket, but that other self somehow summons up the resolve not to flee from the stage in fear.
6
Shy Art
In March 1910, in Manchester, England, a man in a long overcoat, his hat pulled down over his ears, began walking the streets of red-brick row houses. He was six foot two and ungainly, his flat feet heading in slightly different directions. In the poorer districts barefoot children followed him as if he were the pied piper, name-calling and mimicking his lurching step. Sometimes he dropped a penny for them, and they fought for it on the cobbles. He was famous in these parts only as the rent man for the Pall Mall Property Company. He saw himself as an artist but sold barely enough paintings to cover the cost of materials to paint more of them.
Although he had his first solo show in London in 1939, he was still little known to the wider public in 1952, when, at the age of sixty-five and now Pall Mall’s chief cashier, he retired from the firm on a full pension. He had been known as Mr. Lowry all his forty-odd-year working life, even to long-standing colleagues. He said he was too shy to use first names, as was now common. On his last day he announced flatly that he wouldn’t be in the next day. Only after his retirement did he become famous, as he was filmed for television and photographed against the landscapes of his paintings, without anyone knowing that he had collected rent on the same streets. Afraid of being thought a mere Sunday painter, he kept his day job a secret even after giving it up.