To the softly spoken 60-something on the other end of the phone line it is "just my life - I never thought of it as extraordinary."

But you'd be hard pressed to find a story as strange, sad and ultimately inspiring as that of Vashti Bunyan, who is currently touring a sublime record of folk songs released 35 years after its only predecessor.

A genuine cult legend, Bunyan was discovered in the mid-Sixties by The Rolling Stones' guru Andrew Loog Oldham when she sang at a birthday party for her mother's friend, all "grumpy and teenagery" about being made to perform.

It led to her recording a song by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and reviews which touted her as "the new Marianne Faithful" and "the female Bob Dylan".

Then, however, nothing. Further singles remained unreleased and, despairing of the music industry, Bunyan bought a horse and cart and set off with her boyfriend for Donovan's dream colony in the Isle of Skye.

The experience formed the gentle, rustic beauty of 1970's Just Another Diamond Day, set down on a trip to London. But Bunyan never promoted her debut record, setting off again for Ireland and obscurity.

"I made this terrible mistake of comparing myself to other people and finding myself lacking," she says now.

"Joni Mitchell was just coming up and when I heard her I thought, 'Well why bother?' I stopped writing, I stopped playing, I stopped singing, even to myself.

"I thought I was a failure. At one point, I hated the sound of my voice so much I couldn't even record an answer phone message."

For 30 years ...Diamond Day was an embarrassment to Bunyan, a tape-of-a-tape-of-a-tape shoved to the back of a drawer which the children (her daughter later confided) would listen to secretly in the car.

Then in the late Nineties, having bought a computer with a view to writing the story of her horse and cart journey for her children, Bunyan typed her name into a search engine and discovered bootlegs of her album were selling on ebay for £900. Tracking down the master tape to a dusty warehouse and forcing herself to listen, she discovered that "it wasn't such a load of rubbish after all".

So Bunyan re-released ...Diamond Days and set about writing a successor, Lookaftering. Critics were amazed by the way in which her voice, unused for so long, had retained its tenderness and purity. Her kids read the accompanying interviews and said, "You never told us that! Do know how much cooler we could have been at school?"

"It was like a parallel life had been going on that had nothing to do with me," she explains. "Suddenly I've stepped into it. My last child had left home - I had no idea what people meant by empty-nest syndrome until then. The timing was brilliant."

Initially terrified of playing live, Bunyan is enjoying it more and more, though she doesn't like it so much when she can't see the audience's faces.

But the biggest boost to her confidence has been the friendship of a host of young artists, especially Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, who emerged citing her influence.

Having felt isolated and ignored by her own generation, Bunyan has found her contemporaries in the future.

"Kindred spirits is about as close as I can get to describing it," she says, clearly moved. "I didn't realise how the Sixties has been seen as a time of wonderful generosity and everybody being nice to each other. Really, there were very few lovely people. I'm so pleased that I've found them now.

Tonight, 7.30pm, £16, 01273 709709