Shelagh McDonald: Mirage

Shelagh McDonald wrote a piece in the Guardian under the title 'I disappeared for 30 years'.

It wasn't my intention to walk out of my own life and vanish, especially when things were going so well. I was an ambitious 24-year-old folk singer and had just started work on my third album. The second had been a critical success and had really started to get me noticed.

A bad trip was the catalyst for unexpected change. I took LSD at a party, expecting the effects to be short-term, but ended up losing three or four days. I remember wandering across London, experiencing terrifying hallucinations, then being helped on to a plane with no clue where I was going. 

Touching down, I recognised Glasgow and my parents' stern faces. They'd never approved of me becoming a singer; perhaps this is what they'd always expected.

The hallucinations continued for weeks. I remember lying in bed at my parents' house, hearing the phone ring, but if any of the calls were for me, they were never passed on. My address book hadn't made the journey with me, and I didn't have the money to travel. My friends were all down south and though I desperately wanted to see them, I became completely cut off. 

Over 18 months I began to recover, though when I tried to sing, all that emerged was a strangled croak.

But come back she did, after 30 years of a vagabond life.

This is a track from McDonald's first album, imaginatively entitled Album, which came out in 1970.

The obvious comparison to make is with Sandy Denny. And, sure enough, Wikipedia says:

On her first two albums, McDonald was backed up by many notables within the English folk-rock scene, including Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Danny Thompson, Keith Tippett, Keith Christmas, the Fotheringay rhythm section, as well as Ian Whitman, Roger Powell and Michael Evans, then members of Mighty Baby.