VASHTI Bunyan puts Kate Bush’s legendary long years of silence in the shade.

Between Just Another Diamond Day’s muted release on a tiny pressing in 1970 and Lookaftering’s arrival in October 2005 there were the years of disenchantment, long-term exile and eventual re-discovery, but Vashti promises her next record will arrive rather sooner.

The story of her Bermuda Triangle years has been told so often – she brought up her family etc etc – that we will look forward to after Lookaftering.

This week the enigmatic Edinburgh folk singer is on tour, playing the Howard Assembly Room at the Leeds Grand Theatre tonight at 7.45pm, when Vashti will introduce two new songs.

“We’ve worked on only two so far to play live,” she says. “Across The Water is about recovering from the slumps in your life, sleeping till noon and living through the night when people become a little lost…and that’s certainly happened to me.

“Here is about a person being there all the time, just expecting them to go at any minute, but they’re always there. It’s a song with only four lines in it; the rest is music, as I like to condense things.”

She has always enjoyed doing so. “I think that’s what I wanted to do with my music since I was very young,” says Vashti, who turns 65 this year. “That was what would appeal to me in pop. You can say so much in two lines: saying something as briefly as possible, but with meaning through its brevity, and then using repetition, which is such a powerful tool.”

Busy song-writing through this year, Vashti will be working on her new album with producer Andy Cabic, of the San Francisco band Vetiver. No release date has been set yet. “Not this year,” she says, “because Andy and I have so much that we’re doing already, and we’re on different continents, but we can do so much by email now.

“Really it’s at the end of the process that I’ll get together with Andy, so maybe it’ll be this time next year that it’ll come out.”

Watch this space and keep your fingers crossed.