Magic Carpet Ride

Rediscovered 70s gem and Noel Gallagher favourite ALISHA SUFIT tells her strange tale to Ian Shirley

When the track Just Another Diamond Day was used for T Mobile advertising campaigns, a new generation discovered the beautiful, unvarnished voice of Vashti Bunyan.

In the last year or so, another female singer from the early seventies has moved back into the spotlight in the shape of Alisha Sufit.

Surfit’s gorgeous voice adorned the highly collectible Magic Carpet album, issued on Mushroom in 1972, a record that blended wistful psych-folk with Indian texture and is now a collector’s item worth close to £150.

Surfit owns the rights to the album and reissued it on vinyl and CD in 1993, and followed it with another Magic Carpet summit Once Moor (1996), as well as releasing solo album Alisha Through The Looking Glass, and even recordings made in 1974.

In 2008 she was contacted by former Future Sound Of London wrangler Gaz Cobain, who was compiling an album of obscure 70s gems and wanted to include the Magic Carpet track The Phoenix. Noel Gallagher was so taken with the ensuing record, A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Platipus) he asked Cobain to do a psychedelic remix of Oasis track Falling Down ,which ended up at 22 minutes long and featured Surfit on vocals.

She is now touring with Cobain’s The Amorphous Androgynous and enjoying every minute of it. Record …

by Ian Shirley
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