Top 10 Tuesdays Obscure Albums That Became Classics

With last week's news that Bill Fay had been coaxed out of retirement to make his first new studio album in over 40 years, I've been thinking about the excited reception that the news received, and the heroic homecoming given to an impossibly obscure and long reclusive figure.

Fay's sainted status wasn't bestowed from above, consecrated on some Rolling Stone list big on Baby Boomer nostalgia. Instead, it's grown slowly up from below; trickling through in the work of Nick Cave, Wilco, Okkervil River, Destroyer, and countless other acts who're proud to be Bill Fay acolytes.

Yet, Fay is hardly alone. Since nascent reissue culture and the filesharing explosion made everything old new all over in the early-2000s, there's been a mass reevaluation and reappraisal of so many 'failures' of rock'n'roll past. People like the incomparable Vashti Bunyan (pictured!), who doubts she even sold five dozen copies of Just Another Diamond Day on its 1970 release.

All these albums sank into obscurity on their release, only for time to prove more kind, and their influence to linger long after their makers had retired, disappeared, or died. And they're all now, quite thankfully, hailed for their greatness. Here's 10 Obscure Albums That Became Classics...