Donovan


 * There’s an incredible intimacy, isn’t there, about Donovan? Makes you feel you’ve known his things first since the first thing you heard in your cradle. Makes you feel as though you’ve known them all your life, or perhaps even before that. And makes you want to run naked and sort of unashamed through his songs – there’s something incredibly intimate about them. Beautiful. That was Writer In The Sun anyway. (JP on the Perfumed Garden, 18 July 1967)
 * Enter stage right the glamorous Miss Russell ((not the full-figured girl herself but the Disc personality) and she is talking about seeing Donovan on the television last might. She says that he was very good - I can believe it.It is a bitter comment on our lives and times that so little is heard of Donovan now. I'd love to hear him singing on Top Gear or the other programme again. (JP in Disc, 1970-1, quoted in The Olivetti Chronicles, p.198)
 * ...I pointed out to Boy Kershaw that although we older pop fans may be ugly and have sore bottoms, our age has enabled us to hear some magical stuff. That night we were back on the hill, talking TT racing again as the sun was sinking down, as Donovan once put it, "behind the tattered tree". Then Donovan started singing right behind us and we moved hurriedly back to the plain to drink beer in the night mist with Mixmaster Morris....(JP at Glastonbury, 1993 - from The Olivetti Chronicles, pp. 102-103)

Although it may seem unlikely to listeners who discovered Peel's programmes during or after the punk era, there was a time when Donovan (b. 10 May 1946) ranked among his very favourite artists, regarded with the same awe as Peel's other late 1960s heroes, The Misunderstood, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and Tyrannousaurus Rex. While he seldom revisited his favourite Donovan tracks in later years, the intensity of his admiration (shown in the first of the above quotes) seems to contradict his later claim that his professed love for Donovan's music was a simple reaction to the widespread reverence for Bob Dylan.

The two singers were portrayed as rivals in the pop press of the mid-1960s and Donovan was sometimes written off as a Dylan imitator. In fact both singers were admirers of the group of older wandering bohemian folk singers headed by Woody Guthrie. While the young Dylan took Guthrie as his role model, Donovan, after leaving school at 16, embraced the beatnik lifestyle as described in Jack Kerouac's On The Road. He travelled down to Cornwall, a centre of beatnik activity, became a folk club performer and befriended one of Woody Guthrie's disciples, the singer and banjoist Derroll Adams (the subject of one of Peel's favourite Donovan songs, "Epistle To Derroll").

Given such a background, it was remarkable that Donovan, still a teenager, rapidly became a pop star after appearing in 1965 on the influential TV pop show Ready, Steady, Go!, and that he managed to sustain a high level of popularity (particularly in the USA) until the end of the decade. He owed this to his ability to write simple, catchy melodies and allow them to be transformed into pop chart material by producer Mickie Most. On his LPs he moved away from the Guthrie-Dylan acoustic style towards more complex arrangements incorporating elements of jazz and psychedelia. The albums Sunshine Superman (1966) and Mellow Yellow (1967), issued separately in the U.S. but edited down to a single LP when issued in the U.K. in May 1967, illustrated these developments and the dreamy, atmospheric moods of many of the tracks made them ideal material for Peel's late-night Perfumed Garden programme. It was rare to find a Peel programme on Radio London which did not include at least one Donovan track.

Despite his chart success, Donovan had real underground credibility in 1967. He was one of the first pop stars to be "busted" for pot-smoking, visited California when the hippy era was beginning, took part in one of the early London "happenings" which led to the founding of the UFO club and was part of the Beatles' social circle. He accompanied them to Rishikesh in India when they decided to follow the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and during thier stay reportedly taught them the folk guitar styles which helped them write the material which was later featured on the double LP The Beatles.

In 1968 Donovan issued his own double LP, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, half pop songs, half acoustic songs written for children. Peel remained enthusiastic, praising the children's songs in particular, but some critics were more sceptical. Donovan, clad in exotic robes and bearing flowers in the cover photo, embodied a flower-power image which was already passé and was now calling upon his audience to turn away from drugs. The hit singles continued, but Donovan's LPs were sometimes unissued in the U.K. because of a dispute between his British and American record companies. Donovan thus began to lose some of his audience to more adventurous artists working in the same field, like Pentangle (whose guitarist Bert Jansch was honoured in two Donovan songs, "Bert's Blues" and "House of Jansch") and the Incredible String Band (Donovan sang Robin Williamson's "First Girl I Loved" in his live set). Both groups were regularly featured, on record and in session, on Peel's programmes, while Donovan only did two Top Gear sessions in 1968. He seemed to become more dependent on a teenage American public and appeared less often in the UK; at one Royal Festival Hall concert in summer 1968 Peel, acting as compere, was shocked to hear him describe an acquaintance as a "wanker" backstage.

This phase of Donovan's career ended in 1970, when he abandoned a tour of Japan and flew home to take a break. Later, in a BBC radio documentary, he was to claim he had suffered a breakdown. His career never recovered its original impetus and he did not succeed in finding a new audience in the 1970s. His new songs appeared too simple-minded and childlike for the largely adult public attracted by the singer-songwriters of the time, and he was too "pop" to find a niche in the folk scene. His records eventually vanished from Peel's playlists and he disappeared from public view, but he was able to enjoy revivals of interest in his work starting in the 1990s, performing alongside younger artists such as the Happy Mondays. However Peel, conscious that he had overpraised Donovan (he had even suggested in 1967 that the singer would be a suitable candidate for Poet Laureate) never invited him to record a session for his show; the final comment above would seem to sum up his later attitude to an artist who had once been among his favourites.

(work in progress...)

Festive Fifty Entries
None

Sessions

 * 2 sessions. No known commercial release.

1. Recorded: 1968-01-16. First broadcast: 21 January 1968. Repeated: ?
 * There Is A Mountain / As I Recall It / Lalena / The Timber And The Ceab / Young Girl Blues

2. Recorded: 1968-06-11. First broadcast: 16 June 1968. Repeated: 21 July 1968
 * Mad John's Escape / It's Been A Long Time / The Entertaining Of A Shy Girl / Lalena / Hast Thou Seen The Unicorn?/ Skip Along Sam (21 July 1968 repeat)

Other Shows Played
(The information below is incomplete and compiled only from the database of this site. Please add any missing details if known.)


 * 01 July 1967: Sunshine Superman (single) Pye (JP: "A revived 45... one of the most important of the past year as it led directly to the recording of two magical albums...")
 * 12 July 1967: Epistle to Dippy (US single) Epic
 * 16 July 1967: The Fat Angel (LP - Sunshine Superman, US version) Epic
 * 18 July 1967: Writer In The Sun (LP - Sunshine Superman, UK version) Pye
 * 19 July 1967: Young Girl Blues (LP - Sunshine Superman) Pye
 * 06 August 1967: To Try for The Sun (LP - Fairytale) Pye
 * 07 August 1967: Guinevere (LP - Sunshine Superman) Pye
 * 14 August 1967: Guinevere (LP - Sunshine Superman) Epic / Pye
 * 14 August 1967: Epistle To Dippy (US single) Epic
 * 14 August 1967: Sunny Goodge Street (LP - Fairytale) Pye
 * 14 August 1967: Sand And Foam (LP - Sunshine Superman) Pye
 * 14 August 1967: Writer In The Sun (LP - Sunshine Superman) Pye
 * 01 May 1968: Epistle To Derroll (LP: A Gift From a Flower to a Garden) Pye
 * 09 October 1968: Keep on Truckin' (LP - What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid) Pye
 * 12 December 1970: Celia Of The Seals (single) Dawn
 * 09 December 1975: Writer In The Sun (LP - Sunshine Superman) Pye
 * 19 March 1980: Sand And Foam (LP - Mellow Yellow) Epic
 * 10 July 1982: Guinevere (LP - Sunshine Superman) Epic/Pye
 * 22 May 1992: Song For John (LP - Open Road) Epic/Dawn
 * 11 August 1998: Guinevere (LP - Sunshine Superman) Epic
 * 23 January 2002: Guinevere (LP - Sunshine Superman) Epic