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 ranked among his very favourite artists, regarded with the same awe as Peel's other late 1960s heroes, 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 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 Dylan took Guthrie as his role model, Donovan 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 alcoholic 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 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 and Mellow Yellow, issued as two albums 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.

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, he had taken part in one of the early London "happenings" and was part of the Beatles' social circle.

(work in progress...)

Sessions

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