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The Sunday Times
September 04, 2005
The 60s were so great, I’m never gonna leave
Donovan’s new book recalls his glory days – and he tells Giles Hattersley just how glorious they were
The restaurant, Donovan’s choice, is the sort of place you would expect an old swinger to loathe. A yuppified former industrial space in Cork with bad art on its towering walls and Andrea Bocelli on the stereo. It’s so ungroovy you worry Donovan, the breton-capped troubadour, will turn up after all these years looking square.
No need to panic, though. He enters, same frizzy cloud of hair, same unblinking eyes and same black, beatnik polo-neck sweater that, frankly, did a lot more for Bob Dylan in his twenties than it does for a man of 59.
The only additions are facial crags so deep you could lose your change in them. But let’s not get heavy, man. Later we’ll see that it doesn’t matter where he floats through space and time, in Donovan’s mind it will always be 1965.
First he must attend to more pedestrian matters. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the folk singer’s foray into the charts. “It’s handy to be alive when you have a 40th anniversary,” he says, his accent part Scottish, part Hobbit. “It’s also altruistic, of course.”
Hence there’s a new album, an exhibition of his photographs in Washington DC and, later this month, the release of his (sometimes unintentionally) hilarious memoirs in which he reveals that, if not the most talented songwriter of his generation, he’s certainly the least modest.
Few have escaped the Hurdy Gurdy Man’s put-downs. Of Bob Dylan, he thinks, “his lyrics are without equal, but I think I am musically the more creative and influential”. On teaching Paul McCartney how to finger pick the guitar he says: “He did not have the application to get it, but he wrote some lovely ballads under the influence of my style.” Jimi Hendrix, apparently, “found I was the nicest person he’d ever met!” Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are merely “the number one white r’n’b group in the world”.
He takes pains to claim back credit from his producers and fills three pages with the playbill of a 1968 Italian concert to show there was a time when his name came first. In the book, and in conversation, he says repeatedly: “You have to believe in yourself as an artist because nobody else will, especially when you’re young.” Skidding towards his bus pass without a future hit in sight, you wonder what his excuse for the ego is now.
“It’s my turn, you see,” he says of his 40th, “because I’m three years younger than the Stones, the Kinks, the Beatles, than a lot of my pals.” Unnervingly, when chatting he drops his chin and fixes the listener “charismatically”, like you are the camera lens on Ready Steady Go! With Donovan you are always the listener. Swathes of time pass during which your brain shuts down and you’re unable to snatch anything other than occasional phrases: “Chaos theory . . . Buddhism . . . manifesto . . . in the Seventies I called myself a shaman.” Frustrated when you interrupt, he dispenses with protocol and asks the questions himself. “What is Donovan’s legacy?” he ponders more than once.
But the big question, the one that has pursued him with all the vigour of an acid flashback, is that despite six years of international fame, Mellow Yellow and Jennifer Juniper, hanging out with the Beatles in India and being dubbed the high priest of the peace movement, is Donovan less a genuine rock’n’roll dinosaur and more a musical lightweight? On the dust jacket of his memoirs he is described as “one of the most influential musicians to have emerged from the 20th century”. Others may have their doubts.
Donovan Philip Leitch was born in 1946 in Glasgow where he lived in a tenement with his engineer father and factory girl mother, a far remove from the fine Irish rectory he occupies today. Polio didn’t stop him giving his first performance at the age of four, singing There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly in a Maryhill launderette. Later the family would emigrate to Hatfield in Hertfordshire, but a respectable working-class existence lost its charm at 16.
He explains that, like lots of his contemporaries, Kerouac and Burrows were on his bookshelves, cutout photos of the Paris beat scene on his walls and his parents were increasingly displeased with his ragged attire and artistic bent. “I wanted to leave the devastation of my old home and my family’s expectations. I felt something, like a call to arms, so I hit the streets.”
Donovan likens his experiences in 1963 to Kerouac’s On the Road, citing this time as proof of his authentic bohemian roots. Perhaps, in the early 1960s, it was shocking for a teenage boy to spend a few months in St Ives washing dishes, making love and getting high. These days we’d call that a gap year, but Donovan says it qualifies him as a vagabond. “I had everything I wanted before I made so many hit records,” he says. “I loved many gorgeous ladies and explored all the alternate forms of consciousness and holy plants.”
As “an outsider”, Donovan believed he had to bring the bohemian manifesto to popular music. “The folk scene wanted to keep bohemia exclusively theirs, but what kind of socialism is that?” In those days “the music world was tiny”, so after a chance performance for a visiting management team in St Albans in 1965 he ended up on Ready Steady Go! Naturally, the crowds “loved me straight away as I was always”, he pouts, “a pretty good-looking guy”. An instant hit with the girls the Beatles first taught to scream, he says, “the floor staff loved me as well, because the camera loved me too”.
So everybody loved Donovan. Soon he was living a fabulous Carnaby Street existence of wild days in the studio and wilder nights at the Bayswater hotel. “In the Sixties the girls looked better, the guys looked better, the art was better and the music was better,” he says.
All this fun resulted in Donovan becoming the first pop star to be done for marijuana possession. Naked in his flat, he tackled the arresting officer but “was still fined £250 and told I was a bad example to the youth of Britain”. When the scandal made the front pages, many in the music industry turned their backs on him, but the drugs bust ingratiated him with the big boys. “George Harrison called to say, ‘You can have £10,000 by noon, Don, if it helps ’.”
Professionally, his first hurdle was unfavourable comparisons with Dylan, but the Scot is quick to claim precedence. “My friend Gypsy Dave reminded me last year: ‘I called you up in ’64 and told you there’s this singer/songwriter in America doing just what you’re doing with a harmonica and a cap’.”
The men met on camera in D A Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. Summoned to the American star’s room at the Savoy, Donovan plays him the saccharine To Sing for You, with which Dylan appears visibly unimpressed. After a pause, Dylan plays his formidable It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and viewers experience the deep embarrassment of watching a lesser talent crushed.
I ask Donovan if the comparison still irks him. “Oh my God, that question is so boring. So boring!” which is a bit rich coming from a man who launches into 20 minutes of Tibet talk that is so life- alteringly dreary it could drive the Dalai Lama to beat a small mammal to death. He’s more engaging when he says: “Nowadays you are what you eat, but in the Sixties you were what you thought.” But then he starts rabbiting on about mysticism again.
Regardless, his sweet nursery rhymes and sensitive persona struck a chord with the flower power set. He had 13 hit singles, sell-out world tours and was fortunate enough to be taken seriously overseas. Dylan had introduced him to the Beatles in 1965 and their friendship was cemented by an infamous 1968 trip to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India.
The boys joined Mia Farrow in swapping hedonism for meditation and yoga. “Super-fame became difficult for us,” he says, effortlessly equating himself with more iconic figures. Back in Britain, the American model Enid Karl was raising the first of their two children, Donovan Jr, in a cottage in Hertfordshire, but Donovan Sr had fallen out of love. He pined instead for Linda Lawrence, the beautiful former girlfriend of Brian Jones, the dead Rolling Stone.
Donovan Jr and his sister Ione Skye now enjoy success as actors/musicians/New York hipsters, but for years they had a frosty relationship with their father, who is still married to Lawrence. “Often celebrity children, mine in particular, beg their fathers not to talk for them, so I won’t,” he says. “A big shadow is cast by a celebrity father.” His daughters by Lawrence, Astrella and Oriole, went on to marry Paul and Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays.
But back in 1970, at the age of 24, drugs and women got the better of Donovan, who withdrew from public life. “I was a poet who had entered history. I was a teacher whose course had come to an end.”
He continued to record but “this enormous amount of money came in whether I worked or not, so I got very lazy”. Like an ageing busker he was rolled out to perform on breakfast television. In one toe-curling example, the one-time rebel adapted the lyrics of his song Colours to sing “Yellow is the colour of Selina Scott’s hair”.
Were the 1980s miserable for him? “When I used to sit with George Harrison and we discussed the ultimate reality of existence, we knew there was no such thing as time. It’s only when we consider that something is yesterday or tomorrow that history is given a name. The material world is a strong illusion, but we must resist the notion that there is any time.” Which I’ll take as a yes.
With his clothes, speech and extensive name-dropping, these days Donovan cleaves to times when he was more admired. Over lunch he recalls meetings with Steve Jobs, the computer mogul, film roles for Lord Puttnam, openings with Richard Gere and comes off sounding horribly defensive. Can we forgive him this? After 40 years of being compared to Dylan, who wouldn’t be under-confident? With his new material, Donovan has the lofty ambition of presenting the bohemian manifesto (“ecology, hunger and the brotherhood of man”) to a new generation.
“I look around and see the peace and love my friends and I called for in the 1960s are needed now more than ever.” But even with the Stones on tour again and beatnik fashion back on the catwalks, the chances are Donovan, the voice of a different generation, will have less success this time round.
The Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan Leitch will be published by Century on September 29, £17.99
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