Women have had starring roles in Donovan’s songs and mythology since those days of dolled-up, scent-billowing matriarchs. “That was okay you know, being surrounded by seven women all the time.” “They’d all be in furs – the mammy, the grannies, the aunties – and full of perfume, with that great red lipstick, and they’d lean down and kiss me as they left,” he says, a glint in his eye. He educates me in the meaning of bliss (via meditation), and rarely seems happier than when he’s recalling the women from his infancy going dancing down the Barrowland. We sit on sofas across from each other, but he gradually comes around, and pulls an armchair right up beside me. We meet in a suite in One Devonshire Gardens, a stone’s throw away from Maryhill, where he was born Donovan Leitch in 1946. And this audience with Donovan is intimate indeed. And so he does.Īn interview with Donovan is an audience with Donovan. At one point in our meandering discourse, he catalogues, “The heroic poets, the higher songwriters,” thus: “Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Neil Young. Perhaps this is why he’s not slow in reminding us. Such righteous feats secured his position at the heart of a canon that sometimes forgets him. The 1960s pop visionary blazed a trail for psychedelia, celtic rock and flower power, and inspired bands from Led Zeppelin to Belle and Sebastian. We’re sat so close our legs entwine as he sings me a song he once wrote about sunshine, and spins me winding, colourful yarns about post-war Maryhill, transcendental super-vision, Pink Floyd, Billy Connolly, and how he influenced The Beatles. This article first appeared in The Herald Arts magazine (Scotland) in May 2015ĭonovan and I are holding hands over coffee in the Glasgow sun.
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