Dono-fans will be pleased to learn that the concert at London's Cadogan Hall which had to be cancelled in April has now been rescheduled for Monday, 12th October. He will be playing two shows that day, to allow for social distancing, and both will be livestreamed.
All being well, I hope to attend the earlier show, but I suspect I won't be the only person wending his way to Sloane Square with mixed feelings on that Monday. Restrictions mean Donovan will no longer be playing with a band, and because of this it seems there will be fewer numbers from his new/old album Eco-Song, which features some lesser-known recordings from his extensive back catalogue with an ecological link.
In other words, probably not much different from a typical Donovan concert - and I'd stopped going to those, for reasons outlined in earlier posts.
But maybe, in these times, a typical Donovan concert is what we need. And I'm aware, as with going to see Ben E King, that there's a ceremonial aspect: we come to give thanks, to acknowledge what our hero has been to us, not to complain that time hasn't stood still.
It's almost fifty years since I saw Donovan headlining a benefit concert for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders at Green's Playhouse in Glasgow, and it must be longer than that since I first placed a copy of Fairytale (the Marble Arch version) on a turntable, thus beginning many happy (or wasted) years of record collecting. I may or may not go to see him again after this but I owe him a debt of gratitude.
But this is not like submitting to nasty medicine for some kind of anticipated moral cleansing. In a piece quoted earlier in this blog Tom Sutcliffe took issue with a critic who described Paul Simon's voice in a 2012 concert as "faultless":
He's 70 years old now and it isn't what it was ... but that hardly mattered. Its frailties were integrally part of the emotional content of the show.
I hope I'll be able to feel the same as I wend my way home on October 12th.
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