Pieces of Donovan

Following on from the previous post, here is an assembly of shorter pieces about Donovan for them as might be interested.  The first one contains more thoughts about that 2010 German gig mentioned in that post; later there's a bit of agonising - quite a bit, in fact - about whether or not to attend a 2011 concert (I'm nothing if not consistent), followed by a radio documentary telling the story of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' 1972 "work-in", the whole jingbang concluding with the spectacle of a greatly altered Don on daytime TV ... now read on (or not).

28 January 2010

Donovanagain

I stuck with the Donovan concert to the end (see previous post), although I wish I'd been aware of it when it was actually going out. There would only have been a notional difference, but still. The interval was good fun:  various people, some of whom didn't seem to be expecting it, were roped in to say something. What do you expect in the second half? Er, I dunno. More songs? Possibly a few more of his hits?

The quality of the feed, with a nice, warm acoustic, was excellent, and the venue - a real old, proper-looking theatre - seemed an ideal size for the intimate event of one man and his guitar.

There was an odd moment at the end, though, when he was singing Atlantis (big in Germany but less bouyant in the UK): a bass player came on to add assistance, but then suddenly towards the end we got a blast of the original record and for a moment I thought: are they hearing that in the hall or not? Was Donovan then miming to it or singing along? If it was meant to add extra force it seemed - from the POV of at least one person watching the streamed version, anyway, if not those people in the auditorium - a misjudgment. The bass player didn't seem too sure of things as he was led off the stage by Don. But then again, maybe the sound for the streamed version didn't really pick up the full effect of the audience singing along, though there was visual evidence of them apparently whooping it up at the end - though there always seems an element of coercion at such moments: it's the thing to do; rude not to. But the overall effect - for me, anyway - was that it was a bit of a cop-out.

Of course, it does illustrate perfectly what Mark Shipper was talking about at the end of Paperback Writer [reviewed here], and you could even argue there was an element of humility on present-day Donovan's part: the audience wanted the memory so he gave them precisely that, rather than trying to match it more than four decades later. But given that he's normally quite happy to go onstage armed only with guitar and harmonica to play songs best known as full productions (plaudits not just to Mickie Most but arranger John Cameron), the decision seemed an odd one unless the recording really is sacrosanct in Germany.

I wonder what it would be like if I listened now to a recording of the 1972 UCS concert? A bootleg was made, which I purchased from someone in Hamilton. The sound quality - at least in the cassette I was given - was truly atrocious, making it hard to discern anything. I sent it back, or sent a letter complaining about it, only to receive an angry phone call: he assumed I was a fellow bootlegger, trying to get something for nothing (the irony of that I'll leave aside, even though he sent me a list of his "unofficial recordings", which I now know were all well-known boots). I was about fourteen at the time, and he'd met me, so I don't know what kind of industry he thought I was the brains behind, though he cooled down when I was able to convince him that this was a genuine grievance.

Still, it means I don't have any record of that first concert beyond my memory - which suggests that the running order for Donovan's setlist that afternoon (taken from a website of memories about Green's Playhouse/Apollo gigs) isn't fully correct, but who knows, other than someone who may or may not still reside in Hamilton?

And the reason I think I complained, incidentally, instead of accepting that I'd been done, wasn't so much out of some juvenile sense of right and wrong as the fact that, clearly eager to maintain a customer base, he had actually sent me a Christmas card saying "Hope you liked the tape!"

Well - as you know - I didn't, but if you ever read this, now I would really love to hear it again, whether or not technology has allowed for some mini-miracle of audio restoration in the the meantime: let me fire up the ol' long-vanished Rigonda and I'll fill in those missing frequencies for myself.

11 May 2010

Donovanagain - again

Caught up in a madness I cannot fully explain, I have become a Friend of Donovan's - in the limited, online meaning of the term - and watched a bit of footage of him performing during some kind of film award thing recently. First he plays Sunshine Superman - but during Mellow Yellow two people came out and joined him, and you know what? I enjoyed it. Mellow Yellow has become a bit like Happy Birthday: everyone knows it and it's fun. People were clapping along, having a good time, and the presence of others onstage made it seem revived, refreshed, especially as those people were just messing around. The Donovan Concert to which I linked in an earlier entry (see below) now only survives as a few images on his website; this three or so minutes of him singing recently is on youtube so maybe it'll last longer. Anyways, here it is. And my new "friend" tells me that he has been celebrating his birthday - so happy mellow yellow birthday, Mr Leitch.

Sadly, the video which accompanied the above post is no longer available. A year later, Donovan played the Sunshine Superman album in its entirety at the Royal Albert Hall. I duly spent a few posts debating whether or not to go ...

28 April 2011

Donalert aka Belated For-Albert-Hall Plea

Suppose I ought to let readers know that Donovan will be performing the whole of the Sunshine Superman album at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday June 3rd. I had known about this already, but reading the new edition of Mojo magazine I see that John Cameron, responsible for the arrangments on Donovan's classic 60s recordings, will be part of this and there is an orchestra to back him - in other words, this is not just yet another night with guitar. I had a look at the Royal Albert Hall website, and saw that the cheapest tickets are £20 but couldn't actually see any available: £30 looks more likely.

And I suppose the question is do I now care enough, or am I willing to take the risk of disappointment, to schlep out there and back? The answer is probably not - and if you have read my earlier post about Donovan performing at the Festival Hall you will understand why.

But I am tempted - if only to have my disappointment confirmed in a masochistic sort of way. Or maybe I should accept that my experience of Donovan live has already been bookended by the Green's Playhouse and Festival Hall gigs.

With reference to something mentioned in that post, I was fitfully clearing up yesterday when I came across a printout of a message to a Donovan forum which is no longer online. I said something to the effect that its gushing nature meant it was probably better left in cyberspace but I'll reproduce it below anyway. This dates from the days when, as with the Kewl Steve posts, I was accessing the internet via TV and the only way to archive anything was to print it out, so this was rationed. So at the time - and I think this dates from September 2000, around the same time I was starting to contribute to the Doo Wop Shop board - I must have thought this post was important.

I'm still listening to Gift ... and want to move out of quiz mode to talk to everyone about why this record matters to me. It's partly what I said in my previous posting: a sense of being connected to my younger self. I first bought a Donovan LP at about the age of fourteen - a cheapo reissue of Fairytale with a psychedelic cover - the first record I ever bought. Now the songs have become overfamiliar, and I can't listen with the same sense of wonder. But Gift was out of my price range and although a friend lent me a tape of the first half in 1976, I never heard the whole thing till about 1998. Hearing stuff like Epistle to Derroll was a joy because I could hear Ballad of Geraldine in it - the playing and the style of writing - but it was new and fresh to me, as though recorded yesterday. The simplicity yet the sense that this is a perfect, rounded composition, especially the way he intones "in my dreaming bed" at the end.

Recently I've become more drawn to friends and places from the past and Donovan seems the perfect soundtrack: a sense of simple wonder at things, time taken to listen. I was making a tape for a friend I'd lost touch with until a chance meeting in 1999 - a gap of fourteen years. Voyage Into the Golden Screen seemed the best way to say "I feel there is something special and magical about meeting you again." This was one of the songs I'd heard in 1976 when our friendship was close. I also associate Donovan with adolescence in a slightly sad way: I remember my mother's disappointment when I bought a music paper with an interview with Donovan in it: a sign I was moving away from comics and away from her; pop music united myself and my brothers but my mother was excluded: secret, new thoughts. I remember my father's anger at my listening to Open Road in the dark. Seeing Donovan in Glasgow in 1973 was my first gig: an incredible experience.

Now I am a middle-aged man with a copy of Open Road on CD, bought recently, not quite as good as I remember and HMS Donovan seems to me very patchy but Gift seems the real thing: simple, unaffected, somehow capturing what it means to be young. And it's not, or not only, the words, it's the invitation to be calm, be still, to take in the moment. Maybe my articulating this for myself has rung a few bells for others; hope so. Now I can hear Voyage again on my headphones: full circle. Thanks, Donovan, for being part of my past - and present. Tony

Yes, well ... What I didn't mention in in the main post about Donovan on this blog was that I had some contact in the last few years with someone who had been one of Donovan's friends around the time he renewed contact with Linda Lawrence. This friend's disillusion probably mixed in with the Festival Hall gig - but the recent documentary certainly didn't help. In a sense, none of that ought to matter any more than the manner in which Hardy treated his wife invalidates his Poems of 1912-13: the self who appears through writing may be idealised but it's what we're capable of being.

But do I want to be in the Royal Albert Hall, gazing at a distant speck and being pained yet again (however good the backing may be) that overdone vibrato? Wouldn't it be better to sit in the darkness at home, headphones on (and- hah! -my father can't stop me now, on account of he's dead) and listen to the CD? Or do I need to shell out and schlep out so I can delude myself that I haven't altogether lost faith in the possibility of transformation as indicated in that ten year old message, despite the evidence in my life to the contrary? (There were no more mixtapes.)

Yeah, yeah, okay, I get it: symbolically it's important I should go, even if he sounds like he's singing while perched on a washing machine stuck on "spin." And if this was a short story or the end of Manhattan or whatever, there'd be a wry, all-absolving smile which would play about my features. But ...

Ah. There is one thing which could make this work, and give me my mojo (not the publication) back. Why doesn't someone out there in blogreading land buy a ticket for me and get in touch to tell me about it? That simple (but not inexpensive) act of kindness might just be enough to restore my naive belief in ... ooh, everything, really. Even if the gesture has already been soiled by the shameless manner in which I have solicited it.

Anyway, let's see. I will keep that Friday evening free. Ooh, I'm all excited now. Just hope my readership are fully aware of the terrible responsibility they have assumed.

There was one anonymous comment in response to the above post, though I believe I know the culprit: "Since I'm your only bloody reader and I'm not shelling out for a ticket, it's you and the headphones, Pismo." Charming.  And the madness - my madness, that is - continued: 

29 April 2011

Donalert Part Two: A Sign

Remember that Alan Yentyob documentary about Bowie? That's right, in the long-ago when Yentob didn't feel the need to interpose his physical self quite so much between the viewer and the subject, yeah?

Well, remember all that cut-up writing he was doing, like Mr Burroughs in The Newcomers. What? No, you remember Mr Burroughs, surely?

He looked a lot like Norman Bi -ird,
Drove a Morris Minor van

Campbell Singer - that was it. Anyway, you know that cutting-up thing, and Bowie saying proudly, "Yes, that's how I came up with the Laughing Gnome, whereas Marc actually thinks he's a poet," and then subsiding into sniggering and complaining there was a fly in his soup, yeah? All coming back to you now?

Blimey, it's like trying to get blood out of a Rolling Gnome. Anyway, at times of crisis and doubt I do me some cut-ups of Donovan lyrics, to see which way I should go in life, like. And addressing myself to the question of the Royal Albert Hall (see previous post) , I ruined a perfectly good, and extremely rare, Donovan songbook of Gift From a Flower to a Garden, chucking all the bits up in the air. (The image above is not of my now valueless copy, but an item on ebay.)

Now, you know the story of JM Barrie, surely? No, no, anybody can see a Johnny Depp film: I mean his trick with a postage stamp and a penny. Barrie'd lick the stamp (no, that isn't slang), place it on an old penny - and believe me, that's one Lost Boys' mother of a coin - flip his thumb and the aforesaid philatelic item would stick on the ceiling of whatever friend's house he happened to be visiting. Well, it's one way of marking your territory.

What I'd forgotten about was that the songbook had been in a fairly damp environment, and when I chucked all the pieces up in the air almost all of them stuck to the ceiling - and none of them have come down since.

The only fragment, in fact, which has so far made it to the carpet (well, I say carpet - more an iridescent field of green mould, if I'm honest) reads thus:

Go if you're able,
Come if you can

Which I take to be a clear invitation from the mystical maestro himself. Which means it would probably be enough if I just showed up on the night; I'd be smilingly nodded through.

But there is a small note of doubt so if anybody wants to buy me a ticket for the Royal Albert Hall to see Donovan singing the entire album of Sunshine Superman, there is still time.

Campbell Singer, yeah. He was in The Yellow Balloon. Briefly. In the pub scene at the end, when it's all kicking off. Actually, that could be another sign, if you remember the Open Road album - but I don't have a songbook so I had to look it up on one of those lyrics sites with lots of popups:

You're my singer
Let me be your song

So that could be, yeah, another sign, right? Against that, it does include the line

But you are not among us here

So I'm really confused about the Albert Hall. Part of me thinks it would all  be so simple if I just, y'know, bought a ticket myself,only I have this recurring dream that I'm at the Donovan concert immortalised on the Donovan in Concert album, only I realise, with a sinking feeling, that the CD issue with the extra tracks is actually only a tiny part of the event, which mostly consists of friends and relatives of Don taking their turn to introduce him: a kind of neverending tease, akin to that scene in Help! where an official is greeted getting off an aeroplane. Y'know, so it'd be: "Without any further ado, I'll hand you over to a friend - no, an acquaintance, rather - of Derroll Adams ..." and so the long evening wears on, to the point where the audience is praying for a special sort of rain which will be impervious to Donovan's commands.

But, like, that's just a dream, right?

Come the hour ...

3 June 2011

Donovan: why I'm not going tonight. Probably.

Have been thinking more about the Donovan Albert Hall gig tonight (above, same location in 1973). Not entirely unexpectedly, no mysterious benefactor has offered to pay for a ticket so far (so that cruel contributor was right), and I've rather lost hope in that direction.

But in a way the money is not really the issue. Funds have been severely diminished but I could go if I really wanted to - and had a good look at the Royal Albert Hall website today, where good seats are still available, though sales seem to have been pretty good.

No, it's more about the level of disappointment. That there will be disappointment I am reasonably certain; that there will be flashes of enjoyment in between I am less certain, but that, too, seems, on balance, probable. But will those flashes be enough?

What it boils down to is what Ronnie Barker was thinking when offered a job at the National Theatre. The first thought was not "Woweee! What a great play!" but rather a calculation about the length of the commute. If that was his immiediate priority, Barker realised, then maybe it was time to get out of the profession, and did.

And it's the schlepping to the Albert Hall and back (a pretty average journey for any Londoner), the waiting for the gig to start, the fear (as with the Festival Hall gig I saw) that our troubadour's extended family may be merrily chatting away at the back then half-heartedly playing along on percussion to There Is a Mountain ...

But more than anything, it's not 1972 and no amount of effort on my part will make it so. The collective will of those who have elected to attend may result in some kind of miracle, but for me that Festival Hall gig is just too much to get over.

Despite my softening at the end of an earlier blog entry about the Don, coming across a video of a gig in Germany which was only a day or two old, and realising that, yes, I wanted to hear it, whatever I might have just written about renouncing him, I can't imagine there will be a sufficient difference in what will happen tonight. Though it's a while since I saw him with a band, and having a chamber orchestra will be a wholly new experience.

So I am - still - sort of tempted. But perhaps the best thing to do is to slap on the headphones at the appointed hour and connect with the Donovan in my - and his - past.

Despite absenting myself from the proceedings I was unable to resist quoting from the responses of others and embedded some YouTube videos of the event in the next post. Most of them have since been taken down as there were plans for an official DVD of the concert.

4 June 2011

Donovan Albert Hall reviews or How Do You Like Them Gold Apples?

No, I didn't go. I will add to this post over the next few days with reviews by others - y'know, people who actually went there, who took the chance and sat and sweltered on the tube in the hope of happiness to come by being present at Donovan's recreation, at the Royal Albert Hall last night, of the Sunshine Superman album.

The only review I have come across to date is by Kieron Tyler on the Arts Desk website, readable in full here. He notes that "the voice is not what it was" but concludes:

Donovan's borderline naffness is what makes him and his questing music great. With a self-consciousness, he could never have pioneered psychedelia or written a song like last night’s show closer “Atlantis”

And it certainly looks like the guests couldn't have been bettered: Danny Thompson, Shawn Phillips and even Jimmy Page, brought on for Sunshine Superman. Wonder if he hung around for Hurdy Gurdy Man, given that it would appear he wasn't on the session? (See the songfacts website.)  That would be rather neat: making the legend half-true. Bit Pinterish, even:

How did I know Jimmy Page was on the session?

Pause.

I decided he was.

And with all these heavy friends (which reminds me of that unfortunate purchase of a Lord Sutch album in Woolworths, many years ago, but let it pass), would it, after all, have been worth chancing it? Tyler says that "Donovan shone" and that the recreation of the Sunshine Superman album in the second half was "almost flawless." Oh, and I've just read that Page was indeed there for Hurdy Gurdy Man in the first half. Wonder how that was introduced?

Sounds like it could have been enjoyable. Maybe it's just that I'll never be ready to embrace that borderline naffery. You see, I once loved him, unreservedly, absorbed the poetry of those early songs, discovered, rather later, the perfection of much of the Gift From a Flower album ... but it all goes back to the Festival Hall a few years ago and that creeping realisation (did I really never have it before then?) of the ridiculous aspect. I lost my faith, my Dono-faith, nurtured for so many years, a bit like the night I fell out of love with Chaplin at the Dominion Theatre (but that's another post). And it has never come back. It's one thing to talk about it here, with no more effort than fingers falling across a well-worn keyboard, but making the pilgrimage, through the heat and bustle of London, for a momentary mirage-type sighting of a land that I did know?

When bits and pieces turn up on youtube, as they probably will, I'll watch them and maybe even enjoy them. The above is a photo of last night which can be found on Donovan's Facebook page and probably his website, looking much as he has always done. I'm glad he's ditched the more severely scraped back hair.

But can you tell me how to get back to Green's Playhouse and the excitement of that first gig? One of my fellow attendees at that 1972 gig is now a psychiatrist who deals with alcohol problems among the elderly and apparently coined the phrase "Saga louts". He was more of a Neil Diamond fan, so it's probable that he didn't book time off to travel to London.

It's not impossible that my Town Hall Humiliation brother (whose birthday it is today) might have made the trek. Perhaps, inspired by Donovan's endurance, he has finally brushed away the past and, even as I write, is bringing to an end a matter which is starting to make Bleak House look like a novella.

If only I still had my Dono-faith.

More reviews to follow below as I find 'em. Kieron Tyler's blog here; his reissue record label, RPM (including Alan Klein) here.

Page-centric review on a Led Zeppelin website here.

Below, what seems to be the first youtube clip from the Albert Hall: Mellow Yellow with orchestra and Jimmy Page:



There is a video Wall of fans' verdicts,  here. By and large very positive, although quite a few of those Don-inclined do say that there were problems with the sound in the first half and that Donovan himself took a while to warm up. There are some suggestions that there may not have been enough rehearsal time with the orchestra. Try some of them; the  experience is very more-ish. 

Rolling Stone article on Jimmy Page's appearance here.

[At this point I uploaded a YouTube video, no longer available, of "what might be termed the case against: Donovan with vibrato in overdrive for Catch the Wind".]

Ah - a lately added comment on Kieron Tyler's Arts Desk review says that Page didn't play guitar on Hurdy Gurdy Man at the Albert Hall, thus sort of ruining my Homecoming reference.

But I have witnessed in the past his liking for onstage glasses of water - nothing else but a penchant.

The Guardian has just added a review:

His once-angelic voice is a disconcerting reedy quaver now, but neither the quality of the music nor his dippy sweetness have dimmed. 

Read it in full here.

A voice of dissent added to the Arts Desk comments on Keiron Tyler's article:

I came, I listened, I was disappointed. I didn't mind Donovan's poor old voice. But the orchestra was under-rehearsed, the sound levels were a mess and Donovan used cue cards for some of the lyrics. His children were spotlight-hogging non-starters.

The man wrote some of the catchiest pop singles ever heard and I'll always love them. And him, in a way. It was a shambles of an over-priced evening but, in its own weird way, memorable. Never again, though.

Read the other comments here.

More comments have been added to the Arts Desk article in response to "I was disappointed" above. Here's an abridged version of one:

The truth is, it was an uneven performance due to more rehearsals being needed and technological inadequacies, with highs and lows, not slick but with the warm, human quality that Donovan has always been known for. [...] The background orchestration was glorious on some songs. Donovan's voice wasn't always on top form but was usually strong and on-key. [...] Some people don't seem to realise the old Donovan can't return; he doesn't exist. The current Donovan was simply revisiting that time in his life - for himself and his wife. It was beautiful for that reason alone.

I was listening again at lunchtime to the Sunshine Superman album, and struck by just how much John Cameron's arrangements add. No point, I suspect, in trying to separate out the contributions of producer, arranger and composer/performer - and it's certainly the case that two albums I'm very fond of, Fairytale and A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, include performances which are simple vocal-and-guitar but as affecting as anything else in the canon - so I will simply note what pleasure the listening gave me.

Mind you, I'd been swimming in the morning so that might have helped.

I was tempted to change the alternate title of this post to "Lord of the Reedy Quaver." I didn't - and I feel a little ashamed at the thought. And those who might have looked through this blog will know that how performers acknowledge their past without becoming glorified labourers is a recurrent theme.

Another upload to youtube: There is a Mountain. Wish I kept the tape of his singing the scat version of this, dating from the Essence to Essence tour. "The lock upon my garden gate's a snail" - now that's poetry. He's in reasonable voice for this one too. I like the sounds of audience appreciation on this one.



You know what? I should have gone. I knew I would be saying that at some point, just like I knew I wouldn't go. What's all that about, eh?

Ah - Hurdy Gurdy Man has now been uploaded - and it is indeed pretty good. Donovan is in good voice and you can see his delight in the backing and the crowd reaction. Perhaps now is the time to thank "TheJewellian", who uploaded almost all of these Dono-vids [even if most of them are no longer there].

With that, the Albert Hall posts come to an end.  In 2018 I wrote a lengthy piece about the 1972 Benefit for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, the first Dono-gig I ever attended; it can be found here. By way of a postscript, below are some notes made in 2020 about a UCS radio documentary, written in between my purchase of tickets for the Cadogan Hall concert and the announcement of the rescheduled date.

21 March 2020

When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde (radio documentary about Upper Clyde Shipbuilders)

Those who have read an earlier post about Donovan's 1972 concert to raise funds for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders may be interested in a radio documentary which fills in more of the background to that event.

Entitled When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde, the programme was originally broadcast in 2011, not long after the death of Jimmy Reid, one of the prime movers in the story. He was the shop steward who, before the "work-in", famously said:

There will be no hooliganism. There will be no vandalism. There will be no bevvying ... because the world is watching us.

It was repeated today on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and as far as I can tell will remain available, for UK and US listeners alike, for at least a month - very possibly longer.

I provided some basic details in that earlier piece, drawing on a memoir by Jimmy Reid kindly provided by Doug Holton, but the opportunity to hear the voices of those directly involved in the struggle for survival, the rawness of their emotion and anger, undoubtedly gives the tale a far greater immediacy.

Some all-too-human details emerge during the programme. The story about John and Yoko donating a bouquet of roses along with financial support is corroborated - the sum is £1000 in this telling - although there is no word either way on whether the Lennons really attended the show in body. I've been listening to some old Lennon interviews which suggest he and Yoko gave financial support to any number of causes in those times, though the personal connection with Donovan means that his presence at Green's Playhouse that day can't be ruled out - unless a chronicler of Lennon's solo years with a Lewisohn-like tenacity can account for his movements on the afternoon of the 30th of April. (If you are out there, please get in touch.)

But that's just setting the scene. The detail which leapt out for me is that the ex-Beatle's flowers were not kept by UCS but given away to a local hospital. A lovely touch, you might think, but no: the female staff just couldn't agree among themselves about who was going to keep them.

*

Donovan has been on my mind over the past few weeks for reasons unconnected to the above. He was due to play a concert at London's Cadogan Hall in April, and despite the my reservations when seeing him perform in recent years, chronicled elsewhere in this blog, I went ahead and bought tickets, wanting to see him at least one last time - especially as it is approaching half a century since the Sunday afternoon of that UCS gig, my first ever rock performance - just as Donovan's early album Fairytale was the first LP I ever bought.

I kept revisiting the Cadogan website: concert after concert at the hall was officially cancelled but Donovan's show seemed to be hanging on, almost as though he still believed that asking the audience to clap their hands would be enough to make it stop raining. But it was eventually postponed for six months - and we can only hope that it will indeed happen then.

But in time-honoured news announcer fashion let's end on a happier note (UK readers of a certain age, please to picture the rictus grin of Alistair Burnett as he prepares to dangle the latest Royal titbit).

Those who have read some of the other Donovan posts (there are quite a few of them) may remember that after the disappointment of buying a lo-fi tape of the UCS concert - not to mention the experience of being berated by the bootlegger when I dared to complain - I cut out the middleman and made my own illicit cassette recording of a later Dono-gig at the same venue, by then renamed the Apollo.

In all probability the quality wasn't that much better than the shoddy souvenir of 1972 - but it was mine, and listening to the concert  in my darkened bedroom through the warmth of a valve amplifier my memory was just about able to fill in the gaps.

And then, at some unspecified point, that precious cassette ... just ... disappeared.

(Actually, my father probably threw it out along with other items unwisely left behind in the family home, but that's not such a good story.)

What? No, I didn't suddenly unearth the tape yesterday, sounding an unlikely note of hope amidst the uncertainty which now faces us all, but - well, the next best thing, I suppose.

I found online a fairly well recorded  gig from around the same time, and recognised roughly the same order of songs, beginning with Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and going through quite a lot of the Essence to Essence album, only far more appealing in barebones form. He steadily plays quite a lot of new or newish material before making with the hits and it's a strong, assured performance.

My only regret is that no performance of There Is A Mountain has ever matched the one committed to my little cassette recorder that evening at the Apollo. In addition to the different stresses I have heard on various live renditions - "lock  upon my garden gate's a snail" - he bursts into scatting. I have a feeling that this was earlier in the show than the one available online - possibly he felt he had to seize his home audience more firmly - and I've never heard it the same way since. "Nought happens twice thus", as Ramblin' Tom Hardy so rightly said.

*

Since writing the above yesterday, I  have been idly searching for more Dono-stuff on youtube and discovered tracks from a tribute album to Harry Belafonte in, I think, 2019, therefore representing Donovan's voice pretty much as it is now.

Listening is an odd experience: strain is often apparent, but there is still something moving in the experience. Donovan has been part of my life for so long, and whatever the joshing in some of the pieces listed below he always will be.

Here's his take on Scarlet Ribbons. I've chosen it partly because it's less demanding vocally than some of the other selections but also because it describes a moment of simple magic. Or idiotic, irrational hope, if you will. You remember idiotic, irrational hope, dontcha?

The recording of Scarlet Ribbons is no longer available. This final short Dono-post is slightly out of chronological order but it seems a fitting conclusion:

16 February 2019

He just went grey all of a sudden ...

There may be additional streaks of mellow nicotined yellow tangled up therein - I don't know - but the big news in my little world is that Donovan seems to have officially Gone Grey, choosing an interview with fellow Glasgwegian Lorraine Kelly on her self-titled show last December for the great unveiling:




That said, I haven't followed every recent interview or public appearance, so perhaps I am coming late to this revelation and placing an undue importance on this particular programme, even though this must surely have been the first inkling of this change for many of its viewers.

And his appearance on the show feels like an important event nevertheless - the equivalent, say, of an actress formerly known for playing Juliet agreeing to take on the role of Nurse for the first time: an admission of aging in a public arena.

Had he been encouraged by the fact that Paul McCartney has recently let his hair be, appearing on the Tonight show a couple of months earlier with grey locks? As Donovan was so closely associated with the Beatles during their Indian period (indeed, he was on Lorraine to promote a new documentary about that subject) that feels like it could be - indeed, ought to be - true. Who knows, maybe he'll soon start claiming that it was the shining example of his whitened coiffeure which inspired McCartney to follow suit, ho ho.

Yet the spectacle of Donovan like this is - and I can't get round it - at least a little disturbing. You may remember that in Death of a Salesman Willy's son Biff suddenly notices that his mother has allowed herself to go grey. For all the warmth of his response ("Dye it again, will ya? I don't want my pal looking old") he seems to be taking it as a personal affront, the implication being she has neglected her duty not to disturb or complicate the image he has retained of her since childhood.

And I suppose I feel something like that, even though I have written in these pages earlier of the signs of aging becoming increasingly apparent - sometimes painfully so - in the limitations of Donovan's singing voice in recent years.

Nor am I unaware of the passing of time for myself - only last year I was presented with a token of mortality allowing me to travel to Sunny Goodge Street for free in perpetuity and shake such rusty chocolate machines as may remain - but I suppose I wanted to feel that Donovan, public and private selves alike, would somehow remain forever in a happy cloud of unknowing, oblivious both to the ticking of the clock and the gibes on the net about some of his claims for himself.

Which reminds me of some remarks made by Ralph McTell during a 2006 interview for the Donovan Fanzine. They were quoted in an earlier post but seem apposite here. Referring to the 1966 documentary below he says:

A Boy Called Donovan [is] still how I see Don really - the belief in the music and all those strange Celtic myths that still permeate his work - and that's where his time is I think, and he has to constantly try and force that belief through all the modern hurly-burly and the reality thing - and that's a hard road to hoe. 

If you have been, thanks for reading.