Donovan

The days of wine and roses are long gone now.

When Donovan writes “Writer In The Sun,” he's alone on the shores of a tiny Greek island, gripped by nostalgia for times gone by. But besides the sun sinking slowly into the sea, he's dazzled by the ghost of days yet to come - the ones he might have lived had his career not ended so soon.

The TV debut, the success first with "Catch The Wind" and then "Colours", the tour, the fans' devotion, the papers comparing him to Bob Dylan (already an international legend at the time), their meeting in that hotel room, the friendship with the Beatles. 1965 had been an incredible year, but evidently it wasn't fated to last.

"Sunshine Superman", the album into which he had poured all his talent and hopes, has been sitting on Pye's shelves for months now, held up by contract disputes. Meanwhile England is living through its most glorious days since the turn of the century, firmly on top of the world in fashion, culture and music (not to mention football, with the World Cup finally in the hands of the country that invented the game). From the fishermen's battered radios come the strains of "Revolver", the Beatles' latest masterpiece, and it's almost painful to hear Paul singing the line he himself had suggested to him.

Such resignation may seem strange in a young man who has just turned twenty, but it's because his eyes still hold that original purity of adolescence. If I can't be a pop star anymore, the Scotsman tells himself, I'll go back to what I was doing two years ago: travelling with a guitar on my back, playing in clubs and sleeping on the beach. The music industry of those years, after all, was a ship without a captain, a meat grinder still struggling to understand how the Beatles had lasted more than a few months.

Then one day, from a much bigger island at the other end of Europe, a phone call arrives. "Sunshine Superman" is out, and it's topping the charts across half the world. The time has come to go home.

Held back by the record label, "Sunshine Superman" only manages to reach shops in late August 1966, three weeks after the aforementioned "Revolver", but it still arrives in time to carve out a place among the forerunners of the psychedelic revolution that would soon sweep across Europe and the United States.

The ten tracks that make it up amount to a summation of the musical ferment of Swinging London in those months: the new pop sound coming out of Merseyside, the now-indispensable orchestral arrangements, the jazz of Soho's smoky clubs, the droning hum of Indian tanburas and the rhythm and blues of the Stones, all filtered and transformed through his own ethereal, dreamlike folk rock.

Donovan had realized that the only way out from under Bob Dylan's shadow was to stop following him: to take off the sailor's cap and search for his own personal path as a singer-songwriter; to shed the guise of a Woody Guthrie imitator and embrace his true calling as a troubadour. In short, to picture himself as a modern-day minstrel, lucky enough not to have to sail off to distant lands to discover new chords and new scales.

The best ally he could have found was Mickie Most, producer of some of the era's biggest pop hits. Rather than urging him to milk a tried-and-tested formula, Most encouraged him to experiment with all manner of sounds and genres, putting at his disposal - alongside his own keen musical instincts - the flair and skill of some of his session men. The most important for the album would be Shawn Phillips, whose sitar colours many of the songs; the most famous, meanwhile, would be a guitarist named Jimmy Page and a bassist named John Paul Jones, who, having met each other right there, would soon discover a certain kinship.

The title track is a perfect example of all this: folk's recurring structures tinged with psychedelia, a bouncy pop rhythm and Jimmy Page's electric guitars, on a song that immediately shot to number one on the American charts and later reached number two in Britain. In the same vein, less iconic but even more lively and catchy, is "The Trip", which would also be used as the single's B-side.

"Sunshine Superman" is also Donovan's first tribute to Linda Lawrence, the muse who would guide him for the rest of his life. Linda has just given Brian Jones a son as blond as he is, but things aren't going well anymore. She starts seeing Donovan, but even that relationship doesn't last long. The Scotsman will pursue her relentlessly in his thoughts, in his music and across the world, until he finally catches up with her some years later, bringing to a close the most difficult and important quest of his life. "Legend Of A Girl Child Linda" is about her, but also about the loss of innocence he had read about in William Blake's poems. The verses of the ballad, framed by string arrangements, tell the story of a group of children who want to bring happiness back to the kingdom of a princess who has fallen asleep and a prince who has gone off to war. Where Dylan uses the mournful imagery of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", Donovan chooses the language most natural to him, that of fairy tales - imaginary, yet anything but playful.

And perhaps this is where his uniqueness lies. Donovan writes wonderful songs, but he doesn't have the searing charisma of Bob from Duluth, nor does he breathe in air and exhale melody like Paul from Liverpool. Yet no one else is as capable as he is of carrying the listener out of the world and out of time, into a land that only faintly resembles our own, that enchanted place everyone reached as children, when they dreamed of setting off on some wonderful adventure or meeting the person of their dreams at the school dance. Even if they later forgot about it.

That's where he takes you if you follow him into the silent chambers of King Arthur's court ("Guinevere"), or beneath a dreamlike, tangerine-coloured dusk, along a beach at the edge of which rises a surreal funfair ("Ferris Wheel"). Shawn Phillips's sitar is the graceful, perfect counterpoint to his watercolours, but it isn't afraid to take centre stage in the raga-folk of "Three King Fishers" or the psychedelia of "The Fat Angel", his homage to the West Coast sound of "Mama" Cass Elliot and the Jefferson Airplane. The latter would return the favour, adding the song to their live sets.

"Bert's Blues" is dedicated to his friend, colleague and British folk guru Bert Jansch, and it's also one of the finest examples of the new "fusion" style Donovan had arrived at. The track is built on a classic Jansch-style acoustic guitar pattern, but gets turned on its head by a bold jazz arrangement, which, after giving way to a delicate interlude of strings and harpsichord, returns to close out side A on an upbeat note.

Closing out side two is the ballad "Celeste", with its cathartic orchestral splendour, but the most important track (despite also being the most atypical) is the one that opens it. The sweeping rock-blues crescendo of "Season Of The Witch" would go on to become a genuine standard of the genre, turning up steadily over the following decades in the setlists of dozens of wildly different artists, from Stephen Stills to Jellyfish, from Robert Plant to Courtney Love.

While recording the album, Mickie Most used to tell Donovan not to let Paul McCartney hear it, or else he'd try to do something similar. The Scotsman disobeyed, but in exchange got to hear a preview of a landmark work: "Revolver".

Though profoundly different, "Sunshine Superman" has much in common with the latter. With its kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, at times almost disorienting, and certainly without precedent, it convinced many of its contemporaries that it was time to raise the bar, throw open the doors of perception and lead the pop song form to the natural end of its own adolescence.

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27/08/2017