Who is donovan leitch

He always appeared to be jumping on the latest stylistic bandwagon, be it commercial folk, folk rock, protest music, pop-psychedelia, the singer-songwriter vogue, or even heavy metal. Nevertheless, his popularity was not unwarranted; he was an extremely gifted composer and projected considerable sincerity and warmth both live and on record. He discusses love, success, Brian Jones — and how drugs became big business.

D onovan, born Donovan Phillips Leitch in Scotland in , was famous enough before he was 18 for the world to be on first-name terms with him.

Now 73 and living in Ireland, he has wild grey hair and a gentle, thoughtful face; he looks, in real life, like an atmospheric black-and-white photo of a folk singer. His conversation is as wild as his hair, completely ungoverned by conventions such as sticking to the point or answering the bloody question. His mind comes into focus every now and then, when he wants to tell me what to write, how to write it and how to ask a question.

I have actually since considered some remote therapy to try and figure out why this annoyed me so much. Anyway, he is out of retirement with Eco-Song , a tribute album to Greta Thunberg that he has recorded with his wife, Linda.

He and Linda want to take it to schools, to universities, want the youth performing it up and down the land. They have a plot strung around the songs — four young students in Cork, meeting up on a Friday night, after a climate strike — but, for the time being, the songs have been released as a standalone CD.

A month ago, in an entirely different world, he was planning to take it on tour. We met before the lockdown in a London hotel; the coronavirus crisis was serious enough then that we bumped elbows as I came in, unserious enough that we forgot not to shake hands at the end, serious enough that his roadie immediately handed him some hand sanitiser.

Donovan wanted to explain why he and Linda have dedicated themselves to Thunberg. And I rang the bell, 50 years ago, in , alone among my song-poet peers. It takes four minutes.

If you want me to expand, I can. As the encounter turns into something more like a recognisable conversation, he circles again and again back to the start of his career, meeting Linda, losing her, finding her again. He is delightful and maddening, although maddening can get the upper hand. Everything — jazz, blues, folk, pop music, literature, feminism, ecology — I just absorbed it like a sponge, and I was prepared, because I had had poetry of noble thought read to me as a child.

He thus got his first TV performance before he had even released a single, and slips into the third person, awestruck. How did he do that? And the cameraman loved it, and the directors loved it, and the producers loved it.

How did I learn it so early? I can really impress and project a very special feeling. My dream. She wanted to marry Brian Jones, with whom she had a child. He was like the god Pan; he was spreading kids around every six months. Whether heeding this or for some other reason, she went to Los Angeles on her own later moving her young son over to the US to be with her , and Donovan, bereft, went to Japan. We never had a purse. The Japanese tour was flat, not for audiences but for Donovan, who was miserable.

Gypsy Dave crops up a lot when he talks. He was there at the start, apparently, when they were sleeping rough in Liverpool. The smooth was in St Ives, sleeping on a beach under the stars. Today it would probably be a lot more. Vic was on his knees in the airport, because he stood to get 10 per cent. So he was home, and Linda had come back to England, too, after life in the United States got too dicey. The drug dealers were moving in, and he takes an interesting detour through the end of the psychedelic dream.

The lyric was first to describe the coming Bohemian Invasion of popular culture, the return of Gaelic Mythology and True Meditation as the door to The Source. The true similarity between them is that they are Poets of the highest Order. It cannot be overstated that Donovan has displayed the widest variety of songwriting skill, surpassing any songwriter one can name today.