The knock came at one in the morning, and the woman in the corridor was a stranger. His oldest friend, a wanderer called Gypsy Dave, opened a door and let her in because in that flat you always let people in. And behind her came the officers, nine of them, moving through the rooms with a kind of unhurried self-assuredness of men who already knew what they were going to find.
At their head walked a detective sergeant named Norman Pilcher, a name that would soon turn into a curse across swinging London, a name that literally sounded like a party pooper in human form. And he had chosen his first quarry with unusual care, a young Scott in a cape, the most beatific pop star in Britain, who was sitting with his beads and his poems and one little green secret. Donovan Phillips Leitch watched them dismantle his beautiful clutter and understood only dimly that he was about to be made an example of.
What he could not have known was that the thing beginning in that room would not stop with him, that it was the opening shot in a long war between an old country and its own unruly children, and that the plainclothes men who took him away that night would come in their turn for even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
He was born on the 10th of May 1946 in Maryhill, a working district of Glasgow that the war had left half ruined, all exposed drains and open sewers, and the hunger of a city that had sent its young men to the fighting and got a load of rubble back. His parents were factory people, Donald and Winifred Leitch, a Protestant father and a Catholic mother married discreetly in a side chapel as the custom of the day demanded. They raised their boy on the folk songs of Scotland and Ireland and the big band records that had once sent Winifred spinning across the dance halls.
Then, at the age of three, before the vaccine reached Scotland, he caught polio. It crippled his right leg, thinning and shortening it, and it kept him in bed for long stretches of a childhood he would afterwards call charmed, which seems a bit of a strange word for a lame Glaswegian band to choose until you understand what happened in that sick room. I spent a lot of time in bed after having polio while my grandmother read poetry to me, Donovan said many years later, and he came to believe it had made him.
If I hadn’t had that experience, maybe I wouldn’t have gone on to write and sing my own songs for the past half a century. The limp he would carry all his life and hide, thee poetry he would carry, too, and never hide at all.
When he was 10, the family moved south to the new town of Hatfield in Hertfordshire, into the flatter English light,and he became restless in it. A surgeon’s knife had spared him a club foot at the price of one leg forever thinner than the other. Yet, he swam and he ran and he even ran away more than once.
At 14, he found a guitar in a bin, battered but playable, and something in him closed around it. Luckily, in the music industry, he would say, everyone was only interested in my singing and playing,and not the size of my legs. Art school took him in for a while and then lost him because the road was louder than the painter’s studio.
He had read Kerouac. He had a head full of Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott,and he understood that a proper beatnik did not sit his examinations. So, he dropped out and went Kerouac style, thumbing across Englandwith a fellow vagabond named Gypsy Dave, sleeping rough in Cornwall, busking in the fishing town of St.
Ives,and learning the old American songs from whoever would teach him. On the Road was his gospel and the open highway his church,and he wore the poverty like badge, barefoot and underfed and gloriously free. What he could not so easily come by was the craft.
Mostly this was because no one would teach it. The clawhammer style he wanted,the intricate free finger roll the Carter family had lifted from the banjo, was guarded jealously in the folk clubs. There were only a few people doing the clawhammer, he remembered,and I would sit and watch them.
When they saw what I was doing, they would turn their guitars away and give me the finger, as if to say, You’re not learning it from me. You have to learn this for yourself.
Deliverance came, as it so often did in his life, in the shape of a grubby and unwashed stranger. Into town one day came a guy named Dirty Hugh. He was called Dirty Hugh because he never bathed, but he was a beautiful man and he had a guitar, a Martin Dreadnought.
He could fingerpick. I asked him, Will you teach me? and he did.
He came off the road with a cap on his head, a harmonica in a wire harnessat his throat,and the words this machine kills scrawled across his guitar, borrowing Guthrie’s famous slogan about fascistsand quietly dropping the last word for a more indiscriminate musical murder weapon. Two young managers, Peter Eden and Jeff Stevens, caught his act near St. Albansand steered him onto Ready Steady Go,the anarchic Friday night television programthat was the beating heart of British pop.
He was not a guest so much as a resident. Week after week through the early months of 1965, the country watched this soft boy Scott with the enormous eyes,and the country fell in love. In March of 1965, he released Catch the Wind,which is a willow the whisper of a song, all longing and jangling reverb,and it went to number four.
Colours followed it up the charts,and a reading of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier,and a debut albumwith a gloriously Glaswegian title, What’s Been Didand What’s Been Hid. That summer, he crossed the Atlantic for the first time and played the Newport Folk Festival,the same weekend Bob Dylan plugged inand broke folk music’s heart.
Which brings us to the matter of Dylan. Because the instant Donovan appeared,the British press groped for the nearest available legendand stuck it on him. Here, at last, was Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan.
The cap, the harmonica,the acoustic guitar,the protest songs,the resemblance was too neat to resistand too lazy to be true,and it would dog him for decades. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who had befriended the newcomer, put the sneer on the record. We’ve been watching Donovan, too.
He isn’t too bad a singer,but his stuff sounds like Dylan’s. His Catch the Wind sounds like Chimes of Freedom. Dylan himself touring Englandthat springwith a film crew at his heels, treated the younger man as a curiosityand a running gag, tacking Donovan’s press clippings to his hotel walls.
When the two finally met at a partyin Dylan’s suite called Foreverin D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, Donovan sang a gentle thing of his ownand then handed over the guitar,and Dylan answered with It’s All Over Now,Baby Blue,a performance that generations have since read as a coronationand a burial in the same 3 minutes.
Donovan never saw it that way,and he spent years patiently explaining The two of them, he insisted, were drinking from the same well,and it was not Dylan’s. Most people thinkthat I heard Bob Dylan firstand got a capand harmonica, he said. Really, it was Woody Guthrie.
He was so influential. The introduction had come through Gypsy Dave. One day, my pal Gypsy Dave called meand said, ‘There’s this other guy, Bob Dylan.
I’ve just taken a record from my girlfriend.’ We sat downand listened to the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was just like Woody Guthrie.
It was amazing. It had been Joan Baez, who he met at a folk festivalwhen they were all youngand flirtatious, who first pointed him across the water. When Joan Baez heard me play guitar, she smiled.
She couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘You have to meet Bobby.’ As for the supposed feud, he filed it alongside every other manufactured rivalry of the era.
That Maythe magical summer of ’65 was when we met at the hotel. When the film came out, it looked as if there was a conflict. Dylan or Donovan, Stones or Beatles.
It was played up. ‘Oh, Donovan is a copy of Dylan.’ But we were both taking from Woody.
The way out of Dylan’s shadow was not to argue,but to vanish into color,and Donovan found a door in the winter of 1965 He tore up his old management, signed with Clive Davisat CBS in America,and fell in with Mickie Most,the sharpest hit maker in London,and an arranger named John Cameron, who heard jazz where everyone else heard folk. On the 19th of December, 1965,in studio 3 at Abbey Road, between 2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon, they cut a recordthat had no business existing yet. Sunshine Superman was psychedelia arriving a full year early,a swinging bass-heavy incantation built around a session guitarist named Jimmy Page, then unknown,soon to be of Led Zeppelin, working the volume knob so that each phrase swelled up out of nowhere.
John Paul Jones, another future Zeppelin, played the bass,and Cameron sat at a two-tier harpsichord. The song had been written in the wreckage of a love affair,and its author very nearly dedicated it to his rivals, subtitling it for John and Paul. His whole method, he explained, was a friendly theft from the same source the Beatles used.
George Martin was the Beatles guy,and John Cameron was my guy,and they both had an appreciation of jazz, which was key. The record should have been a smash hit on impact. Instead, it sat in a vault while the lawyers fought about it, because most was still contractually snarled with Donovan’s old British label, Pye,and the dispute froze the release at home even as it went out abroad.
When Sunshine Superman finally appeared as a single in the United Statesin July of 1966, it went straight to number one,the first of his career. In Britain, it would not surface until December,and the album, one of the founding documents of psychedelia, was held back until the following year,and then hacked apart into a compilation. For a season, Donovan occupied the oddest position in pop.
A British artist whose records reached America months before they reached his own front room. On the album shadow side sat Season of the Witch,a coiling paranoid minor key tunethat half the rock musicians of the next 30 years would cover,and which reminded everyone thatthe flower child could also operate in darkness.
He had also by then made himself a target. In the January of 1966,the television cameras had trailed him for a documentary, A Boy Called Donovan,and the filmmakers had thrown a partyand filmed the singerand his friends passing a joint,and the nation of parents had recoiled. His own songs did not help.
Sunny Good Street sang openly of the reeferand the scene,and Norman Pilcher,the drug squad sergeant building a career out of famous scalps, had found his first. So, it was then, on the 10th of June, 1966,the knock came at 1:00 in the morning,and the beautiful clutter of the Maida Vale flat was turned inside out. Donovan had been smoking,and the cannabis had made him reckless rather than serene.
When the officers produced their search warrant, he swatted at it, trying to knock it out of the sergeant’s hand,and shouted,I am too young to read a warrant. You can’t nick me. It was the swagger of a boy who still half believed the law was a thing that happened to other people.
Then the sergeant turned for the bedroom, where a 20-year-old girl named Doreen Samuel,up from Hatfield,lay in the bed,and the swagger curdled into panic. Donovan, who had no clothes on at all, threw himself onto the man’s back to keep him out. A naked folk singer clinging to a policeman in the small hours, while his oldest friend, Gypsy Dave, 19and sharing the flat, watched the raid he could do nothing to stop.
However the newspapers dressed it up,and they dressed it up with relish, it was a farce,and it was also the end of something.
Donovan admitted possessing cannabis at the flat. Gypsy Dave, whose proper name was David Mills, admitted possessing a lump of cannabis resin on a separate charge,and Doreen Samuel admitted possession of her own. The court fined Donovan £250, fined Mills the same,and placed the girl on probation for a year.
And with that, Donovan Leitch became the first British pop star to carry a drugs conviction. Paul McCartneyand George Harrison, alarmed for their friend, steered him towards a good lawyer,but the money was neverthe issue. The issue was the singling out.
Smoking a reefer, he reasoned, was something a man had to try for himself at some stage,and nobody he going to stop him. They were dangerous drugs, killer drugs he said,and he knew artists who were hooked on them,and those were the degradation of life. But Indian hemp was another scene,just a little light-headedness,and no more dangerous than that.
The conviction had a far longer reach thanthe fine. Because of it,the United States refused him a visa,and so in June of 1967,when the whole of enlightened pop gathered at the Monterey International Pop Festival,Donovan, who had been invited to the bill, sat marooned on the wrong side of the Atlantic while the summer of love happened without him. His arrest turned out to be the first domino.
The following January,the News of the World ran an incendiary series titled Pop Stars,The Truth That Will Shock You, sensationalizing Pilcher’s file,and the unholy alliance it announced between Fleet Street and Scotland Yard led,within weeks,to the notorious raid on Keith Richards’ country houseat Redlands,and then to Mick Jaggerin handcuffs,and onward through the decade to the front doors of Lennonand Harrison. Donovan had walked point for a whole generationand taken the first bullet without ever quite intending to. This was the first time a British television audience had caught a glimpse of the lifestyle of the beatniks, he said of the filmthat undid him,and many were shocked.
The bust did nothing to slow the hits, though. On the contrary. That autumn came Mellow Yellow,a lazy saxophone slurred groove that reached number two in America,and lodged itself in the culture forever,largely because everyone got it wrong.
A rumor had gone round,put about by the folk singer Country Joe McDonald,that you could get high smoking dried banana skins,and Donovan, who had heard the nonsense three weeks before his single dropped, watched it latch onto his songand never let go. The truth was a bit earthier. The electrical banana of the lyric was a vibrator.
And the myth-making did not stop at fruit. All of swinging London sworethatthe voice whispering quite rightly in the chorus belonged to Paul McCartney,who was certainly in the building. Donovan, who invited McCartney to sessions constantlyand fretted with most that their experiments would leak into the next Beatles LP,set the record straight with some amusement.
Paul came into the Mellow Yellow sessionand contrary to what people say,he did not sing the whisper vocalthat goes quite rightly. I sang this pieceand Paul joined in on the party parts. He had in any case already done the Beatles a good turn himself,tossing a line or two into another trippy yellow song,this one about a submarine.
By 1967, he was the anointed prince of flower power,selling out the Royal Albert Hall,filling arenas in California,draped in flowing robesand love beads,and with a convert’s fervor,publicly renouncing the very drugsthat had got him busted in favor of meditation. The singles kept coming in a bright, unbroken stream. Epistle to Dippyand There Is a Mountain were among them,each a psychedelic sermon,and his ambition swelled to match the image.
Late that year, he released A Gift from a Flower to a Garden,a double album packaged as a box set,a luxury until then reserved for the likes of Beethoven,which made it one of the first such objects in the history of pop. One disc was electricand worldly for his own generation. The other was a suite of gentle acoustic children’s songs for what he calledthe dawning generation,the babies his hippie peers were now cradling.
The cover showed him on a windswept shorein full psychedelic regalia,flowers in one hand,peacock feathers in the other. On the reverse, he sat holding handswith a giggling man in white,the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,and that photograph turned out to be a kind of foretelling.
In February of 1968,Donovan flew to Rishikeshto the Maharishi’s ashram above the Ganges,and the Beatles came,too. And the Beach Boys’ Mike Loveand the actress Mia Farrowwith her younger sister Prudenceand the jazz flautist Paul Horn. For 6 weeks,the most famous musicians on Earth sat in the Himalayan foothillsand tried to empty their rather overfull minds.
We went to Rishikeshwith only acoustic guitars,and we satand meditated,Donovan recalled. The Beatlesand I walked away from our commitments. We stopped drinking,stopped smoking hash,stopped eating meat.
The mantra thatthe Maharishi gave meand the transmission of initiation plummeted me deeper than any drug I’d ever tried. I went deep,deep,deep. It was there,under a flowering jacaranda one morning,that he gave John Lennon the giftthat would ripple all through the White Album.
Lennonhad been watching him playand asked,in that flat Liverpool way,how it was done. It’s calledthe clawhammer,Donovan told him. It was inventedby Maybelle Carterin the Carter familyin the 1920s.
She adapted a banjo style to guitar,and it changed folk music forever,he explained to Lennon. Lennon,he wrote in his memoir,quote,went to it with a will,and he learned the arcane knowledgein 2 days. In this way,John began to write in a whole new way,composing Dear Prudenceand Juliain no time flat.
Dear Prudence was born of the ashram itself,of poor Prudence Farrow meditatingso ferociously that she alarmed everyoneand would not leave her hut until Lennon wrote her a lullaby to coax her back into the sun. Lennon caught the strange competitive edge of the place better than anyone. She was trying to find God quicker than anyone else,he said of Prudence.
That was the competitionin Maharishi’s camp. Who’s going to get cosmic first? George Harrison, meanwhile, sat trading chordswith Donovanand carried off something greater still.
What George was fascinated with was these descending chord patternsthat I was playing,Donovan said,and out of it came the most heart-rending song I’ve ever heard him writeor that anybody has written,’While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. Harrison repaid him,pressing an Indian tamboura into his handsand writing a verse for a heavy dronein mystical thing Donovan had started in the jungle,a song he would callThe Hurdy Gurdy Man.
Back in London,that record gave the world one of psychedelia’s darkest singles,and it very nearly gave the world something stranger stillbecause Donovan wanted Jimi Hendrix to play the guitar. Mickie Most,who understood radiothe way a butcher understands meat,refused. I told Mickie,’I’m hearing power guitar.
I want you to call up Hendrix,’Donovan remembered. But Mickie said,’We can’t make records like that. Hendrixis a wild freestyle improvisational guitar player,and we have to controlthe song,Don.
It has to be verse,chorus,verse,chorus,a break,and out. We can’t let a wild boy like Hendrixin there.’ Most was right,and Hendrixwas unavailablein any case,and the session went ahead with hired hands.
The hits kept arriving,Jennifer Juniperand There Is a Mountainand Atlantisand Barabajagal,the last of them cut with a Jeff Beck Groupat full electric roar. Off the record,his private life was a mess worthy of the age. There had been,since 1966,an American girlfriend named Enid Karl,and with her,Donovan had two children who would grow up to become actors,a son,Donovan Leitch,born in 1967,and a daughter,Ione Skye,born in 1970.
But the woman at the center of nearly every love song he ever wrote with someone else entirely,and theirs is the tenderest story in his life. Her name was Linda Lawrence,and when Donovan first saw her in the green room of Ready Steady Goin 1965,she was Brian Jones’s girland the mother of Brian Jones’s infant son,Julian. Sheand Jones had come apart.
Donovan fell at onceand hopelessly. He asked her to marry him,and she said no. Worn thinby teenage motherhoodand the churn of the rock world,and she took herself off to California,where she drifted around for a whileinto the orbit of Gram Parsons.
Donovan wrote her into everything. Linda’s in all the songs,he told The Guardian long afterwards. Sunshine Superman,Hampstead Incident,Young Girl Blues,Linda’s the muse.
The heartbreakthat fed Sunshine Superman had been hers. And then,in the summer of 1969,Brian Jones was found deadin his own swimming pool. And the year after that,by the kind of accident only real life dares to write,Donovanand Linda ran into each other again,and this time neither of them let go.
They married in Windsoron the 2nd of October,1970,with little Julianat the ceremony,and Donovan adoptedthe boy as his own. His teenage muse had become the only wife,and the daughters Astrella Celesteand Oriole Nebula followed. Decades later,he would dedicate his memoir to her in two wordsthat held the whole story:to she.
He had,by his early 30s,done everything a pop star could do,and the doing of it seemed to hollow out the wanting. A last true hit arrivedin 1973with Cosmic Wheels,a reunionwith Mickey Most,and after that,the graph turned downwardand kept turning. By the middle of the decade,he was reduced to opening shows for progressive rock bands like Yes,the anointed troubadour of the summer of love,now warming up the crowd for the very bombastthat was burying his kind.
He acted improbablyin a film version of The Pied Piper. He wrote songsfor Zeffirelli’s life of Saint Francis. He became a tax exile.
And then,in a move that baffled his own industry,he walked away from the Rolls-Royceand the mansionand the whole world of fame,married to his museat last,and took his familyto the high desert around Joshua Treein California to raise the children as a gentle alternative tribe. When punk came,it treated men like Donovanas an embarrassment,the soft and beadedand beautiful pastthat had to be burned to the ground,and the new culture nodded along. By 1983,he had stopped making records at all.
The prince of flower powerhad become,to the record-buying world,a period detail.
The strange thing about being a period detailis that periods come back around. In the late 1980s,punk itself had become old and boring,and the acid houseand rave children of Manchester went digging through the psychedelic cratesand pulled Donovan out into the strobe light. His old stomper,Barabajagal,became an unlikely club favorite.
The Happy Mondays name-checked him on record,and all at once the untouchable was fashionable again. A box setin 1992 tidied up his reputation,and then came the telephone callthat raised him from the dead. Rick Rubin,the bearded studio guru who had just rebuilt Johnny Cash out of nothing but a voiceand a guitar,had long dreamed of doing the same for Donovan,and he happened to be working with Tom Petty,who had taken to playing Donovan songs on stage.
I’ve always wanted to record Donovan,Rubin said,and Petty answered simply,Why don’t you phone him up? So,he did. Donovan arrived with more than 100 songs,and the two of them made a spare meditative album called Sutras,releasedin the October of 1996,which the critics admiredand the public ignored,and which remains the only record they ever made together.
He tried once more in 2004with Beat Cafe,a jazzy small hours evocation of the coffee house world where he had begun. And in 2005,he published his memoirsunder the only possible title,The Hurdy Gurdy Man.
In 2007,David Lynch,another disciple of transcendental meditation,put Donovan back on the world stagesas part of a campaign to teach meditation to school children,and the old evangelism came roaring back to life. A feature documentary,Sunshine Superman,The Journey of Donovan,would soon trace the whole improbable arcfor audiences who had half forgotten how much of the ’60s he had quietly touched. The establishmentthat had once hunted him downnow queued up to garland him.
In 2009,came the BMI Icon Award. On the 14th of April 2012,he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fameby John Mellencamp. Two years later,the Songwriters Hall of Fame followed him in.
Heand Linda settled in County Cork,in the green Irish country his grandmothers had come from. And there,an old man in a garden,the boy from the Maryhill sickroom went on writing his poems exactly as his fatherat first taught him to love them.
It is easy at this distance to underrate himbecausethe British Dylan label stuck like a burr,and because his sincerity can sound,to a colder age,as mere naivety. But strip away the flowersand the fable,and the footprint is enormous. He was arguably the first British pop star to mix folk,jazz,pop,psychedelia,and Indian musicinto something genuinely new.
He cut one of the earliest psychedelic recordsa full year before the summer of love. He cradledthe men of Led Zeppelinin his studio before they had a name to call themselves. He taught the Beatles a guitar stylethat produced Dear Prudenceand Juliaand sat at George Harrison’s elbowwhile My Guitar Gently Weeps took shape.
He gave Season of the Witch to a thousand cover versionsand Hurdy Gurdy Manto a hundred films. And he took the first drug bust arrowso that Grand men could learn how to fall. What lingers though is not the influencebut the temperament.
In an era that soured so many of its idealistsinto cynicsand corpses,Donovan simply meant itand went on meaning it. From the sick bed to the ashram to the Irish garden. A man who had decided very earlythatthe size of his legs was nobody’s businessandthatthe poetry his father read him was worth a whole life.
He walked away from the money when the wanting stoppedand marriedat last the girl he had first lovedat 19. And now in 2026,he’s touring the world once morestopping in Romeand Paristo play those songs on their 60th anniversary. And if you can find a ticket,I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
He had called his childhood charmed,that lame boyin the Glasgow dark. And across all the evidence of a strange and buffeted life,he turned out to be right.
