One of my favourite things in Melody Maker from the early 90’s was a comedy feature called “at home with The Shamen.” I can still remember the ridiculous rap that Mr. C did (he only spoke in rhyme) in one episode when they were planning a trip to the boozer…
“Going to a pub, going to a pub, going to a pub with a rub a dub dub. It’s a pub and it’s not a club, we’re going to a pub where they do good grub!”
I’d love to shake the hand of the man that came up with that.
It’s also a different Donovan. That’s not even a guitar. His voice is someone slowly releasing the air from a balloon. Life is an illusion. First there is a mountain, then it turns out to be Richard Dreyfus fannying about with mashed potato.
Leave him alone, you bullies! Honestly, what’s the man ever done so wrong to deserve the abuse he gets on these pages? 🙂
This is all right. It’s exactly what I would expect from an 80 year old hippy. A weird song with backwards noises and a video directed by a fellow transcendental meditation addict. What’s not to like! It’s better than Now and Then or Sweet Sounds of Heaven anyway….
Yeah I genuinely did enjoy it in a “pleasingly bonkers song from an old hippy” way, the same way I quite like the stuff Jon Anderson does these days. I quite like my mad visionaries to age a bit disgracefully.
You lot are a load of miserable bastards. I’m not a fan, but look at it this way: if you are a DonoFan, you’re not going to be disappointed with this – it’s a fine and logical evolution for the pot-head pixie. The David Lynch connection is inspired, his voice is about the same as it ever was, the guitar is great, and the song is better than anything Van Morrison/Neil Young/Bob Dylan has managed in the last few decades. But no! Let’s roll out the old joke about him “inventing” everything. You lot. Really.
Better than BD, NY, VM over the last decades? I think you invented that, old cock, as, however down on their best any of that trio may be, they pass more muster than that effort. OK, Van by virtue of cover versions.
Now if you had compared him to Beatles or the Pink Floyd, or their members, recent, you’d have a point.
Yes it does kinda. I was watching a television crime drama only a couple of days ago and up pops a cover of Season of the Witch on the soundtrack. I’m trying to remember when this frankly odd pairing of Donovan and Murder/crime occurred in film and television and the earliest example I can come up with is David Fincher using Hurdy Gurdy Man in Zodiac. It made sense in the context of the historical setting of that film as does the use of other songs from a variety of other artists dotted throughout the soundtrack. Personally I fail to see the dark connection musically in Donovan’s songs though it’s obviously become an easy and lazy goto for some in the film and television industry.
For the record I wouldn’t claim to be a huge Donovan fan but I used to have a large Sunshine Superman poster on my bedroom wall when a teenager and that’s mostly how I view him.
And now back to the bus queue I go…
As part of my research for this comment I looked him up on IMDB. His music has been used in 206 films and telly programmes, a fair few of them murder/crime capers, including Goodfellas (can’t say I noticed it), The Limey (terrific film!), I Am Not a Serial Killer (a film I think I’m alone in having seen) and most recently Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (ugh, awful, don’t be bothering with that one).
That was ITV police drama Six Four, which used Frankie Miller’s The Devil Gun as theme tune, and tracks by Jack Bruce, Al Stewart, The Average White Band, The Hollies, and Chuck Berry. I’m not quite sure what any of them had to do with the story, apart from someone working on it showing off their record collection.
As I could identify them without resorting to Shazam, Mrs F’s response was either (a) great pride in her husband’s knowledgeable or (b) to tell me to “shut up you bloody nerd”. I’ll let you decide which.
I think of the final episode of The Prisoner as being the first example of this kind of thing. Suddenly All You Need is Love comes on. Completely irrelevant but, as Barry Norman would have said, why not.
Regarding the Don, Hurdy Gurdy Man was used to very good effect in Man of the Year, a Robin Willams vehicle whose plot now seems very prophetic.
I’m landed someone is keeping up with my viewing habits because I’m buggered if I can remember where I heard it. It may have been from the second series of Crime or maybe an episode of Ray Donovan. It could have been from the third series of The Morning Show or Shetland. I don’t remember watching anything other than those lately apart from Only Connect…
Found it. I had forgotten watching “Defending Jacob” on Apple + until I had a brief Proustian moment brought on by a cup of peppermint tea and voila that is indeed where I heard the aforementioned cover of Season of the Witch. It’s from a band called Luna.
I’m watching that at the moment! (Not right this moment, but in this period of my existence). I’m half way through the penultimate episode and quite hooked. They’re in court. I’ve no idea which way it’s going to go.
I thought it rather good in a quiet understated way. I’ve just started on Calls which is sufficiently different to be holding my attention. Very brief episodes which helps too.
The proto-Americana local band I did the sound for (about 20 years ago) used to cover Season of the Witch. Donovan was deeply uncool at the time so, naturally, they wrote a song about him, entitled Guilty Pleasures.
They also did Mama Tried by Merle Haggard and Ain’t That Nothin’ from Television’s Adventure.
They go back a long way, I saw DONOVAN at a Transcendental Meditation benefit gig (Change Begins Within) organised and compered by Lynch at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 2009. The most I ever paid to see a concert I believe. Main attraction though was half of The Beatles
I must have posted Donovan’s collaboration last December with David Gilmour at least a thousand times, but did it instigate the return of @h-p-saucecraft or induce a veritable flurry of insightful observation and witty exchanges as this one has? Dear readers, it did not. Though I do recall (only because I just looked it up) that @baron-harkonnen bought the album and @vincent “thought he was dead”.
And yet, despite the AW’s relative lack of interest, I myself rate it higher than I rate that shaman gibberish and wouldn’t hesitate for a second to define it as “innocuous”.
I didn’t weigh in to defend the mystic minstrel particularly – I like his records from the late sixties. The Afterword needs some new jokes. Every time Donovan is mentioned everyone rolls out the “invented everything” rib-tickler, rather than thinking about the music, adding positive appreciation or reasoned criticism. Which used to be a “thing” at the Afterword, before it became a Bus Queue In The Rain for a bunch of old age pensioners trying to remember if they’d left the gas on.
Shaman was recorded in 2010 (I learn from its wiki page), the video in 2021. What year is it now? I don’t have a calendar handy. But, you know – wake up at the back, there!
It’s not so much that it’s not as good as it used to be – what is, including me? – it’s seeing it for what it is. Which, from the inside, isn’t easy. Like living in the U.K. – another Bus Queue In The Rain. You can’t see how awful it is because you’ve become used to its incremental decline, adopting the necessary Keep Calm And Carry On hunker down defence, with its exhausted “jokes” and familiar comforts.
And deflecting any criticism of the Afterword with a comment like yours is part of that “shutters down” defensiveness.
So what you’re saying is that both the AW and the UK are rubbish on account of the boring dullards who inhabit them? Well, frankly, I’d go way further than that myself. I’d say the problem is not just the AW but the whole of the internet and it’s not just the UK but all of planet Earth. But at that point where else can we go? And will we risk finding ourselves inhabiting wherever it is we go once we get there? I wholeheartedly agree that human people are totally crap and so is everything else except the good bits, but I think we can find comfort in the fact that we’re not on Twitter or in Qatar.
Yebbut no. The core qualities of the Afterword (as of the U.K.) remain intact. They’re the bedrock. Community support, mainly. Finding each others’ glasses, advice on cardigan elbow repair and wheelbarrow nozzles. This is good stuff, but the Afterword needs new blood, new opinions, new enthusiasms (don’t look at me – I peaked with “I’m Thinking Of Buying A Tray”) if it is to drag itself out of the comfort zone. Whether it wants/needs to be dragged out of the comfort zone is another question. A gentle relaunch, a new look, attracting new readers and writers. Not going to happen, very probably.
(Gar – I’m not saying that human people are totally crap – just your wince-inducing taste in music. And hats.)
You can say all that @gary but I saw China Crisis the other night and had a thoroughly lovely time so there is at least a little loveliness left in the world!
That definitely sounds like one of the good bits. Like chocolate and Rob Reiner films (except the recent ones). On reflection, I think HP’s grumpy moaning was probably less general than I first interpreted it to be. More weather-based.
Him! I wasn’t really moaning myself, I was just joining in out of solidarity. I actually love human people, the AW and planet Earth. They’re among my favourite things, alongside my comfort zone, chocolate and Rob Reiner’s films from the 80s. I don’t even mind queuing at bus stops in the rain, as long as it’s not for too long and I’m actually going somewhere (though truth be told, I do prefer taking the car and sunshine).
Only possible to experience if a) there actually were buses to queue for in this village, and b) there actually was a gas supply to this village. Strewth, HP, we don’t all live in some urban hi-tech megalopolis. This is sticks England, not that Lahndahn.
A better image might be standing on the bit of knobbly pavement waiting in the rain to cross the busy B-road to get to the shop, trying to remember what you left the house to fetch in the first place.
I went there last year. Peter Jackson told the crew to paint all the 20,000 leaves on a pretend tree a shade of yellow because the scene was in autumn and that’s the colour the leaves would be, in his mind. They had to work through the night to do it.
Re the invented thing. It’s a running gag. No biggie. I think you have been a party to a few in the past.
I have seen more names unfamiliar to me in recent weeks. Maybe prompted by a recent first time contributor announcing their presence.
The Mods provided some stats recently. Most new registrations are bots. The ones that are legit take months to post.
Most new registrations are bots? How depressing. What on earth is the purpose of that? Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating bots to populate chat groups? I don’t get it.
Because the Afterword is dominated by thought-leaders and opinion-formers and we can be used to destabilise Western democracy with non-standard, pro-Putin ideas about Gentle Giant and Tonto’s Expanding Headband.
An unintended side effect of this thread mocking the great Donovan is that it’s sent me back to listen to the great Donovan for the first time in a while.
By God, when he was good he was really good, wasn’t he? He was only 19 or something when he recorded that Sunshine Superman album, and for 1966 it’s so ahead of the curve it’s frightening. If I’d heard it without knowing what it was I would have assumed someone had been listening to The Incredible String Band’s stuff from two years later (and two years was a massively long time in the sixties). The song that floored me this time was Celeste: I had to listen to it three times in a row to satisfy my head.
His fingerpicking guitar style on A Gift From A Flower To A Garden is phenomenal and he rivals Nick Drake for force of poetic expression when doing folky stuff.
The icing on the cake for me is the kind of acoustic funk soul stuff he got into at the end of the decade, Get Thy Bearings, Barabajagal, Hurdy Gurdy Man. I can see Funkadelic and Terry Callier taking notes.
Sorry, just had to wax lyrical about him there for a bit. I forgot how much I love him. After all these years I think he’s still tarred a bit by the mocking he got in that Dylan film (very unfair to an emerging songwriter still in his teens: we can hardly blame him for being a bit of a Dylan copyist for a year or so).
I bought the recent (last year or two) Abbey Road remastered LPs of SS, MY and THGM on label The State51 Conspiracy. Each were limited to about 300 copies and cheap (all three were total sub-50 quid).
After their recent bonkers Kate Bush sets, the label seem to have reset their VFM machine, and their A Gift From A Flower To A Garden 2LP reissue is – wait for it – £180.
Fair play Arthur , he was indeed a creative force. However, don’t you think it is over egging it to suggest Funkadelic would be getting their funk chops by listening to Donovan records?
He was also excellent in Twin Peaks.
Shit song and he looks like Ivy Tilsley.
That was impressively bad. My only thought was that Tim Minchin had rather let himself go. Oh, and stop was another thought.
I thought it was good to see Alistair Sim back after all these years.
Very good! 😀 Obviously, Don invented Alastair Sim…
E’s not very good..
One of my favourite things in Melody Maker from the early 90’s was a comedy feature called “at home with The Shamen.” I can still remember the ridiculous rap that Mr. C did (he only spoke in rhyme) in one episode when they were planning a trip to the boozer…
“Going to a pub, going to a pub, going to a pub with a rub a dub dub. It’s a pub and it’s not a club, we’re going to a pub where they do good grub!”
I’d love to shake the hand of the man that came up with that.
Dear me, that was very bad indeed. Clearly inventing everything has left him a bit drained.
And David Lynch? DAVID LYNCH? From the beautiful Elephant Man and mighty Twin Peaks to this? Maybe this was done by another David Lynch.
Possibly a different David Lynch? This one’s a plumber from Swansea.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/david-lynch-ab8501129
It’s also a different Donovan. That’s not even a guitar. His voice is someone slowly releasing the air from a balloon. Life is an illusion. First there is a mountain, then it turns out to be Richard Dreyfus fannying about with mashed potato.
Where’ve you been?
I can’t tell you. Let’s just say don’t eat the mashed potato.
Hey, big boy! How they hangin’?
Lower every year my friend. They’ll be in me socks soon enough.
It’s good to have the both of you back!
Christ, you know it ain’t easy….
Is that a Moose on his guitar?
I deny everything. And nothing.
Leave him alone, you bullies! Honestly, what’s the man ever done so wrong to deserve the abuse he gets on these pages? 🙂
This is all right. It’s exactly what I would expect from an 80 year old hippy. A weird song with backwards noises and a video directed by a fellow transcendental meditation addict. What’s not to like! It’s better than Now and Then or Sweet Sounds of Heaven anyway….
Well I enjoyed it but I’m a fan he does talk some crap though.
Yeah I genuinely did enjoy it in a “pleasingly bonkers song from an old hippy” way, the same way I quite like the stuff Jon Anderson does these days. I quite like my mad visionaries to age a bit disgracefully.
With you on this Arthur.
Enjoyed it. I am a Donovan fan though. One of my first singles was Sunshine Superman.
I only lasted 42 seconds. Life’s too short to waste away!
I’ve heard worse…
It’s not as good as Move any Mountain.
It’s not even as good as Too Many Broken Hearts. He’s been pisspoor since Joseph, let’s face it.
You lot are a load of miserable bastards. I’m not a fan, but look at it this way: if you are a DonoFan, you’re not going to be disappointed with this – it’s a fine and logical evolution for the pot-head pixie. The David Lynch connection is inspired, his voice is about the same as it ever was, the guitar is great, and the song is better than anything Van Morrison/Neil Young/Bob Dylan has managed in the last few decades. But no! Let’s roll out the old joke about him “inventing” everything. You lot. Really.
Better than BD, NY, VM over the last decades? I think you invented that, old cock, as, however down on their best any of that trio may be, they pass more muster than that effort. OK, Van by virtue of cover versions.
Now if you had compared him to Beatles or the Pink Floyd, or their members, recent, you’d have a point.
Who’s miserable? It’s cheered me up no end to see Ivy Tilsley again after all these years.
High five, HP! Donovan fans unite!
Why is he wearing a string of teeth around his neck?
The answer, sort of, is here:
https://www.openculture.com/?p=1090526
An insightful piece that suggests, convincingly, we’ve been reading Donovan all wrong.
Yes it does kinda. I was watching a television crime drama only a couple of days ago and up pops a cover of Season of the Witch on the soundtrack. I’m trying to remember when this frankly odd pairing of Donovan and Murder/crime occurred in film and television and the earliest example I can come up with is David Fincher using Hurdy Gurdy Man in Zodiac. It made sense in the context of the historical setting of that film as does the use of other songs from a variety of other artists dotted throughout the soundtrack. Personally I fail to see the dark connection musically in Donovan’s songs though it’s obviously become an easy and lazy goto for some in the film and television industry.
For the record I wouldn’t claim to be a huge Donovan fan but I used to have a large Sunshine Superman poster on my bedroom wall when a teenager and that’s mostly how I view him.
And now back to the bus queue I go…
As part of my research for this comment I looked him up on IMDB. His music has been used in 206 films and telly programmes, a fair few of them murder/crime capers, including Goodfellas (can’t say I noticed it), The Limey (terrific film!), I Am Not a Serial Killer (a film I think I’m alone in having seen) and most recently Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (ugh, awful, don’t be bothering with that one).
That was ITV police drama Six Four, which used Frankie Miller’s The Devil Gun as theme tune, and tracks by Jack Bruce, Al Stewart, The Average White Band, The Hollies, and Chuck Berry. I’m not quite sure what any of them had to do with the story, apart from someone working on it showing off their record collection.
As I could identify them without resorting to Shazam, Mrs F’s response was either (a) great pride in her husband’s knowledgeable or (b) to tell me to “shut up you bloody nerd”. I’ll let you decide which.
I think of the final episode of The Prisoner as being the first example of this kind of thing. Suddenly All You Need is Love comes on. Completely irrelevant but, as Barry Norman would have said, why not.
Regarding the Don, Hurdy Gurdy Man was used to very good effect in Man of the Year, a Robin Willams vehicle whose plot now seems very prophetic.
How do you know what Pencilsqueezer was watching? Is that cos you’re all techy and everything?
I’m landed someone is keeping up with my viewing habits because I’m buggered if I can remember where I heard it. It may have been from the second series of Crime or maybe an episode of Ray Donovan. It could have been from the third series of The Morning Show or Shetland. I don’t remember watching anything other than those lately apart from Only Connect…
Well, as it wasn’t Six Four, The Don (or his publishers) must be raking in the publishing royalties.
“Sut up you nerd” was the response I got when I identified Frankie Miller et al on that show
Found it. I had forgotten watching “Defending Jacob” on Apple + until I had a brief Proustian moment brought on by a cup of peppermint tea and voila that is indeed where I heard the aforementioned cover of Season of the Witch. It’s from a band called Luna.
I’m watching that at the moment! (Not right this moment, but in this period of my existence). I’m half way through the penultimate episode and quite hooked. They’re in court. I’ve no idea which way it’s going to go.
I thought it rather good in a quiet understated way. I’ve just started on Calls which is sufficiently different to be holding my attention. Very brief episodes which helps too.
One of the few CD singles I own:
An odd sense of closure has stolen over me now.
The proto-Americana local band I did the sound for (about 20 years ago) used to cover Season of the Witch. Donovan was deeply uncool at the time so, naturally, they wrote a song about him, entitled Guilty Pleasures.
They also did Mama Tried by Merle Haggard and Ain’t That Nothin’ from Television’s Adventure.
The cover of it I always think of first is the Terry Reid one. It seems to be retaining It’s appeal as Lana Del Ray has had a bash at it recently.
It’s had a fair few takers. Like Song To The Siren and Fade Into You, it has become a bit of a standard.
https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/4665/all
Jeezus. Moose back now HP ( 👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻 to you both btw) who else will make a return? Archie, Middle Rabbit , Bob Numbers Br….. err no.
It’s all a plot I tell you. In years to come we will associate “thanksgiving” with the return of Moose and HP.
My turkey has been pardoned many times.
Good to have the euphemisms back.
You can always rely on me to call a spade a you-know-what.
I love a good wattle joke.
Wattle you have? I’m buying.
Bottle of Domaine Romanee-Conti if you are buying.
They don’t have that, shall I just get Vimto slammers?
Sounds fair
In case anyone missed it, he’s got another equally loopy David Lynch collaboration as well – https://youtu.be/6Wd1qDmE3UQ?si=NosAiN5_isqKpks6
I see these involve Dean Hurley, who collaborated with David Lynch on his two albums (which I like as well – must dig them out again).
I do however enjoy the way the YouTube play button makes him look like a scary clown!
They go back a long way, I saw DONOVAN at a Transcendental Meditation benefit gig (Change Begins Within) organised and compered by Lynch at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 2009. The most I ever paid to see a concert I believe. Main attraction though was half of The Beatles
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/paul-mccartney/2009/radio-city-music-hall-new-york-ny-bd41d56.html
I must have posted Donovan’s collaboration last December with David Gilmour at least a thousand times, but did it instigate the return of @h-p-saucecraft or induce a veritable flurry of insightful observation and witty exchanges as this one has? Dear readers, it did not. Though I do recall (only because I just looked it up) that @baron-harkonnen bought the album and @vincent “thought he was dead”.
And yet, despite the AW’s relative lack of interest, I myself rate it higher than I rate that shaman gibberish and wouldn’t hesitate for a second to define it as “innocuous”.
I didn’t weigh in to defend the mystic minstrel particularly – I like his records from the late sixties. The Afterword needs some new jokes. Every time Donovan is mentioned everyone rolls out the “invented everything” rib-tickler, rather than thinking about the music, adding positive appreciation or reasoned criticism. Which used to be a “thing” at the Afterword, before it became a Bus Queue In The Rain for a bunch of old age pensioners trying to remember if they’d left the gas on.
Shaman was recorded in 2010 (I learn from its wiki page), the video in 2021. What year is it now? I don’t have a calendar handy. But, you know – wake up at the back, there!
The Afterword needs some new jokes? Heyyyy, looks like I came back just at the right time, eh?
…er…
*facepalm*
“The Afterword’s not as good as it used to be” isn’t the most novel remark either, even allowing for how delightfully you express it..
It’s not so much that it’s not as good as it used to be – what is, including me? – it’s seeing it for what it is. Which, from the inside, isn’t easy. Like living in the U.K. – another Bus Queue In The Rain. You can’t see how awful it is because you’ve become used to its incremental decline, adopting the necessary Keep Calm And Carry On hunker down defence, with its exhausted “jokes” and familiar comforts.
And deflecting any criticism of the Afterword with a comment like yours is part of that “shutters down” defensiveness.
So what you’re saying is that both the AW and the UK are rubbish on account of the boring dullards who inhabit them? Well, frankly, I’d go way further than that myself. I’d say the problem is not just the AW but the whole of the internet and it’s not just the UK but all of planet Earth. But at that point where else can we go? And will we risk finding ourselves inhabiting wherever it is we go once we get there? I wholeheartedly agree that human people are totally crap and so is everything else except the good bits, but I think we can find comfort in the fact that we’re not on Twitter or in Qatar.
Yebbut no. The core qualities of the Afterword (as of the U.K.) remain intact. They’re the bedrock. Community support, mainly. Finding each others’ glasses, advice on cardigan elbow repair and wheelbarrow nozzles. This is good stuff, but the Afterword needs new blood, new opinions, new enthusiasms (don’t look at me – I peaked with “I’m Thinking Of Buying A Tray”) if it is to drag itself out of the comfort zone. Whether it wants/needs to be dragged out of the comfort zone is another question. A gentle relaunch, a new look, attracting new readers and writers. Not going to happen, very probably.
(Gar – I’m not saying that human people are totally crap – just your wince-inducing taste in music. And hats.)
I must confess that I really like my comfort zone. It’s actually one of my favourite things.
Some valid comments Mr Saucecraft
I think one’s outlook is very much influenced by that person’s state of mind
You wake up feeling not so good you will most likely feel the same about everything else
You wake up bright and…you get my drift
Simplistic yes but probably true
It’s best to get up and drag a comb across your head.
You can say all that @gary but I saw China Crisis the other night and had a thoroughly lovely time so there is at least a little loveliness left in the world!
That definitely sounds like one of the good bits. Like chocolate and Rob Reiner films (except the recent ones). On reflection, I think HP’s grumpy moaning was probably less general than I first interpreted it to be. More weather-based.
Weather based for you or for him?
Him! I wasn’t really moaning myself, I was just joining in out of solidarity. I actually love human people, the AW and planet Earth. They’re among my favourite things, alongside my comfort zone, chocolate and Rob Reiner’s films from the 80s. I don’t even mind queuing at bus stops in the rain, as long as it’s not for too long and I’m actually going somewhere (though truth be told, I do prefer taking the car and sunshine).
Bus queue? Left the gas on?
Only possible to experience if a) there actually were buses to queue for in this village, and b) there actually was a gas supply to this village. Strewth, HP, we don’t all live in some urban hi-tech megalopolis. This is sticks England, not that Lahndahn.
A better image might be standing on the bit of knobbly pavement waiting in the rain to cross the busy B-road to get to the shop, trying to remember what you left the house to fetch in the first place.
Most English Afterworders seem to live in Hobbiton.
I went there last year. Peter Jackson told the crew to paint all the 20,000 leaves on a pretend tree a shade of yellow because the scene was in autumn and that’s the colour the leaves would be, in his mind. They had to work through the night to do it.
Luxury! Sgt. Hartnell ordered me to paint all the coal white…
“That man has your Cup Final ticket!”
Re the invented thing. It’s a running gag. No biggie. I think you have been a party to a few in the past.
I have seen more names unfamiliar to me in recent weeks. Maybe prompted by a recent first time contributor announcing their presence.
The Mods provided some stats recently. Most new registrations are bots. The ones that are legit take months to post.
Most new registrations are bots? How depressing. What on earth is the purpose of that? Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating bots to populate chat groups? I don’t get it.
Because the Afterword is dominated by thought-leaders and opinion-formers and we can be used to destabilise Western democracy with non-standard, pro-Putin ideas about Gentle Giant and Tonto’s Expanding Headband.
Ah, of course. Silly me.
And we all know why Tonto had an expanding headband, touches finger to 👃.
Ah thank goodness. I had to zoom in there as I couldn’t see clearly what you were touching your finger to and I thought it looked like something else.
I’m just watching him on Sunday Brunch. Looks great for his age in leather trousers. He might be eaty in the ollocks, though.
Star of the show? Palomar Faith. What a woman!
Is that on just now? I missed it!
Did Tim Lovejoy show off his usual depth of knowledge by asking Donovan if he missed being in Neighbours?
He reflected on his skateboarding in 1992, how there was a period when everyone hated him and compared hair follicles, or lack of them.
His regret over “not being able to influence the game anymore now he’s left Sky Sports” 🙄 must have worn off by now, I’d guess.
Tangentially to this Jean Knight soul singer best known for Mr. Big Stuff has died aged 80.
An unintended side effect of this thread mocking the great Donovan is that it’s sent me back to listen to the great Donovan for the first time in a while.
By God, when he was good he was really good, wasn’t he? He was only 19 or something when he recorded that Sunshine Superman album, and for 1966 it’s so ahead of the curve it’s frightening. If I’d heard it without knowing what it was I would have assumed someone had been listening to The Incredible String Band’s stuff from two years later (and two years was a massively long time in the sixties). The song that floored me this time was Celeste: I had to listen to it three times in a row to satisfy my head.
His fingerpicking guitar style on A Gift From A Flower To A Garden is phenomenal and he rivals Nick Drake for force of poetic expression when doing folky stuff.
The icing on the cake for me is the kind of acoustic funk soul stuff he got into at the end of the decade, Get Thy Bearings, Barabajagal, Hurdy Gurdy Man. I can see Funkadelic and Terry Callier taking notes.
Sorry, just had to wax lyrical about him there for a bit. I forgot how much I love him. After all these years I think he’s still tarred a bit by the mocking he got in that Dylan film (very unfair to an emerging songwriter still in his teens: we can hardly blame him for being a bit of a Dylan copyist for a year or so).
…and his backing band on the electric stuff was half of the future Led Zeppelin – and sometimes three quarters…
I bought the recent (last year or two) Abbey Road remastered LPs of SS, MY and THGM on label The State51 Conspiracy. Each were limited to about 300 copies and cheap (all three were total sub-50 quid).
After their recent bonkers Kate Bush sets, the label seem to have reset their VFM machine, and their A Gift From A Flower To A Garden 2LP reissue is – wait for it – £180.
https://state51.greedbag.com/buy/a-gift-from-a-flower-to-a-garden-6/
I’m off to buy the CD.
Fair play Arthur , he was indeed a creative force. However, don’t you think it is over egging it to suggest Funkadelic would be getting their funk chops by listening to Donovan records?
Maybe not the Fonk but how about the bonkers bit?
I wouldn’t be surprised if George Clinton was familiar with the works of the great man, he’s a psych tragic, hence the -delic.