If it wasn't for a fallout with his record label, Donovan could
have changed the face of pop with Sunshine Superman. So why is he
revisiting the album after 40 years? Sitting in the back garden of
a west London coffee house, Donovan offers an apologetic smile. He
has just completed an uninterrupted five-minute monologue, which
variously touched on the social radicalism of Robert Burns, the US
civil rights movement, transcendental meditation (44 years after
visiting the Maharishi with the Beatles, he remains a devotee), the
US inventor and author Buckminster Fuller, the green movement, his
long-term friend Gypsy Dave, the second world war, yoga, Welwyn
Garden City, Radio Luxembourg and something he refers to as the
bohemian manifesto, which apparently "was the full instructions to
save this foolish little planet from the insanity of humankind".
It's all interesting, if occasionally a little hard to follow and,
it has to be said, only very tenuously connected to the question I
had asked, which, as far as I can remember, was about his musical
influences in the mid-60s. "It's too much, I know," he shrugs.
"You're going to have to do some editing.
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