When ‘flower power’ arrived on British shores in the late 1960s, Donovan Leitch embraced this whole heartedly but perhaps imbued it with his own brand of Celtic-British fairy-folk, rustic-romanticism back-to-innocence. He was not alone in this, I suppose: in some ways add a few drugs and these were the colours of the British psychedelic folk boom.
In the same way (minus the drugs) with the same unquestioning enthusiasm I too embraced the gorgeous ‘box set’ double album of ‘A Gift From A Flower To A Garden’ when Allan brought it home one day. [did we say ‘box set’ in those days? Was there such a term?] The lavish artwork that accompanied the albums – line drawings of children, birds, farmers and fishermen; arty-photos through weird coloured filters of robed wizard-looking Donovan holding a flower – it all now bespeaks cringy dippiness at its worst (no –at its very worst were those perhaps exploiting the thirst for faux-rusticity, for peace and love and faeryfolk… but that would be the record producers). Anyway, dippy teen that I was myself, I think I swallowed it whole.
I imagine it must have been released in spring or early summer because that’s the season evoked and corresponded to by this double album, the second disc of which was dedicated to kids or to‘wee ones’ probably. I loved it: it drove me out (after or before listening) to long walks ‘up the mountain’ to commune, presumably, with the cuckoos and a hawthorn berries alluded to in the songs.
It’s easy to look back and feel embarrassed but actually there was and is much value in this double album, and yes I’d say especially in this second disc with its pared-down production, its addition of natural sounds, and in the (why not) commendable childlike charm of its simplicity. Nowhere more so for me than in ‘Isle of Islay’. Take the structure; three verses of three lines each. The melody: simple, unadorned, beautiful. A little hidden craft: internal rhymes throughout (sad/farmlad; neat/peat; blessed/forest). A sense of awe at the simple rugged beauty of nature – OK romanticised no doubt, but evocative in its lexical selection – sheep’s bell, sand, gull, farmlad, peat, seed.
In one of my own early songs (called ‘Dust’ and happily consigned to that!) I ‘borrowed’ a line from this: ‘felt like a grain on your sand..’ This line and the final line ‘felt like a seed on your land’ have strong emotive power, I think, because they encompass a two edged feeling a. a sense of our smallness and insignificance in the whole great scheme of things; but conversely b. a sense of our belonging as part of the whole great natural scheme of things.
….
Something of a coda.
I wrote the above essaylet longhand, in the notebook I carried with me everywhere, nearly five years ago. I decided in this case not to modify and extend it in ways that I have done when writing about other songs. But I did want say something else Donovan-related.
It can often be a disenchanting mistake to read the autobiographies of people you have admired for their musical output. I can think of several where I have just ended feeling appalled at how artists have taken their minimal talent for granted, or as a money making piece of luck, or have wasted fortunes (to which record buying fans like me have contributed) on mountains of narcotics. Others where musicians are keen to chart their chaotic love lives forgetting to acknowledge that the musical lyrical output is really what has made them interesting. Donovan’s autobiography saddened me in a different way: while at times he could be modest or even flippant about his success, more often he seemed to take himself rather too seriously, to the point where he clearly felt that his output was every bit as sophisticated and timeless as Dylan’s. Really? Some perspective please, Mr Leitch.
Going for a Song 