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The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
'Masterpiece' - Scot blew the door of psychedelic revolution wide open
The Glasgow-born troubadour, whose mission was, in his own words, 'to bring poetic vision to popular music', began to make his name when, as yet unsigned, he appeared on the television show Ready Steady Go! in January 1965. On March 12 he sang his debut single, Catch the Wind, on TV, impressing a certain Little Steve Wonder, who was in the audience. The song zipped into the charts at number four, and continuing exposure on television and radio helped ensure that 'my name, my face and my music were in every home in Britain'. America beckoned, and he found himself on the Ed Sullivan Show – the same show that had broken the Beatles in the USA, less than a year earlier. His refusal not to join the rest of the performers for a final bow at the end brought him to the attention of industry heavyweight Allen Klein, who rang the renowned record producer, Mickie Most, and recommended Donovan to him. Donovan also toured Britain, where he was linked in the public mind with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the rising stars of folk music. A second single, Colours, reached the same chart position as Catch the Wind. His debut album, What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, was released in May, a few days after his 19th birthday; it peaked at number three in the charts. Such sudden fame did not come without its critics, however. Some in the music press had sniped that Donovan was but a pale imitation of Dylan, but after Donovan had met Dylan in his room at London's Savoy Hotel, the American told Melody Maker: 'He played some songs to me. I like him. He's a nice guy'. So ended, the magazine reported, 'one of the biggest controversies that has ever split the British music scene'. One Savoy encounter, incidentally, was immortalised by D.A. Pennebaker for Dont Look Back, his documentary about Dylan's 1965 British tour; Donovan borrowed Dylan's guitar to play a song, To Sing for You; Dylan responded with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Little could impede Donovan's rise. He played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the one in which Dylan famously 'went electric') and was feted in the States. He was friends with the Beatles (below), the Byrds and PJ Proby, was introduced to Paul Simon, had chart success with an EP featuring Buffy Saint-Marie's Universal Soldier, and took his first LSD trip. He had fallen in love, too, with a woman, Linda Lawrence, the former girlfriend of the Rolling Stones' guitarist Brian Jones, and mother to his son Julian. The Beatles appeared on the same showA second Donovan album, Fairytale, was released in October 1965. It contained some of his finest songs: Colours, Sunny Goodge Street and Ballad of a Crystal Man, and a cover of Oh Deed I Do, the work of his fellow Scot, the brilliant pioneering guitarist, Bert Jansch. In his memoir Donovan refers to the 'new way of seeing' that he was industriously developing at that time. He cites the lyrics to the jazz-fusion track, Sunny Goodge Street: 'I was describing the sub-culture emerging from the underground and the elusive search for the self. Two years before the beginning of 'Flower Power' and before the Beatles used the same refrain' he was singing … 'I tell you his name is/ Love, love, love''. He also records that he 'felt the need to introduce key spiritual ideas' . [The album] set the scene for my performance as a 'Bard' who would present a way of seeing the wonder of the natural world. I was mocked as a simpleton, when I sang of birds and bees and flowers like a child. Indeed, I was keeping the 'wonder eye' open - just like a child'. Among the many budding musicians who bought and loved Fairytale, here or in the States, was a young man in Indiana named John Mellencamp. The year 1965 had not quite finished with Donovan: in December, at Abbey Road studios, he began work on his 'experimental' third album, Sunshine Superman, with producer Mickie Most and the noted arranger John Cameron. Most, Donovan writes, 'realised I was hearing sounds which came from many sources: classical, jazz, ethnic, medieval minstrelsy, and he saw the potential for a veritable new fusion of music, a 'world music' sound, before this term was thought of'. Read more The album itself was a clever blend of folk music and some of the first psychedelia to ever be committed to vinyl. Musicians such as the double bass player Danny Thompson guested on the album. Shawn Phillips, a Texan musician, contributed sitar. By this time, Donovan's relationship with Linda, who was living thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, was looking uncertain. The title track (on which Jimmy Page, then a session guitarist, played) was the first song to emerge from his oppressive fog of sorrow. When Most heard it in the studio, he instinctively knew that it would be a hit single. He was right: it went to number two in the charts towards the end of 1966. The second track, Legend of a Girl Child Linda, saw Donovan finger-picking his acoustic guitar in front of an orchestra. 'We certainly broke the mould of pop music – and folk music, for that matter', he recalls in Hurdy Gurdy Man. '…There were no songs like mine to compare with. It was all new directions, uncharted seas'. Donovan continued to write songs for the new album in the new year of 1966. Linda appeared in most of the songs on one guise or another, including the gorgeous track, Celeste. Its aching lyric, Donovan notes, said he was disillusioned with everything. One striking line – 'I intend to come right through them all with you' – was in one respect about the changes his generation was encountering but at a deeper level was a song to Linda. In February he enjoyed another turning-point in his career when he headlined at New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall, accompanied by Phillips on sitar and 12-string guitar. It was the first time that a Western pop audience had witnessed the former instrument on a stage. Donovan writes entertainingly of his adventures in the States that year as he finished work on the new album in LA. 'This much I knew then: I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation. I was here to do this … I felt the spirit move within me. I knew that this album would be my masterpiece'. When the album was released in the States in September, the LA Times's Pete Johnson said: 'Donovan, a very talented, if unearthly, writer and singer of folk songs, croons 10 songs to form an album follow-up to his very popular single record, 'Sunshine Superman'. The LP does not fulfill the promise of his single, but it supplies a good measure of his soft understated singing of the medieval-modern, dream-reality mystical imagery. 'The best tracks', Johnson added, 'are 'Sunshine Superman', 'The Trip', 'Season of the Witch', 'Legend of a Girl Child Linda' and 'The Fat Angel'. Like many other singers, Donovan has fallen under the spell of Indian music, which provides structure for most of his non-rock songs'. For business-related reasons the album did not go on sale in the UK until June 1967. It reached 25 in the album charts, someway short of the exalted number-one status it enjoyed in many countries across the world. Melody Maker wrote that "every number has a mood, an atmosphere, a current along which the perceptive listener can float. Donovan glides playing beautiful guitar and singing his songs like they should be sung - with love'. Much lay ahead of Donovan, including a sold-out January 1967 headline appearance at at the Royal Albert Hall, his continuing involvement with the Beatles, his lasting popularity in the States and elsewhere, his 1968 masterwork – the double album box-set, Gift From a Flower to a Garden – and bestselling singles such as Mellow Yellow, Jennifer Juniper and Hurdy Gurdy Man. In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, John Cameron, Donovan's arranger and collaborator, reflected: 'The amount of work we did between '66 and '70 was phenomenal, we had a string section that rode motorbikes. They'd be on Yamahas with their Strads [violins] strapped to their backs, going from studio to studio. It was the only way they'd get from one to the other on time'. Donovan himself reconnected with Linda, and they were married in October 1970. Having done everything he had wanted to do, he then took a decisive step back from the industry. New records followed, but his time in the cultural spotlight was over. Read more On the Record Interviewed by Mojo magazine's Sylvie Simmons in 1996, to promote his 'comeback' album, Sutras, which was produced by Rick Rubin, Donovan explained: "If I can do a thumbnail sketch of 20 years, around about 1970 I had achieved everything I could have possibly dreamed of and much more. "Having been at the top of the ladder, there was nowhere else to go. So I walked onto a British Airways jet in Tokyo and out of a tax plan called a drop-out year where I was going to earn more millions of dollars than any young solo artist of his time. It had ended. I didn't burn out, I wasn't a drug addict, but I was wounded in some way, and I came home to my cottage in England.... I married Linda, my great love and teenage muse — four years of '60s madness had kept us apart — and I walked away from fame, the Rolls Royce, the yacht, the mansion. "We went to Joshua Tree in the California desert for much of the '70s and brought up the children up as an alternative family... But something was happening while I wasn't watching. In the '80s, things were getting very dark, the earth was wounded, and I felt dispirited. In '83 I stopped making records completely, I had a personal crisis, musical crisis, and Linda saw me through it. I came out around 1990. "A new impulse got me... I'd gone into the studio and started recording these song ideas... Rick Rubin had been in the studio with Tom Petty, who was playing one of my songs. Rick says, 'I love Donovan, I've always wanted to record him'. Tom says, 'Why don't you phone him up?'. So he did. We met and we found similarities extraordinarily alike." Speaking to Record Collector magazine in January 2024, he said: 'When I started singing, the message was in the song. The revolution was on. The important part was giving young people a shock in that there were different things to talk about in songs, other than, 'I love you, why'd you make me blue?' This was important' In the same interview he noted: 'I think my songwriting was very influential. Breaking all the rules and experimenting in the studio was encouraging to others'. Things came full circle in a way in 2102, when Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by none other than John Mellencamp. Donovan was introduced as the man who "blew the door of the psychedelic revolution wide open". Recalling the first time he had bought a Donovan album, in 1965, Mellencamp told the audience: 'I was in the seventh grade, and back then we waited for every record and I waited for every album to come out so that I could learn to play those songs. I wasn't just listening to Donovan, I was living Donovan. I was stealing all the s— from Donovan'. A few moments later, to applause and cheers, he held up his original, much-played copy of Donovan's second album, Fairytale. The word 'Mellencamp' was etched in ink along the top of the cover. 'See how it says Mellencamp?' he said. 'In Indiana, we used to use these things like money. If you didn't have any money, you would sell this for a dollar and a half or trade it for two Led Zeppelin records and then they'd trade it back. You always wanted to keep track of your stuff. That's why I have my name all over it'. * Donovan is marking his 60th year as a recording artist with a week of events in Paris between June 1 and 7. Website:
Daily Mirror
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
UK's most dangerous prisoner's disturbing love letters to new girlfriend
Robert Maudsley, once the UK's most dangerous prisoner, has found love according to a series of cards penned behind bars and seen for the first time by the Mirror The quadruple killer dubbed 'Hannibal the Cannibal' has found love after 51 years behind bars. Robert Maudsley, 71, the UK's longest serving prisoner once identified as the most dangerous inmate in the country, never sees his 'sweet girlfriend' Loveinia MacKenney, a mum-of-one. But for the past five years, he has written a string of letters to pledge his undying love for her. In his last one, after being moved from a 'glass cage', the perspex box in Wakefield jail where he was held in solitary confinement, he told her: "Due to certain restrictions I am not able to write as freely as I would wish to. "But you already know how I would love you, if I was there with you." The besotted single mum told how they had formed a special bond. He had spent 46 years in solitary confinement before his transfer to Whitemoor jail in Cambridgeshire on April 8. In March, he told her: "All the kindness, thoughtfulness and love you have shared with me through these last short years can get me through anything." He adds: "My beautiful Loveinia, the more love we experience in our lives, the more the bad experiences tend to fade into the distance and we can live our lives to the full." His letters and cards are full of tenderness. Yet they have never seen each other in person, and accept that they may never meet. Loveinia says: "I have so much love for him. I know that is unbelievable given that we have not spoken and have not met. People see him as a monster, they call him Hannibal the Cannibal. I know that he is far from that. "Bob is a loving and caring person and the letters show that." In his most recent correspondence, he outlines why he went on hunger strike in Wakefield earlier this year, after his Playstation and some of his 'perks' were taken away. He tells her: "Sometimes Loveinia we do have to fight for what is right and we believe in.. "We just need you to get better, and take care of us." She received Get Well cards after recent medical treatment, and a Christmas card to 'Someone Special', in which he wrote: "As my sweet girlfriend, you have been there for me." He hoped that she would see loved ones during festive season, adding: "I truly hope you can find someone to love you, in a physical sense, as I long to do for you. "Thank you for being there for me, and for giving me so many beautiful and wonderful dreams; I hope dearly I have done the same for you when you think of me." Their songs should be 'Someday We'll be Together' by Diana Ross and 'Catch the Wind' by Donovan, he adds. Loveinia, who cares for her disabled adult son Thomas, 46, felt an instant connection with Maudsley after seeing the 2020 TV documentary 'Killer in the family'. It told of the abuse he suffered in care after being parted from his family in his native Liverpool. Loveinia believes the conditions in which he has been held throughout his record time behind bars are 'torture', especially his perspex cell in Wakefield jail, known as Monster Mansion because of the highly dangerous inmates locked up there. "I feel his pain, I cannot put it into words," she said. "He has been victimised yet he has never lost his moral compass. "He holds onto his beliefs, he has never said anything wrong or inappropriate to me, he stands strong despite it all. It is love and that is what he needs desperately, and it is unconditional love that we share. "I have said to him on many occasions: 'There is only one thing I want from you Bob, and that is to know that you are ok'. "I could quite easily have ended up like Bob because of what has happened in my life, we have shared so many similar experiences. "It is only by the grace of God that has not happened to me." Maudsley became the UK's longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years, in 2017. First jailed in 1974 for killing child abuser John Farrell, 30, he has killed three men while behind bars. He warned his captors that he could not bear being alongside rapists and paedophiles on a prison wing before his move to his specially built cell. After killing his last two victims, he was said to have told a Wakefield guard: 'There'll be two short on the roll call." After the two murders of 1983, he spent 23 hours a day in a cell 18 ft by 15 ft wide, which he described as being buried alive in a concrete coffin. Londoner Loveinia has learned of his early life in detail through their letters. She said: "Imagine what he has suffered down the years. "I cannot comprehend what he has been through and what he continues to go through. "He was on his own at first, he had no family visiting. His dad told his two brothers that he was dead, and they believed that for years. "He needs all the support he can get. I am not just a pen friend, and if you see the letters from him, you will understand that. My heart breaks for him and my heart goes out to him." She added: "He came out of the homes at the age of 16, he came to London's West End and was raped. He is not evil, they call him a cannibal and all that, but when he first killed the child abuser, he gave himself up as he knew what he had done was wrong." She believes that he is 'extremely vulnerable' now in Whitemoor, and is adamant that he should be taken off the wing where he is held with up to 70 other prisoners. Maudsley murdered the fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital in 1974. The victim was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear, which led to his prison nicknames; first 'Spoons', then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain. The post mortem made clear that was not the case but the nickname stuck. His brother Paul, 74, told of a phone call with him last month when he told him: "Don't be surprised if this is the last time I call you'. Maudsley went on hunger strike; that has now ended.
