One-time friend to the Beatles and reluctant rival to Bob Dylan, 1960s folk icon Donovan is still going, writes Dorian Lynskey.
There is no missing Donovan Leitch as he trots across the hotel lobby. He looks like a wig on a stick: he's had the same sprouting mop of curls (greyer now) for the past 40 years; beneath them he is impishly trim and dressed in black. He comes bearing gifts: recent CDs, which he offers to autograph. "It just so happens I have a pen with me," he says, producing one like a conjuror. "A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!" He speaks with a distinguished, velvety purr and the boyish enthusiasm of a children's TV presenter.
Thirty years or so ago, Donovan could not have crossed a lobby without being accosted by fans, but history has been unjustly unkind. He hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and accompanied the Beatles on their famous India trip. He made a string of diverse, innovative records, including the 1966 single Sunshine Superman, generally acknowledged as Britain's first psychedelic record. His elaborate arrangements and playful melodies have inspired the likes of Belle and Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy.
Yet still the custodians of the canon regard him as unworthy of serious attention. Admittedly, he made some terrible music - on even his best albums, the visionary walks hand-in-hand with the insufferably twee - but not enough to eclipse the likes of Season of the Witch and Barabajagal. He is a quintessential product of the 1960s: the invigorating, try-anything sense of possibility, the idealism, the flashes of genius, the daft excesses - it's all there.
This, at least, should be a good year for Donovan. Now there's a new compilation, reissues of four of his 1960s albums, and a UK tour. This autumn, he publishes his autobiography, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. All this is to mark the 40th anniversary of his debut release. "Everybody loves a party and a number," he says. "You can't have a 41st anniversary. Not really. Not unless you're really eccentric and living in Vienna. You can do anything you want then."
I see. "Am I excited?" he continues. "I am. Because it's like presenting a mani-festo," he says, rolling the word around his tongue.
The worst thing that ever happened to Donovan's reputation came early. On Dylan's first tour of Britain, a starstruck Donovan visited his hero's hotel room. DA Pennebaker's celebrated tour documentary, Don't Look Back, shows the young Scot strumming his fey homage, To Sing For You, to an apparently mocking Dylan. Viewers divide into those who see Dylan as a genius dismissing a young pretender, or a sniggering bully surrounded by sycophants.
In the latter camp are British pop act Saint Etienne, whose album Finisterre contains the splendid lyric: "This house believes in Donovan over Dylan." Donovan chuckles. "I've heard about the line, I haven't heard the song. Comparisons are odious, but what can you do? It was the two Ds - Dylan and Donovan. It was like you were either a Beatles or a Stones fan - it was a clearly defined line."
Does he ever think Dylan was a bit of a bastard? His brow wrinkles. "For years, people thought that Dylan was putting me down. He may have been a bit edgy, but those New Yorkers were into amphetamine. Their jawlines were about 12 inches wide. I put it down to a lot of agitation, a lot of adulation and a lot of stress that Bob was under. The misunderstanding was hard for me because I was only 18. I wasn't copying him, but we were stuck together because I was going to do what he did. I was going to be the poet folk singer who invaded the charts."
Off-camera, he says, they got on fine. Two days later, Dylan introduced him to the Beatles, who proved far more welcoming. George Harrison was the first person to call Donovan when he became the first pop star to be arrested for marijuana possession.
I ask if he is secretly proud of that place in history.
"No, no, it wasn't pride. Why was I busted? Tens of thousands of guys were rolling joints that night. Why me? Because I was an example to youth, which is what the lady judge said. I was the first but I wasn't the last. The authorities thought they could stop this revolution called the 1960s by picking off the main singer-songwriters. Now the poets are always at the forefront, so in a way I am proud to be the first."
Normally, pop singers describing themselves as poets should be discouraged in the strongest possible terms, but that is how Donovan was raised. His Glaswegian father was an engineer for Jaguar and amateur monologue reader, who bequeathed his son his actorly diction and love of poetry; 1971's HMS Donovan album set the likes of WB Yeats and Edward Lear to music.
Perhaps Leitch senior's ability to memorise 25-minute speeches explains his son's passion for long, lively anecdotes in which every voice (Dylan's nasal whine, Harrison's deadpan scouse) is mimicked, every detail is recalled ("one morning she came up the drive in a little yellow Volkswagen Carmen Ghia") and no name is left undropped. He was Keith Moon's neighbour, recorded with three-quarters of Led Zeppelin, helped Paul McCartney finish writing Yellow Submarine and co-wrote, with Allen Ginsberg, the famous placards in Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues clip.
Donovan, though, didn't have the temperament to be a rock star. He accompanied the Beatles to India (where he taught John Lennon the fingerpicking guitar style he uses on The White Album) to escape what he calls "superfame". Eventually it caught up with him.
"Did I have a breakdown? Did I have a dark side? Yes. There was a kind of watershed. There was a dark night of the soul." It came two months into his 1969 world tour. "I looked in the mirror of my bedroom in the Tokyo Hilton and said, 'I've done it. Why should I continue?' There was no excitement to it any more, the mission had been accomplished. Meaningful lyrics were now in popular culture, breakthroughs had happened, but what had we got for it? Loss of private life, bohemia gone for ever, absolute mayhem. Look what happened to John. In a way, the audience love you to death."
He abandoned the tour and escaped to his cottage in Hertfordshire. Four years earlier, he had had a fleeting love affair with model Linda Lawrence, ex-girlfriend of the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones. By chance, he bumped into her again, and they married.
"Linda's in all the songs," Donovan says fondly. "Sunshine Superman, Hampstead Incident, Young Girl Blues . . . Linda's the muse."
The next two decades were his wilderness years as he raised two daughters, Astrella and Oriole, and released several indifferently received albums. A nadir of sorts was reached when he appeared on UK breakfast television in the early 1980s, adapting the lyrics of Colours to sing: "Yellow is the colour of Selina Scott's hair."
At the end of the decade, however, he found recognition from an unexpected source. While performing in Birmingham, UK, he was visited by Shaun Ryder and his band, the nascent Happy Mondays, who asked Donovan to join them at the legendary Manchester haunt, the Hacienda.
"I thought it was a Mexican restaurant!" he chortles. Thus Donovan and his family became unlikely fixtures of the Manchester club scene, with all that entailed. "Astrella had a birthday party in a club and Shaun said, 'Do you want to try this?' And we said, 'All right, give us it.' And so we ate it and we danced all night." The memory makes him beam.
Donovan went on to support the Happy Mondays on tour, while Astrella dated Paul Ryder and Oriole married Shaun. Surely Shaun Ryder, with his prodigious appetite for every narcotic under the sun, was not the kind of son-in-law proud fathers dream of. "The two brothers went through some problems," he says diplomatically. "They're probably still going through them. But Shaun became a member of the family and a beautiful child was born, Coco. Linda described the Happy Mondays as the Rolling Stones of the 1980s. And they were. So it was curious what was going to happen but the girlssurvived."
As did their father. Last year's Beat Cafe album was his best for more than 30 years and these reissues should find a sympathetic ear. Donovan insists he doesn't mind that he hasn't been inducted into the rock'n'roll hall of fame: it's more meaningful, he says, that he has been honoured by the University of Hertfordshire in St Albans, UK, the town where he spent his adolescence.
"I'm a doctor of letters now," he says gleefully. "Maybe I should get a plaque and screw it on my door. Come in, I'm a doctor of music! Let me show you how!"
The reissues of Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, The Hurdy Gurdy Man and Barabajagal are on EMI. The compilation, Summer Day Reflection Songs, is on Sanctuary