Early yesterday, Cup Final morning, I can’t recall what it was now, but something led me to an internet page. I was probably obediently researching some arbitrary request from my wife. Contemporary dance. Modern Jazz. An exhibition of surrealist paintings or abstract sculpture. When it comes to art, she’s the Arsenal to my Corinthian Casuals.
Whatever it was, I found myself beholding a page with a marginal mention that caught my eye: Donovan in Reading, it said. Donovan? Now there’s a name I’d not heard in a long time. I clicked on the link, and found myself at the website of The Hexagon, Reading’s slightly outmoded theatre and arts centre. Donovan? Crikey. There was his picture. Yep, that’s him alright.
Whatever happened to Donovan…? I was about to find out.
The item told me that he was making an appearance at the Hexagon on…. let’s see…. May 21st. May 21st? When’s that? Have I missed it? May 21st? That’s this evening!
I called out to M: “Do you want to see Donovan this evening?” The reply came back: “Yeah, why not?”
Oh, the underestimated pleasures of not having kids.
Listen to Catch The Wind.
When Catch The Wind first made it into the charts in 1965, Donovan was 18 years old, and immediately touted as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan. This wasn’t fair on either of them. Donovan was always a relative lightweight, but that didn’t stop him producing some of the most enduring songs of the sixties.
I’ve talked before about my first big football match – the 1967 League Cup Final – in which 3rd Division QPR overcame West Brom from the First. 9 years old, I remember standing on the massive Wembley terraces, overwhelmed by the sound of tens of thousands of QPR fans singing “We’re just mad about Rodney, Rodney’s just mad about us”, in homage to Rodney Marsh. To the tune of Mellow Yellow, of course.
I also remember as a kid, lying in bed, sick, off school, listening to There Is A Mountain.
Caterpillar sheds his skin
To find the butterfly within.
I’m trying to link that to the story of the Cup Final, but there was no butterfly within for the armchair neutral. Arsenal v Manchester United, a mouth-watering prospect to all lovers of the Beautiful Game. The reality was that Arsenal were poor, and rather against recent form, it was left to Manchester United to play the football. On chances and possession, United should have had Arsenal conquered by half time. But they couldn’t get the ball in the net, and it was spiralled down into a penalty shoot-out that Arsenal won. There’s no justice in football, which is one of the many reasons I like it.
So anyway, we went to see Donovan. The only tickets left, funnily enough, were in the front row, right in the middle. (Does he spit when he sings, I wondered?)
And here he is, shambling onto the stage, grinning like the kid that we all still want him to be, his guitar slung over his back like the hobo we all still want him to be.
He grins. Phew, he’s the same old hippy.
He begins to spin some tale about the Beat Café. This is a virtual venue to which we are all invited, and where his life is played out. He sings a song we don’t know about gypsies and mystical starlit nights on roads through vast deserts. Now it’s 1964, he tells us. He walks into his Beat Café and starts playing… Catch The Wind.
He’s still good, and he can still charm an audience.
Listen to Colours.
Colours, Sunshine Superman, Universal Soldier, Season Of The Witch, There Is A Mountain, interspersed with poetry, mystical ramblings, new songs, and a lot of giggling. Then as an encore he picked up an electric guitar and blew us away with Mellow Yellow.
When I’m plodding round Loch Ness in October, grinning, I want to be singing:
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
It could be the runner’s anthem.
