1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 96. Donovan – Sunshine Superman (1967)

 

The third studio album from Donovan Leitch, and a movement into a more psychedelic rock sound. Donovan was friends with The Beatles and Brian Jones, somewhere on this album there may be Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones playing, he wrote one track (Fat Angel) for Mama Cass Elliott, another for Bert Jansch (Bert’s Blues) and namechecks Dylan, Janis [Joplin] and Jefferson Airplane in Fat Angel, and it seems like he was everywhere in the British and Californian music scenes of the time.

There are essentially three types of track on this album; some troubadour/chanson ballads, usually featuring wizards and queens and knights (e.g. Legend of a Girl Child Linda, and Guinevere), or they’re more upbeat, genre-defying mixes of psychedelia, folk and rock, often with quite a funky tempo.

The title track is a good example of this form, as is The Trip and what is probably my favourite track from the album, Season of The Witch. The timbre of Donovan’s voice is not so good for carrying the ballads, but on the upbeat numbers he’s got a good soul/blues kind of voice when he needs it.

The final kind of track are the more raga-style ones, most notably Ferris Wheel and Fat Angel. My sketchy notes called this album “a load of old hippy nonsense, in a good way”, but I think I undersold it; listening again there’s a lot more variety and musicianship on display if you focus on that rather than the lyrics about wizards and rainbows.

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