DonovanDonovan at The Olympia Theatre, 26th of October 2013

Donovan? Who’s Donovan?” So goes the famous line spoken by Bob Dylan in the documentary film ‘Don’t Look Back’, shot during that freewheeler’s 1965 tour of England and it’s a question that has resonated throughout his Scottish contemporary’s entire career. Hardly the trailblazer in his day, when folk was hot Donovan emerged, and when psychedelia was dripping from radios across the Anglophonic world sunshine came softly through Donovan’s window. He didn’t pave the way but he made the way a nice place to be led along with songs that were always as unabashedly romantic as they were unchallenging.

And so forty-nine years after that career-defining question comes Donovan to the Olympia. When he emerges on the stage with his green guitar he takes a bow on either side of the microphone, perhaps of the opinion that he has already earned his praise for the evening. He performs his solo opening with Catch The Wind and y’know…it sounds just like Catch The Wind. A few more songs are played before your mind drifts and you start thinking about where this guy came from. Donovan’s big influences were about the age he is tonight when he first came to prominence in the ’60s. These were the pre-war blues singers who were rediscovered in Eisenhower’s America, and they performed in Newport, and they performed on Pete Seeger’s ‘Rainbow Quest’ TV show, and they performed the blues so well that they directly inspired the most creative era in recorded music. On the Olympia stage Donovan is not performing his songs, he’s simply “playing the hits”.

A band arrives onstage shortly and in succession we get our Sunshine Superman and our Mellow Yellow and much arhythmic happy-clapping is going on for the nostalgia-trippers who turned out for the man who soundtracked their youth. The average age of the crowd is revealing and you can’t help but understand why even though 20-somethings were once profoundly moved by 60-somethings like Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, today this is not the case. The band – made up of Fins, presumably a ready-made unit rather than a painstakingly (or thoughtfully) put together group – are average, and spontaneous attempts at letting them solo range in quality from “passable” to “he’s just going up and down the scales there…and he’s not in the right key anymore.”

For how unremarkable the band is Donovan deserves special credit for making things worse. As if playing with no conviction wasn’t bad enough he time and again tries to shift his rhythm guitar playing from a down-stroke to an upstroke going completely off-beat and confusing the band. And that’s how the gig ends. Some of the crowd have left, and some who would continue to clap along in beat if he began slaughtering children onstage have kept the noise level constant long enough for him to sneak back out for an encore.

He rushes through that poem thing at the start of Atlantis so fast it’s almost like hearing his 33 played at 45 and people sing along. Then as the song ends he does that upstroke thing again so the drum is beating out “a one and a two” while Donovan’s guitar is somewhere between the “one” and the “and”. So the drums and guitar separate, the piano and bass are like Stretch Armstrong being pulled apart by them, and Donovan trying to kill the situation rather than save it lifts up his guitar to indicate to the band to wrap it up. But the drummer thinks he’s trying to show them the rhythm and keeps playing after Donovan’s struck his final chord, prompting the man to sing the final “Atlantis” twice.

The big difference between the Donovans and the Mississippi John Hurts of the world is that the bluesmen were all about the live performance. If you didn’t impress the crowd in every town you stopped in you didn’t last in a listener’s head longer than an after-taste of whiskey. Donovan emerged at the epoch of recorded music. Everything we know about him came to us through his pretty romantic records. As he once said when talking about Atlantis, like the city in that song the influence of the sixties continues to resonate to the present day. However on this night it is clear that on the pool of time we are starting to find ourselves beyond the reach of some of the weaker ripples of that age.