Not a bad life. Not a bad career. And on this nifty and outrageously colourful ‘Very Best Of’ release we have heaps of the cap-headed beatnik’s finest moments: ‘Sunshine Superman’, ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’, ‘Jennifer Juniper’, ‘Catch The Wind’, ‘Guinevere’, ‘Colours’. Unfortunately it’s for lyrics like these that we best remember Glasgow’s Donovan Philips Leitch:
Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze.
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase.
But hat’s off the bloke, it was to be the very next phase. The brass-laden ‘Mellow Yellow’, released in 1966 stormed the US Billboard Charts and earned Donovan a gold record award for sales in excess of one million. Arranged by John Paul Jones and rumoured to feature Paul McCartney on backing vocals, the song is now best remembered (and quite rightly) for the phrase ‘electrical banana’. Peeled, smoked, dipped in chocolate and fried, who knows, one thing is certain at least, for many the phrase was a coded reference to a vibrator, leaving little doubt in the minds of the tittering masses everywhere that ‘Mellow Yellow’ was sexual in nature (it sounds naughty enough, anyway).
So here you have it. The whole flower lovin’, psychedelic, lavishly bohemian shebang, from the early Dylan/Guthrie inspired early efforts like ‘There Is A Mountain’ to the jazz-flavoured, Mickie Most produced, Yardbird sessioning tales of mystery and mind-expansion that peaked with the West Coast grooves of ‘Sunshine Superman’, the ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ and shamelessly gauche ‘Atlantis’.
‘The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is. First there is a mountain then there is no mountain, then there is…..’
Timeless stuff. And quite rightly.