Fact #157619

Donovan : Clive Davis was head of Epic Records at the time. I recorded this in August and September of 1967, at the height of quite a few hits that I was having, and when I delivered the album, it surprised Clive Davis, and he was rather shocked — it was the first time a pop artist had requested a boxed set, and the sleeve photograph involved seven colour separations, which was far more expensive than their budget allowed.

Talking about the budget, he said, 'Well, we'll do it, but you'll have to pay for the extra cost', and they simultaneously released it as two separate albums. One was titled 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' and the other 'For Little Ones'. Essentially, I produced the album, and Mickie Most, my hit friend with whom I made lots of albums, produced 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' and 'Oh Gosh', the tracks which were the singles on the album. It wasn't received very well by Clive Davis, who couldn't understand what I was trying to do, but he insisted it was also split into two albums. It went gold after two years and since then, I think it's become quite a cult album.

I suppose on 'For Little Ones' I was returning to my roots in a way, making a completely acoustic album. On the other album I was continuing in a sort of jazz/pop vein, and at that time, a lot was going on — Mickie and I didn't fall out so much as I thought I would like to make this particular album on my own. At the time, I was still under contract to make records with Mickie and so I went in and made the majority of the record, recording all through that summer of '67 and I also started working on the art, and Mickie Most was standing by, really, wondering what I was up to in the studio. I hadn't really felt that Mickie and I wouldn't work together again, we were just working together on so many records and then I decided to do this.

I brought the tapes to Clive Davis and he thought it very unusual, and it was quite a departure from the album before it, which was 'Mellow Yellow', although the 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' songs, especially the title track, were very much in the vein of what I was writing at the time. Then Clive Davis said 'We'll release this, but there's no singles', so I said what if Mickie and I went in and recorded a couple of extra songs, and we got together again and recorded 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' and 'Oh Gosh' — 'HMS Donovan' was another departure, which was later on, and then it came together for the following album. So Mickie and I weren't working together on the whole album, but he did the singles.

Arrangements under the direction of John Cameron were usually present on early Donovan sessions, played by the jazzers, a set team - Danny Thompson or Spike Heatley on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums, John Cameron on piano and Harold McNair on sax and flute. So Tony Carr was an old friend by this session and worked on two tours of the United States - he had a distinctive conga sound on lots of my records.

There's a jazz/rock connection I've had most of my career, and the bass player, Cliff Barton, was probably with Georgie Fame at the time, and also doing sessions, and Mike O'Neill, who was later in Heads, Hands And Feet, was also probably doing sessions then. He was actually Nero of Nero And The Gladiators, and we were to work together again on the 'Open Road' album in 1970, on which he also played keyboards.

I think it was word of mouth around that Donovan liked a jazz flavour, so I think that's how I got in touch with Cliff Barton, and Mike O'Neill would have also come in through that contact, while Keith Webb was drumming with Terry Reid, who was another of Mickie Most's clients. Candy John Carr was a buddy from the pre-'Catch The Wind' days, late '64, early '65, and lived in Portobello Road and he played bongos. We used to hang out and play music into the night, and we knew a few rasta friends and they were great mates and great lovers of early bluebeat, soul music.

When we started making those early records, and doing some early shows, Shawn Phillips, John Carr and I would play as a trio - he played congas and bongos. He was the full kit drummer for Open Road later on when we made that album - he lives in California now. Candy And I And Shawn Phillips were very early associates, although Shawn isn't on this record - he and I recorded together on the 'Fairy Tale' album. Harold McNair has unfortunately gone now, but he was a white Jamaican who used to be called 'Little G', a very famous flute and sax player who is sadly missed. I think he was reckoned at the time of his death to be the best in the whole of Northern Europe, but he had lung cancer and died. We did a big benefit for him, but among the jazz crowd - he was my friend on the road and he made a wonderful flute sound round me on this album, of course. He was classically trained and a jazzer as well - he was wonderful.

Erik Leese and Mike Carr were casual acquaintances at the time, so I didn't really play a lot with them, and I don't know their history - I think again they were both in the jazz mould. Jack Bruce seems to have played on one of those electric tracks - Jack was actually sessioning as well at the time. On the acoustic album, there's Ken Baldock on string bass. Danny Thompson is an old friend of mine, and I don't know why he didn't play on that session, but obviously Danny was probably working with Pentangle on the road. I don't remember Ken, but I always liked the upright bass. Tony Carr, the drummer, was Maltese, and was known as the Maltese Falcon, a fine drummer and conga player. He was the one everyone called for percussion.

The Electric Album

Sir Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic wanted to do a modern version of 'As You Like It', and I was commissioned to write two songs, 'Under The Greenwood Tree' and 'Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day', I gave a live rocking backing to 'Under The Greenwood Tree', and 'Shall I Compare Thee' I did as a normal troubadour job.

Unfortunately, the director ran away with the leading boy to Italy, and the production didn't happen, but Sir Laurence Olivier was running the Old Vic at the time and I got very excited about that and I loved it so much, I decided to put it on this album.

'There Was A Time' mentions St. Albans, where I used to play in the early days. It's an autobiographical song, which reflects the turning point in my career, as does this whole album. I looked backwards, obviously, but also I'd moved to a cottage, so that's why many of the nature ballads are on the album; I started to rediscover Celtic poetry which speaks a lot about nature. 'There Was A Time' speaks of four and a half years before this album was released, where I was actually that person in the song, and how fast I was projected into fame from when I was selling cake on a market stall, the rags to riches story, although there were a lot of changes between St. Albans and this record.

'Mad John's Escape' was based on an actual event - I knew Mad John, a lot of people knew him. He was one of the rambling types of '61, '62 and '63 around the scene, who broke out of borstal and went on the run. It's a true story.

'Skipalong Sam' is a painter friend who's still alive and living in Scotland, a school friend incidentally, and 'Epistle To Dippy' was a school friend too.

He was actually one of three school friends, and we all had nicknames and he liked a Zen monk named Diplodocus or something like that, and we called him Dippy for short. The song was about him and me and friends in school; it was a memory of school days.

'Sun' is early ecological, early green, and there's a connection between flower power and green issues in my life, which seems to get clearer and clearer, although they didn't call them green issues then. It's a celebration of life as well, and possibly not altogether ecological, but a nature song. I don't know who 'Little Boy In Corduroy' was - I'd begun to write children's songs quite early. It's a teaching song, and not about any child in particular.

This whole album is the beginning of wanting to address myself to the children of my generation and perhaps introduce them to certain truths through simple stories of nature. 'The Land That Doesn't Have To Be' speaks of a sort of Celtic other word, fairy land, a fictional land to entertain the children, but there is something about it being an altered state of consciousness in some way - one enters this land In Dreams, and it is a land that has an energy to it. Some people call it the land within, while some people call it God. It seems to speak of people who can enter a deeper state of consciousness and bring back dreams of love and compassion, because heaven is within, but it pokes fun at those who live on the outside of life and want to enter the depths of their own mind. It's almost meditational.

'Someone Singing' is about me, I'm singing. I had become by then, in the cliché form, a voice of my generation, but in the song, I am taking the position of presenting love and compassion to my generation, the actual philosophy I had read in the books of Buddhism and the Eastern books of faith, which were seeping through my generation at the time. 'Oh Gosh' speaks of the fashions at the time, and the emerging children coming out of it, a celebration of life, very swinging London, but it also embraced every active romantic group of people in any major community in the West at the time, and the search, once again, for some answer to it all, and the children that were emerging, and also my position in singing about these subjects which were underground - I'm singing it out, and preaching peace, of course, 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' was a hit, and lyrically, it was about a painter, I think, it's a painterly song".

The Acoustic Album

I played the banjo on 'Song Of The Naturalist's Wife', and I got that banjo for Derroll Adams, and ended up keeping it myself. I learned the banjo from Derroll, and I also sang through the banjo, sang through the ski, which was an unusual sound, and I beat it like a drum as well. That song came from my early interest in marine biology - I thought I was going to do that once, and so it's a projection of a life I may have lived myself, a celebration of the life by the sea, which wasn't far from where I had been living. When you think about it now, these songs weren't really for any particular age group, but for the child with a soul which still looks at the world in wonder. There is no age group for them, actually - children who can't read enjoy then.

I received many hundreds of letters at the time from parents who found that these songs could be lullabies, and their children were put to sleep by them, which suggests all ages to me, from a very early babe all the way up to nine. This was before Ninja Turtles, unlike these days when children of six and seven are listening to very hard-edged television shows.

We didn't record the bird sounds which are on this album ourselves, we went to the sound effects library. I'd left London and moved into a cottage at Little Berkhamsted in North Hertfordshire, and all around the cottage, these particular birds could be heard, and so as I was writing the songs, all around me as I sang was the sun rising or setting with the accompanying birds, so when I wrote 'The Magpie', I was looking at a magpie.

'Starfish On The Toast' and 'Epistle To Derroll' both mention the starfish, which is a curious creature, because it has an astrological shape. This shape is repeated in flowers and it's also of course a magical symbol in philosophy. I just love starfish - you cut a leg off and it grows another one, so it's a symbol for me, I suppose. The seagull was my main symbol in many songs - freedom, the symbol of the sea, the symbol of loneliness, maybe - but the starfish may have been too. Also Derroll Adams had a starfish tattooed on his hand. A lot of my guitar style comes from listening to his banjo style, and I was very much taken by him, he was almost a mentor, so 'Epistle To Derroll' is a celebration of the music of Derroll seen through a Lewis Carroll type story of an encounter on the seashore, and a celebration of the shores of Scotland and the North of England, where I grew up, recalling my background. 'Starfish On The Toast' is a bit of fun, really - it's more a southern beach, way down south, but a Victorian world is what these two songs are speaking about, a kind of passing world. In some parts of Britain, you can still feel it's there, and we have nostalgia for that passing world, the wonder of childhood. I think that the story of Derroll is all over that album.

A Gift From A Flower To A Garden is, in a way, flower power, but in a way, it's a philosophy, a celebration of the planet and the transcendent state that one can place oneself in. There are certain songs on this album my fans have told me they relate to - and that's why Maharishi's on there. Also the call to people on the liner notes to stop taking drugs was very important - Maharishi also called for that. It was getting out of hand - marijuana and LSD had turned into needle drugs, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin and a mass of synthetics which were actually created by the government, not by us at all, that followed on that naive time of '65 and '66. In a way, Maharishi's on there because he gave my generation an alternative drug, a way of continuing what we were all interested in".

When I did this boxed set and George Harrison followed it with his All Things Must Pass, which was also a boxed set, it impressed upon the world that there was a way of expanding popular music and using fine artists to design the sleeve - my album may also have been the first time where infra-red photography was used on the front of a sleeve. Karl Ferris was the photographer, and it was an experiment which actually I had to fight very hard to be able to use. I'm glad I did, because it put a little bit of class on the illustration of pop covers, which I like.
(Source : not known)