He was the roving minstrel the rambling songster the peripatetic gypsy the ambulant chanteur the kinetic bard combining courtly-medievalism with Sixties cool

He was the roving minstrel, the rambling songster, the peripatetic gypsy, the ambulant chanteur, the kinetic bard, combining courtly-medievalism with Sixties cool. Girls liked the combination, partly because Donovan didn’t seem to threaten – his songs promised walks on the beach and holding hands rather than anything more shag-orientated.
But Donovan was also the quintessence of hippiedom – or at least the watered-down British version of Haight Ashbury – and when the whole kaftan culture packed up in 1970, his career drooped like a sunflower at dusk. He went on to make records that cunningly interspersed hippie grooves with more earthy concerns (like “The Intergalactic Laxative” on his 1973 album, Cosmic Wheels, a song about the problems facing astronauts who wish to visit the lavatory), but by the late Seventies it was all over. He and his wife Linda spent the Eighties living in Ireland and America, and getting by on CD sales of his backlist.But now he’s back, boys and girls, with his first album for nearly two decades, a fantastically hip American producer (Rick Rubin) and a prolonged tour across Europe and on to America and the stage of the Filmore East. Can he convince the cynics of the British press that it was more than a nostalgia trip?”Absolutely not,” he says emphatically “It would be impossible to convince the British press.

A man always has to leave his homeland, go to another time zone, another culture, to get a different recognition – to be accepted as someone who’s following a different path, who’s moving into a different mode.”If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this vocal pattern before, let me help. It’s a combination of the I Ching, the Zen prophesy manual, and the obiter dicta of George Harrison, the Beatle whose mystical vapourings have been riotously documented over the years. Donovan in the flesh appears considerably more down to earth than Harrison, but he strives for visionary effect all the time. The air is thick with shamanic tales, spiritual paths, Buddhist enlightenment, yogic fliers.

“Scientists and thinkers,” he assured me, nonsensically, “are coming to understand that, underlying every philosophy and scientific law is one common factor, and this factor they call the spirit, or a Field of Energy, or ‘the Goddess’ And I can link this to Celtic music. Up to the 1700s, the bardic tradition was still taught in Scottish schools – poetry, music, philosophy and history We were functional in the tribe.. The effects of music at ritualistic times of the year.. I don’t feel I’m a flashback. I’m trying to embrace the future, as we all must now.”His curiously feminine face, the eyes rather sunk and stoned, gives nothing away. He could be reciting from a New Age pamphlet bought in a field in Glastonbury “It isn’t called ‘New Age’ any more,” he interjects. “It’s called the ‘Human Potential Movement’.” Donovan himself is less a devotee of the movement, more an aspirant boss.

In mystic-visionary land, he’d far rather be a chief than a brave. You can tell by the subtly self-reflective way he explains the figures in his songs (“The Hurdy Gurdy Man is the yogi, the One Who Comes Singing, the One who Appears a Fool, the Trickster, the One Who Looks Ridiculous But Sings About Profound Things…”). So does the reverence with which he invokes the names of writers on Zen matters, particularly when he sneaks his own name in among them. At one point he said, “Maybe there are people like Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Donovan and Alan Watts, who are conduits of belief, who pass things on…”Wasn’t all this a little hard to square with the life of the pop star on the road, the life he left behind, 20 years ago? Not at all. “The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga Very early on, I chose the path of Life One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.” For a hedonist and aspiring rock star, this is obviously very good news.

Donovan has, however, been worrying about his motivation and, as he does many times in our conversation, he goes off into a fusillade of what’s-it-all-about? questions, a kind of one-man Socratic dialogue. “What am I coming back to? What is the question? What is it I wanted to do in the beginning? The idea of coming back is daunting inasmuch as I have to ask these questions. But Linda said, ‘It’s to offer as many people as possible an alternative…’ She’s very simple in her answers and so that was that.” One can only speculate on the nature of the conversation at the Leitch breakfast table.The new album, Sutras, will disappoint any fans who thought Donovan might embrace the New Lad culture for his comeback. No trace of energy or feeling, no pulse or ripple of felt life, disturbs the millpond surface of this enervated Buddhist tract. Faint ethereal figures, like “The Clear-Browed One” or the pilgrim shadow of “Eldorado” wander on- and off-stage, as Donovan invokes the seashore, stars, moon, night, and the interchangeable paraphernalia of nature, as he looks for “deep peace” and “the Evernow”. His voice is weirdly youthful and unchanged, but the songs (minimally accompanied by some flash American musos and our very own Nigel Kennedy) are as insubstantial as dreams. “What is it – what is it – that’s for sale in this album?” asks Donovan with his habitual tic of self cross- examination “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a healing sound.