July 1 marks 55 years since the release of Donovan’s US number one, Sunshine Superman, a hit that helped define a genre and made the Hatfield singer a star.
As Donovan strolled along the beach in California in late 1965, a song was born that would change his career, taking him from a folk singer to a rock star who would help usher in a new era in music and culture.
Sunshine Superman would hit the top of the US Billboard charts in September 1966 and spawn the psychedelic sound that would encapsulate the latter half of the decade, as society embraced the new found freedom of ‘flower power’.
But, the musical aspirations of Glasgow-born Donovan would have humble beginnings in Hatfield after moving to the town as a child.
“In that little wallpapered bedroom, my dreams were dreamt of being a voice for freedom for my generation,” he said upon returning to 230 Bishop Rise back in 2019 for the unveiling of a blue plaque in his honour.
Learning to play guitar at 14, he performed at a number of local venues while also absorbing the folk scene in nearby St Albans, before dropping out of art school to travel the country.
Signing with Pye Records in 1964, he would release two albums, What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid and Fairytale, the following year as he drew comparisons to legendary folk singer Bob Dylan.
By 1965, he had moved to Epic Records to begin work on an album for US release, shedding the Dylan comparisons in the process as he moved to a new style of music, helped by the words of an Aldous Huxley book on psychedelia.
“I’d just read The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s book about taking mescaline, and wanted to get to the invisible fourth dimension of transcendental superconscious vision,” Donovan told the Guardian in 2016.
“I tried LSD, mescaline and finally meditation.”
While ‘sunshine’, a slang term for LSD, and The Doors of Perception helped Donovan on his way to stardom, Sunshine Superman was truly inspired by his infatuation with Linda Lawrence, the former girlfriend of Rolling Stones founder, Brian Jones.
“We got together for a while, but when I asked her to marry me she said no,” he told the Guardian.
“She’d just broken up with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. She’d been the first celebrity girlfriend of the pop era and was tired of fleeing the paparazzi.”
Continuing the story in a 2016 interview with Billboard, Donovan recalled: “That song was really kind of a plea for her to marry me at that time.
“The lyric says ‘It will take time, I know it. But in a while, you’re going to be mine. I know it. We’ll do it in style’. There was going to be a time of parting and that parting, by the way, saved our relationship, because through super-fame, none of my brothers or my sisters in the fraternity of music in the '60s, their relationships never survived it.
“So Linda and I had a break from '66 to '69, when we met again. Sunshine Superman marks the beginning of a really true love story that works out in the end. She’s the Sunshine Supergirl.”
Donovan would marry Linda in 1970, going on to have two children together and staying married to this day.
As for Sunshine Superman, the song would reach number one on September 3, 1966, becoming the first psychedelic song to reach the summit of the on the US Billboard chart.
“I already had top 10 records before Sunshine Superman, with Catch the Wind and Colors, but this was a real breakthrough for me,” Donovan told Billboard.
“It was a consciousness change for song writing, as people are now saying I initiated the psychedelic revolution.”
The revolution that Donovan started helped spawn the Woodstock Festival, launch and elevate the careers of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Pink Floyd, while providing the sound for 1967’s Summer of Love and the hippy movement.
But, by the early 1970s, aged just 24, he had stepped back from fame, moving to Ireland with Linda.
"It looked like I had given it up, although I continued through the '70s making nine albums and still touring quite extensively in the first years. But nobody who experienced '64 to '69 in the music world, especially with super-fame, would ever be able again to follow that excitement that followed the 1950s,” he told Billboard.
The 75-year-old continues to make music today, but Sunshine Superman remains his magnum opus. From his bedroom in Hatfield to launching an era-defining genre, Donovan helped changed music forever.
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