Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

15/08/65 : What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid - Donovan


This is our second visit with Donovan and last time I was mostly unimpressed, but found some of it to be bearable - I'm already put off this by the album title here though. However, it's now also known also as Catch The Wind, which was it's US title and is a much better name - except for the fact that he's released FOUR compilation albums with the same name!

It opens with "Colours" which I vaguely recognised and actually quite like, despite it sounding pretty Dylanesque. And it kinda continues in that vein, although it's more hippy-ish that Dylan - which isn't usually my sort of thing, but I actually really liked "Universal Soldier" which has a real "peace and love" feel to it. I was also surprised to get our second version of "Donna Donna" this year, with Joan Baez having given us the other one - and they're both pretty decent. All in all, I was quite impressed - it's all well put together and played and it feels ahead of its time, and there are very much still people out there now making this kind of thing.

We're at #15 in the chart this week on his twelfth week of a sixteen week run, with it having peaked at #3 in its sixth week. The top five this week were The Beatles, TSOM, Mary Poppins, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez with no new entries in the chart.

Wikipedia tells us it's his debut album, released four days after his nineteenth birthday - there's a fair bit of text there but remarkably little information, other than telling us it features the obligatory Woody Guthrie cover. However, I'm not being entirely fair there because (for a 1956 album) there's actually a reasonable amount of original material here with Donovan writing half of it himself - and the critics were pretty nice about it as well.

"Customers also listened to" Tom Paxton, Melanie, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan - some fairly folky names there and no mistake. And I don't mind a bit of folk at all, but I was expecting Donovan to occupy an area for which I have less tolerance, so was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

08/08/65 - An interesting listen
22/08/65 - Him again!

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