Zeppelin and Floyd hoped his magic would rub off on them. The Happy Mondays just wanted to kidnap him. Donovan just dropped the most epic, name-dropping answer to a question ever

A legendary singer-songwriter who’s seen a thing or two, Donovan is one of the most well-connected artists in rock’n’roll, and never far away from an anecdote invoking the name of a musical legend or ten – a Beatle here, a Rolling Stone there, maybe a couple of Led Zeppelin members and a Pink Floyd frontman.

All this I know because I recently interviewed Donovan for The New Cue and was treated to a whirlwind of tales. The interview format is a series of set questions, with the last being a simple, “What do you consider your greatest achievement?”.

Now, with this being the last question, interviewees usually reply along the lines of, “Well, apart from my kids, it would be still making music.” But not Donovan. Nope, the 79-year-old’s answer is a name-dropping all-timer.

“It should be what I’ve achieved but I realised that it's more as a catalyst. I suggested you could do with blending and fusing styles of music – and write more than just ‘I love you, why’d you make me blue?’ in a popular song – and create material that was helpful for millions of young people into one song and one chorus.

"I didn’t know what to call that achievement, but I worked it out when George Harrison said, ‘Donovan is a catalyst.’ A catalyst can put two things together and create something completely different.”

Continuing on this theme of being a “catalyst”, his next stop was Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. “He said, ‘You know I bought your cottage?’” says Donovan. “I said, ‘Yeah? Why’d you buy my cottage?’ He said, ‘You wrote all those bloody songs there’.

"One song on Sunshine Superman was called Three King Fishers and he said, ‘When I heard that song, my future with the band I was with' – which I suppose was Floyd – 'I knew my direction.'

"That’s the effect of a catalyst. He bought my cottage. He said, ‘Maybe all that happened there would rub off on me.’ A catalyst is a strange animal… a human animal… me.”

Next up, Led Zeppelin. Donovan goes way back with Zep's members. His 1968 track Hurdy Gurdy Man, for example, featured both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, with some reports over the years suggesting John Bonham played on it too.

But it was the other guy he wanted to chat about. “Robert Plant said to me one night, ‘You know I bought your 1965 Aston Martin.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Cos it was so beautiful. You had a headlining put in it [in the car roof] and it was custom-made.'

"I said, ‘But what was the real reason?’ He said, ‘Maybe you wrote a couple of songs in that car.'"

So far: a Beatle, a Floyd, a Zep. But he wasn’t done yet. Moving the story forward by a decade or so, he declared: “My two daughters fell in love with Shaun and Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays,” he said, and remembered the first time he almost met them, at a gig where his step-son Julian, the son of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and Donovan’s wife Linda, was roadie’ing for him on an acoustic tour.

“After the show, he said, 'There’s somebody from Manchester at the back door with a van.'

"I said, ‘What do they want?’

"Julian said, ‘They want to capture you and take you to the Hacienda’. This is the 80s.

"I said, ‘Why?’

"‘They’re not telling’.

"I said, ‘Some other day.’”

He did get to hang with the Mondays eventually. “Shaun Ryder says, ‘You know I stole your song Sunshine Superman and I’m not giving you any fookin’ royalties,'” says Donovan. “I said, ‘That’s OK, you can take my melody, it’s terribly OK, because I am a catalyst. But you just nicked it, why did you do that?’. He said, ‘When we were nine, me and Paul and the band, we were thieves all over Manchester.'”

Not long after, the band were leaving his hotel room and he noticed that Mondays dancer Bez was attempting to remove the door handles of his hotel room with a screwdriver. Another member of the band was taking a picture off of the wall.

“I said, ‘Stop it! Leave that stuff alone, I don’t want to get into trouble,’” says Donovan. “‘Alright’.

"Then Shaun said, ‘Sorry I stole your song.’ I said, ‘It’s OK, it’s free, you can have it.'

"Linda said the Happy Mondays were the Rolling Stones of the 80s. There’s no question about it, they just went out there and went, ‘Watch this.’”

And so Donovan’s vast reply to the simple question, “What’s your greatest achievement” came to an end, with a short explanatory summary from the man himself.

“My greatest achievement is that they all want a bit of what I do,” he said. “And that’s OK.”