A song reborn across generations, carrying the restless spirit of the sixties into a new era through memory, legacy, and the unbroken pulse of rock and roll.
When Don Powell and his band Don & The Dreamers released their single Hurdy Gurdy Man on 11 April 2025, they did more than revisit a classic. They reached backward through time to reconnect with a piece of musical history first shaped in 1968 by Donovan, a song that once rippled through the psychedelic currents of its era and now returns with renewed vitality. This new recording arrived not as a nostalgic replica but as a living continuation of its lineage, strengthened further by a remarkable personal thread: guitarist Claus Bøhling of The Dreamers had played in the original band Hurdy Gurdy for whom Donovan first wrote the song. The past and present meet squarely in this version, transformed through the hands of musicians who understand both its origins and its unfinished potential.
The song has always carried a mystique. In its earliest conception, Hurdy Gurdy Man emerged from the haze of late sixties experimentation, its lyrics drifting between dreamlike images and an undercurrent of searching introspection. Donovan famously incorporated a third verse written by George Harrison, a stanza that remained unreleased for decades, living only in the mythology surrounding the track. The existence of that hidden verse shaped the aura of the song, suggesting layers of meaning that listeners sensed even if they could not fully articulate them. Its melodic progression, hypnotic rhythmic pulse, and trance like vocal phrasing made it one of Donovan’s most enigmatic recordings.
The Dreamers approach the song with a kind of lived wisdom. Powell, long celebrated for his tenure as the drummer of Slade, grounds this 2025 version in muscular rhythmic presence, bringing an earthier, more direct energy to the arrangement. Where Donovan floated, The Dreamers stride. Their performance respects the spirit of the original while giving it the weight and texture of musicians who have spent decades shaping stages, songs, and scenes. Bøhling’s presence ties the project to its point of origin in a way few covers ever achieve. It is not simply interpretation; it is reclamation.
Lyrically, Hurdy Gurdy Man has always been about initiation into a deeper awareness, a calling from somewhere outside the ordinary world. In the hands of Don & The Dreamers, that calling feels more weathered, more urgent, less mystical and more human. The recording from May 2024 carries the warmth and imperfections of real players in a room, creating a version that feels immediate rather than ornamental. It becomes a meeting place of eras: the psychedelic imagination of 1968, the stadium hardened experience of seventies rock, and the reflective authenticity of musicians still creating with purpose in the present day.
This Hurdy Gurdy Man is not a revival but a continuum, a testament to how certain songs retain their power when they pass between generations of artists bound by shared history and enduring musical truth.