Donovan: Call him Mallow yellow

Donovan is looking forward to travelling the few miles from his Co Cork home to play the city’s 38th folk festival, writes Ed Power

WHEN Donovan Leitch wrote Hurdy Gurdy Man in India in 1968, he had little inkling of the strange afterlife his transcendental dirge would go on to have. In the past decade,

especially, the haunting ballad, with its aura of slowly rising dread, has become Hollywood’s go-to tune for existential terror .