The Pop Corporation

It would appear we’ve been mishearing ‘Mellow Yellow’ – the smash psychedelic pop hit from Donovan – this entire time. On a surface listen, it’s just one of those daft drug songs, probably about smoking banana peel or something, right?

Well, what we assumed was ‘I’m just mad about Fontaine…‘ – it isn’t out of our imagination that Donovan would surround himself with people with fancy names, especially how he’s mad about someone called Saffron too – is actually “fourteen“.

Maybe, it’s just random, garbled ’60s silliness. Maybe it’s… look, we checked it out. We looked it up. It’s exactly what you think.

Fourteen is equally mad about Donovan, and the problem starts when you listen to the ‘Donovan in Concert’ LP where the singer proudly states “I’m just mad about fourteen year-old girls.”

And then, again us thinking it was some free-association word thing, he sings “Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze” and lo and behold, it turns out that this is a reference to sex toys, telling the NME that he used to “look in the back of newspapers and pull out funny things and they’d end up in songs – the electrical bananas that were appearing on the scene – which were ladies vibrators.”

Jesus christ almighty.