(Credits: Alamy)
Sun 22 February 2026 23:00, UK
The Scottish folk-rock hero Donovan isn’t necessarily a guy you’d associate with Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, but when it came to getting the sound he wanted on the song that would become one of his most enduring hits, there was a definite overlap in philosophies.
“I remember the bass line going down and [producer] Mickie Most saying, ‘We’ve got a problem’,” Donovan recalled in a 2005 interview with Mojo, speaking about the recording of his 1966 psych-rock anthem ‘Season of the Witch’.
He added, “The engineers were saying that they couldn’t turn the bass up. I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s going into the red’. And so Mickie said to the engineers, ‘Look, you go into the red, I’m giving you permission. Go in the red! That’s the bass sound I want. Very, very loud!’”
Donovan and his producer won the debate, and one key component of the mesmerising and highly influential ‘Season of the Witch’ was in place.
A classic slow-builder with an epic chorus, the track was the confluence of a lot of new ideas Donovan had absorbed in the months leading up to the sessions for his third studio album, Sunshine Superman. Musically, this included new frontiers in his guitar playing and songwriting, inspired by new friends from the emerging English folk-rock scene, such as Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. The latter was credited with introducing him to a D ninth chord, which became the foundation for the instantly captivating and eerie feeling of ‘Season of the Witch’.
Wisely, he decided to try and pair that vibe with a matching lyric about the rising paranoia of the mid-1960s, including the proliferation of both drug dealers and drug busts. Donovan himself would famously be a part of Scotland Yard’s early crackdown on pot-smoking rock ‘n’ rollers when he was arrested for possession just weeks after recording this song.
“When I look over my shoulder,” he sings on the track, “What do you think I see? / Some other cat lookin’ over his shoulder at me / And he’s strange, sure is strange”.
“There was a feeling, even then, that all was not perfect in the Garden of Eden,” he told Mojo in 2011, “Dealers were moving into bohemia and hard drugs were on the fringes. The song was also prophetic. It was about the bust, although of course I couldn’t know that then.”
To get the feeling they wanted on the song, Donovan and collaborator Shawn Phillips brought in a collection of session players and local club musicians to flesh out the sound. It’s long been speculated that a pre-Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who were known to have recorded with Donovan on other occasions, might have been among those players, although no one seems to be quite sure, oddly enough.
Whether he was involved with the recording or not, Page certainly seemed to appreciate the song, often incorporating it into Led Zeppelin jam sessions during pre-gig soundchecks. As Donovan explained it, ‘Season of the Witch’ continues to be a perennial influence because it allows a jam, not a 12-bar or Latin groove, but a very modern jam, and “It makes me very proud that I’ve created certain forms that other bands can get off on, to explore, be experimental, or just break the rules”.
Across the 60 years since the song’s release, it has been covered by everyone from Stephen Stills, Vanilla Fudge, and Richard Thompson to Joan Jett, Hole, and Lana Del Rey, also becoming something of a Halloween staple, despite having nothing to do with actual witches.
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