John Denver: Country Boy

John Denver wasn’t your average good ol’ boy. The son of a pioneering test pilot, he looked like a bit of a nerd and was a key player in assorted protest movements, from anti-war to pro-environment. He also recorded more modern standards (of a pretty sappy bent, it has to be said) than you might think: ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, ‘Annie’s Song’, ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. And he sold many, many millions of records and hosted a BBC variety series with Pan’s People.

None of which quite explains the outrage of one contemporary who, 14 years on from Denver’s death in a plane crash, complains that ‘he didn’t get the same adulation they gave the Beatles’. Well, no. That Denver was one of the good guys seems hard to contest. But as this respectful, sometimes slightly incurious profile touches on Denver’s friendship with Jacques Cousteau, his dabbling with booze and New Age therapies, you start to wonder whether music might just have been the least interesting thing about the man.