PARIS: The folk singer Donovan has a secret plan for world peace. It involves ukuleles, meditation and his old friends Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

“We are helping a great guy who is getting Israeli and Palestinian children together to play ukuleles for peace,” he told AFP on a visit to the French capital.

“Imagine if we could get them to meditate together too. That is our secret weapon for peace. We are already doing it with Catholic and Protestant kids in Belfast.”

The sixties ended nearly half a century ago but its utopian dreams of a better world burn on in the man who penned such psychedelic hits as “Mellow Yellow” and “Sunshine Superman.”

At nearly 70, Donovan is on the road again, playing to audiences across Europe in what he calls his “Retrospective” tour.

Sitting on stage crossed legged on a pile of sheepskins with just his acoustic guitar, it is as if flower power had never ended.

“After the concerts people say, ‘But he’s 70. How can he sit for two hours like that?’“

It is all the more remarkable when you consider that he spent his childhood battling polio.

“There’s a secret,” said Donovan with an impish twinkle in his eye.

That secret is the transcendental meditation and other Eastern spiritual techniques Donovan learned in India at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

It was Donovan who introduced The Beatles and the Beach Boys to the guru. And like the surviving Beatles, he is still a believer. During that famous 1968 trip to the Maharishi’s ashram with the actress Mia Farrow, John Lennon wrote “Dear Prudence” for her younger sister, and Donovan taught him and McCartney his finger-picking and clawhammer guitar styles.