This page and opening spread: COB. Short-lived but magical.


they would drive past while visiting friends in the West Country, is a highlight. ‘Frustration’ has a an ultra-speedy fuzzed- out riff that has more in common with LA acid-rock than pastoral folk, yet it’s quintessentially English.


Of course, it all went wrong very quickly. By the time the album was released the label lost interest and did not promote it. An enterprising press officer fabricated a story about a poolside orgy with a bunch of Swedish girls, even claiming that a Bernard Bresslaw-like coach driver muttered “I’ve gotta get some of that” before ripping off his clothes and jumping in, but it was too late. Then a fault at the pressing plant meant that many of the albums had blisters on the playing surface. Fresh Maggots shrivelled up, to be unearthed by collectors decades later. Now the album is an acknowledged classic of the acid-folk genre.


If Heron and Fresh Maggots captured Britain’s melancholy and underachievement, COB captured its mythic power. Cornwall was the spiritual home of this beguiling band, who made two wonderful albums – Spirit Of Love and Moyshe McStiff And The Tartan Lancers Of The Sacred Heart – in the early ’70s before calling it a day.


There’s something about Cornwall that welcomes, even encourages eccentricity. The Cornish are proud of local saints like St Gennys who, with typical West Country resilience, walked around holding his head in his hands after being decapitated by heathens. St Roche cured several people of the plague before catching it himself and withdrawing into a wood so as not to infect others, where a kind dog brought him a loaf of bread every day. And the three members of Cob lived in a broken-down caravan amidst the rotting, fungus filled trunks and moist moss of the woods near a village


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called Mylor, surviving on a diet of hashish and Digestives and writing songs that captured the Celtic mystical quality of the place. Both albums sold no more than a few hundred copies.


Perhaps it’s unsurprising. They sound nothing like anything that came before or since.


Clive and Bert Jansch to survive in the snow on nothing but hashish for three days”


“The decrepit VW broke down, forcing


Moyshe McStiff, of which ‘Chain Of Love’ is a part, sounds like Cornwall. It isn’t traditional, although there are hints of Breton and Celtic influences, but it creates an impression of the place. It has the same atmosphere and timelessness as the land itself. The words are about the birds singing, and the winter chill, and about how “autumn comes so slowly you don’t even know he’s here”. One song is about a miserable encounter with a prostitute, another is about the Lion Of Judah, and yet somehow they are all reminiscent of this outpost of Britain that seems like another world.


Clive Palmer, born in North London, was a banjo player whose childhood polio had left him with a severe limp, a disjointed education and a mistrust of authority. A proto-beatnik who left school at 15 with the conviction that he would do what he could to avoid conventional employment, Clive hitch-hiked to Edinburgh and hooked up with the city’s burgeoning underground scene that revolved around the reasonably innocent pursuits of smoking dope and writing poetry – the heroin-ravaged nihilism depicted by Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting was still another two decades away. Clive started a folk club, formed a group (The Incredible String Band) and lived a life free from such bourgeois concerns as making money or looking out for one’s health. Bert Jansch recalled attempting to go skiing with Clive in the Scottish Highlands: Clive’s decrepit VW broke down, forcing the two of them to survive in the snow on nothing but hashish for three days until being rescued by an unimpressed crofter.


In his ’60s memoir White Bicycles, the American producer, impresario and former manager of The Incredible String Band Joe Boyd describes Clive Palmer as “a true rebel. He rejected any attempts by me to turn the


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