band into a commercial entity.” Clive left after the first album, deciding he would rather travel to fghanistan than become famous. He told the rest of the band that they could do what they liked with the songs he had written; he couldn’t be bothered to seek any financial or creative return for them.


When Clive returned to England he headed to Cornwall, where he hooked up with a fellow displaced Londoner called Mick Bennett and a local musician called John Bidwell. He also met a remarkable Cornish family called The Val Bakers. The patriarch, Denys Val Baker, was a writer, poet, pacifist, early vegetarian and free thinker with a sympathy for the recent wave of incomers searching for some kind of elemental freedom in Cornwall, who he frequently allowed to live rent free in the chalets at the bottom of the garden of his house in Crean, at the far western end of Cornwall known as West Penwith. His widow and one of his daughters still live there. Clive formed a band called The Temple Creatures with 15-year-old Demelza Val Baker, a very good conga player; when they fell out he formed Cob and enlisted the even younger Genevieve Val Baker on part-time duties, who could only just about play the congas but did offer the valuable attribute of being extremely pretty.


I tracked down Clive Palmer for The Ballad Of Britain, a travelogue on the nature and spirit of British music. He was living in tiny house around the back of a row of shops in Penzance, a yellow-haired man with large black-rimmed glasses and wide red braces. The house looked like a squat. An off-cut of carpet didn’t quite cover bare floorboards and the sofa Clive sat on looked like it had been pulled out of a skip. Here was a home occupied by someone that didn’t lose too much sleep over décor.


I asked Clive how he came up with the unique sound of the band, of the things that inspired songs like ‘Oh, Bright Eyed One’ and ‘Chain Of Love’. “We didn’t have any idea for the music. We just started playing together and coming up with ideas,” he replied. “We were quite high on creativity. At that age it comes easily – all of my songs are written in a rush. I get images.”


He didn’t appear to care in the slightest that the albums were total commercial failures. “The thing is, the only reason the albums got made was because the labels they were on were sloshing money around and giving all these musicians the chance to produce an album by a band they liked, so they approached Ralph McTell and he suggested us. I think the label thought the albums might sell because of the String Band connection. They didn’t, but they were appreciated. People have liked those records.


“I don’t listen to music very much. Never have done,” continued Clive, looking like a wizened mystic enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “My brother and mother


were musical and I was encouraged from an early age to sing and play banjo, but I hardly ever listen to other bands because I like to make the music that I hear in my own head. Bits and pieces wander in from what I’ve heard and it all gets mixed up, like scraps of food that go together to form a stew. I’ve never based myself on anything. I think that’s a big mistake. If you try to make a sound you think will be successful you’re generally behind the times. It’s far more useful to be yourself.”


Some might argue that Clive was behind the times – by about 500 years. There is something about COB that sounds like it belongs to an age when the Enclosures system was still in practise and crumhorns were all the rage. But with Clive that’s an impression more than a style. This strange, unique man didn’t study early music, or traditional folk, or anything else as far I could work out. He was off on his own. I asked him why he moved to Cornwall.


“I liked its smallness,” he replied. “You’re never more than four miles away from something or someone. Things grow that don’t grow anywhere else, wild flowers coming out of walls and so on, and the land is so narrow that you get the famous double light from the two seas that all the painters like. It gets pretty Stone Age round here. In the winter you go back to a real desolation. It’s wild.”


I couldn’t help it. I had to blurt out in an uncool way about how much I loved those albums.


“They’re alright,” said Clive with a Steptoe-like snarl. “The truth is, it’s for other people to decide whether they like them or not. But I’m very good at waiting. People say you’ve got to push yourself, but if there are opportunities for you they’ll come sooner or later. I’ve hardly played for the last five years. I don’t miss it at all. I’m not a one-track person – I come from a family of French polishers and I like making things as much as music. I can take it or leave it but when I feel like doing it, great. It’s the best way, the waiting game. Just wait until people want you to do something. I remember watching a guy on telly, and the idea was to produce a highly desirable, trendy restaurant. He hid the place away in the backstreets, made it look really exclusive, and it was only open at certain times. It was packed out. It’s best not to push yourself too hard; it’s better to let people come across you.”


It only took almost 40 years, but Heron, Fresh Maggots and COB are finally receiving the exposure they deserve as the great distillers of the British soul.


•


The Ballad Of Britain by Will Hodgkinson is published by Portico, £12.99. A CD of field recordings made on the journey, featuring Gruff Rhys, Martin Carthy and Pete Molinari among others, is available on Heron Recordings.


27


10 PASTORAL ENGLISH FOLK-ROCK GEMS


FRESH AS A SWEET SUNDAY MORNING


1. COB MoysheMcStiffAndTheTartanLancersOf TheSacredHeart (Polydor, 1972) (Available: Sunbeam CD)


2. HERON Heron (Dawn, 1970) (Available: Sanctuary anthology, UponReflection)


3. FRESH MAGGOTS FreshMaggots (RCA, 1971) (Available: Sunbeam CD, Hatched)


4. MARK FRY DreamingWithAlice(IT, 1972) (Available: Sunbeam CD)


5. COMUS FirstUtterance (Dawn, 1971) (Available: Sanctuary anthology, SongToComus:The CompleteCollection)


6. DANDO SHAFT DandoShaft (Neon, 1971) (Available: Repertoire CD)


7. JADE FlyOnStrangewings (DJM, 1970) (Available: Sunbeam CD)


8. WATER INTO WINE BAND HarvestTime(DJM, 1970) (Not currently available on CD)


9. THE ALBION BAND BattleOfTheField (Island, 1976 –recorded in 1973) (Available: BGO CD)


10. DUNCAN BROWNE GiveMe,TakeYou (Immediate, 1968) (Available: Grapefruit CD)


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