Spirit of Love

COB is the abbreviation of Clive’s Original Band though Cob, as the trio was sometimes called, is apt. Cob is the mud, straw, gravel and dung mix from which old dwellings in the south-west of Britain are made; this music is as rough, earthy, unpredictable and homely as the building material.

Clive was Clive Palmer, founding member of the Incredible String Band, who left after they made their first album and wound up in Cornwall. He and ‘Whispering’ Mick Bennett lived in a battered caravan near the Folk Cottage, a famous club in the village of Mitchell, where they often performed. ‘Little’ John Bidwell resided close by. They shared penury – living on potatoes, strong tea and weak weed – and a devotion to creating music that – in the incantatory quality of ‘Spirit of Love’ and ‘Wade in the Water’, its engagement with the natural world in ‘Evening Air’, its insistent percussion and robust gentleness – is itself devotional. Bidwell plays the dulcitar, an instrument of his own devising, which, with the harmonium, augments the spiritual aspect of the group’s singing. Palmer was a fine banjo player and the album leaps from hippie happening to the music hall in ‘Banjo Land’. Ralph McTell, who was around, too, corralled this maverick crew to produce Spirit of Love in 1971. It became an acid folk classic, which is pioneering as it rather pre-dates the genre. It has had, fittingly, a long bootleg life, and this is the first official reissue available also on vinyl.