Clive Palmer, who has died aged 71, was a founding member of the mid-60s avant-garde folk group the Incredible String Band, and later brought his songwriting and instrumental talents to Clive’s Original Band. He was an accomplished banjo player, initially specialising in the English finger-picking “classic”style that emerged in the late 19th century, but his 1967 virtuoso recording, Banjoland, considered too esoteric at the time, had to wait until 2005 before it was released.
In the early 60s, Palmer had formed a duo with Robin Williamson, with the rather unimaginative stage name Robin and Clive, and they toured folk clubs in Scotland and northern England. They recorded a track on the Decca album Edinburgh Folk Festival in 1963. Robin and Clive’s repertoire was mainly Scottish traditional song which, as the US record producer Joe Boyd (who visited Edinburgh on his voyage of discovery of the British folk scene) later said, sounded as if it had taken “a journey to the Appalachians and back via Morocco and Bulgaria”.
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