The ISB was really at their best without Rose and Licorice, with their best LP probably being The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion – but I personally love their debut, when they were a power trio with Mike, Robin and their founding father, Clive Palmer. I spent a week at Palmer’s house in Cornwall in 1992 and when told him this LP was out now on CD, he realized that he wasn’t getting any royalties, he gave me a copy of his original 1966 contract with Joe Boyd, I made a call and soon after Clive starting get paid. My visit was a decade before Clive got rediscovered by the freak folk movement, so about 4x a day, Clive would turn me and say “tell me again how old you are?” I was the first person under the age of 30 to seek him out in decades, he kept shaking his head and saying “damn.”
– Pat Thomas is the author of the recently released work, Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975. The companion disc for the book has been named one of the ten best CDs of 2012 by Time magazine.
http://youtu.be/U4_8u3ZNR4Y
