It’s nearing closing time in the tavern of
musical obsession, and fans of psychedelic folk light up their leaf of
choice and get the last rounds in. The court is in session; the stained and
cracked table reverberates, shimmers and morphs into a pantheon of
improbable achievements as wide-eyed dreamers state their convoluted cases.
In hoarse, reverential whispers, the deeds of COB, Incredible String Band
and Pearls Before Swine are recounted. Eventually, the rheumy, bloodshot
eyes of your fellow nutters lock on to you like a target acquisition system,
and it’s one of those inexplicable moments when an entire public space falls
silent. Here’s your chance to strike a blow for the underrated. You say one
word that encapsulates everything that you feel is good and great about the
genre: ‘Forest’. Well, you do if you’re me anyway. To my mind their two
albums, ‘Forest’ and ‘Full Circle’, are as essential as ‘5000 Spirits or the
Layers of the Onion’, ‘The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’, ‘Spirit of Love’,
or ‘One Nation Underground’.
Forest was started in Grimsby in the mid
60s by brothers Adrian and Martin Welham and their school friend Dez
Allenby. Folk music, thanks to Dylan, was as hip then as spinning other
people’s stuff on turntables is now; the shockwave from the advent of the
Beatles was travelling faster than the speed of thought, and the world was
one boundless psychedelic vision. Forest was initially the Foresters of
Walesby, who, if the sole evidence of ‘Famine Song’ from ‘Full Circle’ was
anything to go by, were easily able to hold their own against traditional
three-part harmony groups like The Watersons and the Young Tradition. The
latter were obviously an influence – ‘Famine Song’ recalls the way the YT’s
vocal arrangements and lungpower combined for a result as electrifying as in
folk as Hendrix was in rock. It’s a pity that Foresters of Walesby versions
of folk standards such as ‘Staines Morris’, ‘Hares on the Mountain’ and ‘The
Blacksmith’ were never recorded. In fact, the Young Tradition was on the
bill at their first serious gig, and became strong supports of the nascent
group.
A concurrent love of other forms like beat
music and blues was always going to cause a breakout from the traditional
mould, and this started to happen around the flowering of the Summer of Love
in 1967. Revivalism gave way to a solid brace of original songs that were
well established by the time of their appearances in summer of the following
year. Demos got made, connections established, and under the management of
Marc Williams the three young men were recast with the hipper moniker
Forest. Around this time they made an enduring and powerful allay in the
form of John Peel, who helped with publicity, and eventually landed them
management and agency contracts with Blackhill Enterprises. The demos
contained a lot of what they were presenting on stage at the time, and,
along with BBC airings on Night Ride and Top Gear, ultimately landed them a
deal on the EMI progressive rock subsidiary Harvest, and in an instant they
entered the underground rock counterculture of the day.
Their 1969 debut LP ‘Forest’ was firmly
placed in that counterculture, and a long way from their revivalist roots.
In fact it was much more like the Incredible String Band’s contemporaneous
work stripped of its overlay of arch theatricality. Throughout the album the
instrumental textures are all acoustic: the strings of guitar and mandolin
and drones of organ and harmonium ascendant. The vocals are skilled,
youthful and possessed of a certain abandonment: naïve and glorious and
obscured by perfumed smoke, in fact the words ‘smoke’ and ‘mind’ occur an
awful lot. The album kicks off with ‘Bad Penny’, which plays out as if the
work of Ray Davies was being robed instrumentally by Mike Heron and Robin
Williamson. ‘Lovemakers’ Ways’ is genuinely epic psychedelic folk with an
exquisite melody, a fractal arrangement and lots of time-signature agility.
‘While You’re Gone’ and ‘Sylvie’ have a good-natured ease that suggests the
band would have done some rousing, crowd-pleasing folk club work. The
ethereal ‘A Fantasy You’ and ‘Fading Light’ are exquisite letters from those
times, alternately dream-like and propulsive: soaring and Pan-like with
eddies of mandolin, organ, various pipes and hand drums in the glades of
their psychic voyaging. ‘Do You Want Some Smoke?’ strikes a blow for a new
tradition in the same way that albums like Mike and Lal Waterson’s ‘Bright
Phoebus’ were doing at time, and shows off the bands facility with complex
vocal arrangements. Elsewhere, the climactic ‘Mirror of Life’ equals
anything on ‘Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’ for tripped-out acid-folk
strangeness. There is a lack of polish and variety to the production that
works favourably to give the record a single-minded intensity and clout.
It’s electrifying work in the way that the recordings of the Young Tradition
are. No doubt this was an aim of the recording fulfilled. Despite the album
clearly being the product of a band learning how to exert its will in the
studio and not quite getting there, several tracks achieve a level of
structural sophistication that would be rarely heard in this genre today.
The debut album was a modest success and
the band embarked on the familiar rounds of touring and promotion,
everything jammed in a series of vans of dubious serviceability. They played
both rock venues and folk clubs and engaged in impoverished tours of the
continent. In retrospect one could see that their position in the scheme of
things was awkwardly between the two worlds of club folk and the burgeoning
progressive rock scene, and that perhaps this would be their undoing. But
they still had another recorded masterpiece to loose upon the world. The
1970 LP ‘Full Circle’ represents a band with much more idea of what they
wanted to achieve in the studio. It also shows a shift from the communal
collaboration that had marked the creative process on the debut LP. Here,
the individual songwriters are on divergent but still complementary trips.
Dez Allenby’s ‘Hawk the Hawker’ and ‘Gypsy Girl and Rambleaway’ both
represent the Forest ideal at its most affectingly lyrical, and also
continue his concern with creating modern folk myths based on colourful
characters (in the former case a pot dealer!). Adrian’s songwriting
astonishes with arguable two of the finest songs of the period by anyone,
the goosebump-inducing celestial staircase of ‘Bluebell Dance’ and
neo-classical glory of ‘Graveyard’ (famously once BBC DJ Bob Harris’s
favourite track). Martin weighs in with the complex and challenging
folk-horror tale of the Brechtian ‘Midnight Hanging of a Runaway Serf’ and
archetypal seasonal nostalgia piece ‘Autumn Song’, which leaves the listener
with a fittingly thematic final whiff of wood-smoke and the thought that
‘all my life is contained in this, the key to each and every wish’. It’s
masterpiece of lyrical precision and a fitting elegy to mark the end of
their recorded work for Harvest.
I’ll save the details of the final stages
of the band for the end of the article, but it is probably fair to say that
the band were burdened by some ineffectual management and sidelined by
heavier times. Perhaps a spell was broken when Dez Allenby faded out of the
band. In a pre-independent label environment one needed to secure and keep a
major label deal to maintain headspace in the industry, and the majors were
ruthless then as now. At an infamous Eel Pie Island gig they had the course
of their gig forcibly changed by the management after three numbers for not
being ‘rock’ enough. An extended sax solo from new multi-instrumentalist
member Dave Panton recovered the situation somewhat, but they to fled a
hostile audience after the first set with only a rubber cheque as
compensation for their labours. It seems that the time were only progressive
if you were the ‘right kind’ of progressive. There is an Italian bootleg of
material from this time that gives a clue to what a third forest album might
have been like. It contains songs performed in concert for Bob Harris on BBC
Radio 1 in May 1972 and a studio session for Bob Harris with added applause
(by the bootlegger) on 23 October 72. It contains some superb compositions
by Martin and Adrian and a cover of the Everley Brothers ‘Leave My Women
Alone’. On the truly live songs, the Welhams are joined by Dave Panton on
viola and saxophone and Dave Stubbs on bass. The most interesting track is
the 10-minute ‘Everyday Laugh’ which contains long improvised passages
typical of the style that the band was developing in their later days and
diametrically opposed to the precision of ‘Full Circle’. The droning viola
and skronking saxophone sections on this track probably have more to do with
Henry Cow and the Velvet Underground than folk. And yes, they sound very
drugged.
Needless to say when Mr McMullen recently
sent me Dez Allenby’s email address and said, ‘see what you can do with
this,’ I immediately got in touch with Dez, and subsequently the Welhams,
and was able have a quite detailed chat about those days.
DA = Dez Allenby. MW=Martin Welham.
AW=Adrian Welham.
PT: What are your earliest musical
memories – what you were exposed to while growing up that led to you
becoming musicians?
DA: Well my mother used to sing and my
father played mouth organ, though not at the same time. And my grandma used
to play hymns on the piano with the music in front of her for the words but
they said she made up the music. I used to love to hear her practising to
play for the ‘sisterhood’ meetings. I've realised recently that my early
brush with the Church of the Nazarene and services in a little mission in
down-town Grimsby - The Gospel Tabernacle - gave me a strange feel for the
power of music that went beyond tapping your feet to it. I never learned an
instrument other than harmonica whilst young. It was John Lennon singing
‘Twist and Shout’ that made me realise I wanted to sing. This directed my
musical pursuits since I thought I would need to play a stringed instrument
to hold a place in an R&B band. Then came Dylan on the big scene and visits
to Grimsby Folk Club where I heard the Broadside, a local folk group writing
songs about the fishing community in which I lived, and The Watersons, a
wild and weird harmony group from Hull who made their own sound. I've always
found music to be the kind of total experience that somehow transforms and
I've wanted to do that with people in performances.
MW: As a seven year old in the junior
school choir I remember getting lots of exposure to vibe-laden Christmas
carols – therein finding an unknowing affinity with sanctified folk songs.
Family harmony singing sessions were obviously a factor, and included Ian
(much older brother), Barbara (slightly older sister), and Adrian (slightly
younger brother). We tackled anything with a decent melody, but Everley
Brothers, Buddy Holly/Crickets, and obscure American vocal groups like the
Impalas, Kalin Twins, and Four Preps all figure. There was a constant stream
of pop music via my elder brother’s records, played on ridiculously small
record player at full volume - totally inadequate for anything but partial
appreciation and every track has treble distortion (mmm...sounded good).
When I was eleven, a baby grand piano entered the household thanks to Dad’s
mania for repairing anything involving wood. (He and his brother were
classically trained violin/viola/cello players.) The piano opened musical
doors, meaning Adrian, Barbara and I could simultaneously busk bass, chord
and melody parts. Must have been fun for the neighbours. Then came 1963 and
the Beatles: at this point music became my raison d’etre. I scraped together
pennies to buy my first guitar. £2 15s to a shabby second-hand shop in
Corporation Street, Grimsby got me three quarter-size F-hole acoustic bliss.
My initial song-writing attempts were garbage. Three years of pop music
saturation led to further stabs at song-writing. By 1966 I was an avid
participant in musical journeys led by Beatles, Stones, Kinks. Around this
time Barbara started bringing acoustic music into household - Bert Jansch,
Paul Simon and sundry singles from UK independent labels. I was inspired to
learn finger-style techniques so that I could play like Jansch (some hope).
By this time Adrian has acquired an acoustic guitar, I’ve got a 12-string
and we both had electric guitars and one amp. Saturdays are spent hammering
out full volume rock while parents are out shopping. Neighbours in the next
street must have wondered…
AW: I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t
fascinated by music, whatever the type. As a boy in my pre-teens,
opportunities to hear ‘pop’ music were limited to café jukeboxes, youth
clubs and Radio Luxembourg – the only radio station broadcasting popular
music; the BBC output in those days was limited to ‘light music’, big band
and jazz music, and classical music. My eldest bother Ian had grown up with
the Rock’n’Roll revolution in full swing, so Martin and I could enjoy Ian’s
collection of records, and of course, sing along with them. The foremost
influence on me in those days was principally Buddy Holly (with or without
his Crickets) and the Everley Brothers. The arrival of the Beatles onto the
scene in 1962, however, knocked me for six. It is not necessary for me to
expand on this event, or its cultural impact, since that era is well
documented. Listening (then and now) to the Lennon/McCartney compositions
was, and is, a lesson in song-writing. Forty or so years later, their
catalogue remains unsurpassed in my opinion. Martin and I spent countless
happy hours learning, playing and singing the music of Buddy Holly, the
Everleys and subsequently, the Beatles. These three ‘bands’ were undoubtedly
seminal influences for me.
How and where did the members of what
eventually came to be known as Forest meet, and decide to form a folk band?
MW: At Wintringham Grammar School, which
all five Welham siblings attended over a 14-year span, I found myself in the
same A-level set as Dez Allenby. He’d been in the same class as me
throughout Secondary school but sat on opposite side of
alphabetically-oriented classroom, so I never really got to know him before
this. We shared a similar sense of humour, attitudes and he plays harmonica.
A good guy - and he had Bluesbreakers Albums. Dez knocked round with strange
guy named Rory Greig who plays extremely loud banjo. We get together with a
lad (Andy Sutton) who has a guitar and inflict upon the school folk club a
peculiar mix of folkish songs as the aptly named ‘Ranting Lads’. Andy
disappeared, and the remaining Ranters began to gig around north
Lincolnshire pubs and folk clubs. Rory went off to Uni and Adrian joined me
and Dez .We sought out folk songs that would enable us to investigate
unaccompanied singing, having heard The Watersons and later the Young
Tradition - both superb exponents of the genre.
I assume that the path to Forest started
off with the earlier incarnation The Foresters of Walesby, which then became
Forest at some point. Was it the same membership through that period, and
what are the key dates?
DA: There were no membership changes along
the way, but a transforming shift of perception happened in 1967 as if we
were all different band members anyway. The traditional stuff went - we
played our own songs and played instruments on almost all songs. I was much
moved by Pepper and the 5000 Spirits and all the other stuff that was going
on - Family, Floyd – oh, there was so much listen to that made you want to
do things quite differently.
MW: In 1967 our parents moved from Grimsby
to Walesby - a tiny village in the Wolds. We became The Foresters of Walesby
after discovering empty church on the hill in the village where we could
rehearse in splendid isolation. (The church features on the ‘Full Circle
album cover and in Dez’s ‘Gypsy Girl & Rambleaway’.) We worked up repertoire
of folk songs and regularly play Grimsby Folk Club. The road to Damascus
turned out to be paved with folk-rock when we played Grimsby Folk Club,
where the Young Tradition was the visiting group. We were mutually amazed
with each other’s music and become good mates with these psychedelic hippies
who clearly shone their musical talents into the staid world of folk and
successfully lit up the scene with a dynamic harmonic approach previously
unheard in this neck of the woods. The YT invited us to sing at the Hundred
Club in London to introduce us to a wider audience in the Big City. We met
various folk luminaries in the process. At this stage, the band’s musical
destiny seemed mapped out. By this time Adrian is 17, and Dez and I are 18.
In the autumn of 1967, Dez and I moved to Birmingham to take up University
course in Behavioural Science. Adrian remained in Lincolnshire working at
print works of local newspaper. We continued to develop folk-based
repertoire by communicating ideas with Adrian via cheap voice-tape.
Dez and I played Birmingham folk clubs
regularly attending ‘The Jug of Punch’, where a succession of folk artists
appeared. Unable, in my case at least, to develop any interest or competence
in statistical theory, I resolved to leave Uni at end of first year. At this
point I heard the first Incredible String Band album, Shirley Collins, and
Fairport Convention albums plus a myriad of post-Pepper music from UK and
America. I began writing songs in folk modes to widen the repertoire. In
spring 1968 Adrian moved to Birmingham bringing a 6-string acoustic guitar
and little else. I played 12-string acoustic and Dez took up the mandolin.
The Foresters did their first big open-air festival gig at Canon Hill Park,
Birmingham, with Roy Harper topping the bill. It was a mix of traditional
folk and our own songs. Hearing us, a local impresario asked us to record a
demo in his studio. We recorded four or five of our own songs – nothing
comes of this. Around this time we met Mark Williams – a budding music
journo - who becomes our manager.
Was this around the time of the name
change to Forest and the first association with John Peel?
MW: Right. Mark had contacts in the
pop/rock field and we were booked as support to Joe Cocker and the
Greaseband just as their superb rendition of ‘With A Little Help From My
Friends’ was climbing the charts in the direction of No. 1. This gig was at
our ‘old’ university and hosted by John Peel who heard our set, which
received a hostile reception. John berated the soul-seeking audience for not
listening. John turned out to be a nice guy who supported our music on an
on-going basis and helped us to gain national airing on Radio One.
I gather that the Foresters of Walesby
played mainly traditional material? Was some of the material on the Forest
LPs debuted back then, or was it all written later?
DA: We almost always put our latest songs
on the LPs because we were so excited by what we had just written. No, none
of the recorded songs came from the Foresters of Walesby except ‘Famine
Song’.
Did Walesby in Lincolnshire have much of a
club scene to be going on with?
DA: Walesby is a very small village with
couple of churches and perhaps a shop. But there were little folk clubs in
Lincoln, Scunthorpe and Grimsby where we played often as guests. But we
heard people like Mayall, Clapton, Peter Green, Jethro Tull, Jimmy
Witherspoon, The Artwoods and many others at the South Bank Jazz Club in
Grimsby. These amazing people came in transits to one night in the club: a
very vibrant scene.
Once in Birmingham, and called The Forest,
did you play many club gigs, and what other notables were on the same bills?
Did this incarnation of the band record anything that might be crumbling
away in a vault, attic, garage or even studio storeroom potential treasure
awaiting discovery?
DA: As Martin mentioned, we recorded some
stuff at Haynes's studio where Carl Wayne of the Move seemed impressed.
These just recently turned up again. Who did we share bills with?
Remarkably, people like Joe Cocker at Aston University in the week that
‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ hit number one in the charts, and The
Spencer Davis Group at Cannon Hill Arts Festival. We would break right out
of the folk ghetto. Used to see Ozzie Osborne and share impoverished fags
together at our agent’s. Who else? John Martyn with whom we lost much of our
minds, the McPeak Family, Dominic Behan, the Young Tradition and Tea and
Symphony.
Did the band attend any festivals at this
time, or otherwise tour at al/?
DA: Not many festivals although we played
at the Cambridge Folk Festival. We did a big one on Parliament Hill Fields
to about 10,000 people, played the Marquee and the 100 Club when we moved to
London. And we did gigs somewhere off the Ladbroke Grove where it was always
like a festival anyway with people like Roy Harper, and I think The Pink
Floyd were on. Ron Geeson certainly was. And at out agent’s, Blackhill
Enterprises, we hobnobbed with
Pete Brown and the Battered Ornaments,
County Joe's bass player, The Edgar Broughton Band, Bridget St John and
shared gigs with them.
How did the record deal for the two albums
come about? And interestingly on a progressive rock label…
MW: At an archetypal hippy gig at All
Saints Hall, Notting Hill, London (complete with light-show and incense) we
played a by-this-time well-coordinated set which impressed various musicos
who were in attendance to assess our potential. EMI were just setting up the
progressive rock label Harvest. The label’s manager Malcolm Jones and Peter
Jenner of Blackhill Enterprises liked what they heard enough to sign us for
a management and recording contract. No money, but there was an album and
big gigs in prospect…
DA: We did a demo for Fontana and
amazingly they accepted it. They had some interest in acoustic music but
were very straight. On the basis of their offer, we got into the deal with
Harvest. We just didn't see music in terms of genre and we wanted to be with
an audience of our generation. We'd all listened to Dylan. They would all
like Forest, we thought.
I know a single preceded the first album,
but I’ve never actually heard it…
AW: This was Forest’s first Harvest
release, in spring 1969. ‘Searching for Shadows’, one of Mart’s songs, is a
neglected gem. With its memorable melodic form and the high-energy Forest
treatment, I think it glows with the band’s creative adrenalin of those
days. I am disappointed that on the album re-releases (on vinyl and CD),
‘Searching for Shadows’ was not included, or rather, added.
From the opening track of ‘Forest’, it seems
like the psychedelic movement was an influence. Was this the case?
DA: Yes. That was what was happening in
those days. I thought I was involved in a cultural revolution, a change of
perception that was influencing everyone for the good. It was a joyful time
when people were coming together in new ways, as evidenced by changes in
music. We felt right at the heart of it.
AW: I don’t know! Dez, Martin and I all enjoyed eclectic musical taste –
Blues, psychedelic, Folk, Pop and classical influences are all discernible
from both Forest albums.
What was the working composition method of
the first album? I note that all tracks are tri-credited to all band
members.
DA: A kind of communitarian ethic was at
work there. We all lived in the same house or flat. Someone would say 'I've
got a new song' and the other two would listen a bit and then join in. It
was the way we had worked with our voices in the early days. After a good
few days rehearsals would come arrangements which we would then commit to
memory. We shared the credits on the first album because we recognised that
the collective arrangement added very much to the original idea.
AW: Whilst the songs on the first album
are tri-credited for the reasons Dez mentioned, essentially the lead
vocalist on the track is the culprit! There was more spontaneity in our
instrumental augmentation on the first album. Abbey Road Studios was
groaning with musical instruments and we purloined what we could, to enhance
many tracks. ‘Full Circle’ was a different matter. The instrumentation was
more economical and in all honesty, more measured and thought-out. As we
each developed as songwriters, our ideas and visualisations for our
compositions might call for specific motifs, instrumental passages or
ritornellos, and so forth.
A heavy emphasis on drones is quite
noticeable on the first record. A lot of folk records at the time,
progressively-intended or not, were mainly based around stringed
instruments. So here we get a Midsummer Night’s dream-world of pipes,
organs, glorious ragged harmonies, and stringed instruments as well. An
intentional world you were trying to create?
DA: We have always had a deep commitment
to playing things that have not been done too much before. I could not claim
to be ‘intentionally creating a world’, but we'd come from folk clubs at
least for part of our musical development so it just seemed natural to
explore the potential of the instruments we had. Adrian and Martin would
just start playing things that were lying around in the studio and we'd see
if they would fit. And they did. I was less adventurous but I was playing
whistle a lot anyway.
DW: Our aim was to create a sound-scape
through which the melodies would drift into unexpected areas, incorporating
vocal harmony and rhythmic changes on the way. At the same time we were
aware of the need to stay just this side of accessibility - we were hoping
to sell some records after all. However, the overall effect of hearing the
album is still a sense of strangeness - some songs are straightforward
narrative/melody in the A/B/A mode (‘Nothing Else Will Matter’, ‘While
You’re Gone’) others meander both rhythmically and melodically (‘Fading
Light’, ‘Smoke’, ‘Don’t Want To Go’) and we tried to sew into the fabric
ideas which would permeate over several hearings.
Tracks like ‘Lovemakers’ Ways’ and ‘Fading
Light’ are quite complex structurally and instrumentally, lots of layers and
time changes making them reveal their content over many listens. Was it
important to go beyond folk orthodoxies, simple narrative ballads or easy
instrumental options a la jigs and reels?
MW: ‘Lovemaker’s Ways’ is an inspired song
by Adrian: uncluttered, airy, warm with a beautiful melody; rich in
unexpected forays. It was a joy to be instrumental in presenting this one.
‘Fading Light’ was also cleverly crafted by Adrian, and a complex,
well-gigged grower.
DA: I rate Martin's and Adrian's songs
very highly. Adrian never wrote before Forest and was the last of us to
write. Was he worth waiting for! Their songs are built around really
interesting guitar chord progressions that they seem to understand easily
and love to develop. I think as well as this, they are both touched by
simplicity so that as well as the complexities of form, you get these
memorable melodies or snatches of melodies. We had left the folk orthodoxies
behind by then and were on our own trip. I think we had approached the
traditional material in our own way too.
AW: But there was no band policy to avoid
folk music orthodoxies or structures. Personally, I usually allowed the
embryo of a new song to develop naturally; if a phrase was for example,
modal, and fell naturally into the song, it stayed. It was important to me,
to avoid derivative phrases or melodies. I wanted Forest’s songs to be
‘Forestial’ rather than folk, blues, psychedelic or whatever. In the main, I
feel we achieved this.
‘Don’t Want to Go’ and ‘Mirror of Life’
seem to be progressive folk touchstones of the time, on a par with the
Incredible String Band’s ‘Three is a Green Crown’. How did these ones come
about?
MW:
As I listen to this record on headphones
while fumbling away at these questions, the songs and their performances
seems as rich and strange as when I first heard them years ago. Are you
pleased at how this record holds up, and is there anything you would change,
looking back now from a different century?
DA: I don't listen to ‘Forest’ much. I
prefer ‘Full Circle’, but don't listen to that much either. Forest seems a
bit messy to me in terms of production. Look, I don't want to spoil it for
you! What I do like is the naivety of it: the virginal first. You go into
the Abbey Road studios; you record your songs and add lots of extra tracks.
You do all the work there over something like a fortnight, bringing nothing
home to listen to. Then you mix it with Malcolm Jones who gets a bit fed up
that you all want to keep switching up and down the various controls. It
sounds great on the six-foot high speakers they have there and not bad on
the trannie radio speakers they have because that's how most people will
hear your work. Then eventually it's on vinyl and you hear it and wish you'd
mixed it differently. What am I saying? Oh yes - I'd like to remix it. We
didn't know what we were doing and that is its strength and weakness.
‘Forest’ seems to me more comprehensively
successful than ‘Full Circle’, so it’s interesting to me that you think the
reverse…
DA: I think ‘Full Circle’ hangs together
better as a record though I know what you mean, I think, about Forest being
more comprehensive. For me as a musician on that record- and it is very
often a painful experience to hear yourself- it is too comprehensive.
Not enough variance.
What was the reaction like to the first
LP? How were sales?
DA: John Peel loved it. We got radio gigs,
university gigs, a tour of Germany. Not many sales. Maybe 10,000? It was
released in the USA on Harvest. I must have met all the people who have
bought the record at subsequent gigs and just people who I would meet
casually who have Forest records at home. While not many bought it, I have
met a lot of people who rate it very highly.
AW: The perceived popularity of ‘Forest’
over ‘Full Circle’ may owe more to the fact that the former enjoyed more
publicity and promotion (such as it was) than the latter. I learned however,
that our total sales, including our current CDs of those albums, reveal that
sales for each album are roughly the same.
‘Full Circle’ seemed to be a much more
diverse record than the first record, with material which seems like
individual solo pieces with band members guesting on each other’s work.
Notably American country influences are evident on tracks like ‘Hawk the
Hawker’. What was the intent with the second record?
DA: To do a better one. Martin and Adrian
were much more into arranging whistles and mandolins for instance rather
than letting the music shamble on which I always trusted. I think we wanted
people to notice us so we approached it less naively. This was one of Bob
Harris's favourite records for some time and was record of the week on
Rosco's Round Table on Radio One. But sales were no better and the gigs were
not plentiful.
MW: ‘Gypsy Girl & Rambleaway’, ‘Bluebell
Dance’, ‘Midnight Hanging of a Runaway Serf’, ‘Autumn Childhood’,
‘Graveyard’ and ‘Famine Song’ all represent a continuum from first album.
Most of these were gig standards. ‘Hawk the Hawker’, ‘Do Not Walk’, ‘To
Julie’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ were stylistic changes that may have
represented individual wishes to experiment with genre, which the group
happily went along with. The songs on this album were nearly all presented
by the writer to the group in a relatively advanced stage of arrangement. We
wanted to avoid too much clutter in the musical backdrop and were able to
have much more control of production at the recording stage. In retrospect,
for me at least, the continuum tracks work best…
AW: ‘The Midnight Hanging of a Runaway
Serf’, ‘Gypsy Girl and Rambleaway’ and ‘Bluebell Dance’ were written by
Martin, Dez and Adrian respectively yet all three tracks represent, to me,
the core Forest sound. ‘Bluebell Dance’ was written in the period between
‘Forest’ and ‘Full Circle’.
Clearly the band enjoyed the
instrument-swapping aspect working together. ‘Graveyard’ seems a great
example; with all that marvellous tin whistle work, and Adrian pulling out
the aforementioned cello. A fun part of what the band did?
DA: Yes. Given a few bob more from sales
or gigs, we'd have been sitting in studios doing this sort of thing probably
to this day: the very best of fun.
Joan Melville's cover art for the records
complements the music in the way that good cover art is supposed to do, and
adds mystique to an already fairly mystique-drenched sonic artefact. How did
the relationship with Joan come about?
DA: As far as I recall, we were introduced
to Joan Melville by Marc Williams (who also introduced us to John Peel - a
better manager perhaps in retrospect than we thought at the time). We went
to see Joan for tea and talked about meditation. She had been given a mantra
by the Maharishi that George Harrison had made well known and we talked
about this and art. We played for her so that she could get a good feel for
the music and I remember posing for her in my pants presumably for artistic
rather than voyeuristic purposes. She was older than us, a sort of hippie
mum figure, and we cared about her very much. She came with Dave Hollis (our
photographer) to Walesby to sketch the church whilst he did some
photographs. They stayed at Martin and Adrian's parents' house and visited
my parents in Grimsby. Joan decided to do the two versions of the same
picture because she sensed some heaviness about the group at that time, a
little after the visit. We kept in touch for a time after the group ceased
to work together and sadly, she died some years ago, but not before she
produced a book based on her feelings derived from an Egyptian mummy in the
British Museum. Perhaps our mystical mum?
The first incarnation of Forest ended with
the departure of Dez Allenby in 1971. ‘I came to a point when I had to do
something else. I had just got lost in the smallness of our lives and found
it hard that so few people wanted to listen to our music. So I quit and
returned to my education while playing with music as a significant part of
my private life’, he says. But the band continued for several more years.
Martin and Adrian began auditioning for
two new members for a rapidly-approaching tour of Holland. "We had known
Dave Panton while living in Birmingham in the early period of Forest", says
Adrian. "He was an accomplished musician and plied his trade as an
avant-garde performer and composer." In Forest, he played sax, oboe, viola
and percussion. Dave Stubbs, a young bass player with a "quick musical ear"
for Forest’s melodic style was also recruited at this time. This new line-up
was quickly rehearsed for the Holland tour. The tour peaked when Forest
played at the Pink Pop Festival 1971, along with Fleetwood Mac, Focus,
Hardin and York, CCC and many others. "Around thirty thousand people seemed
to enjoy our set and called for more", recalls Adrian. On their return to
England, a live concert for the BBC with John Peel awaited - the last public
gig the band performed with the ‘Holland tour’ line-up.
Meanwhile, the band was keen to begin
recording a third Forest album and made urgent enquiries with EMI as to when
this could proceed. Malcolm Jones – a man with whom they had enjoyed such a
good rapport - had moved on, to be succeeded by David Croker, who was
himself rapidly succeeded by Nick Mobbs. "Our urgent enquiries became very
urgent at this stage", says Adrian. But it rapidly became apparent that
henceforth, Harvest would retain only the more commercially viable artists –
ones of the commercial magnitudes of Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.
The end was clearly approaching. Adrian:
"By 1972, things were rapidly changing on the music scene. Glam Rock was
lurking in the wings and the advent of discotheques, visual (as opposed to
aural) imagery, and trite novelty records put paid to any continuance of the
innovative sonic arts of the late 1960s, as far as the business at large was
concerned. Forest’s music had always been cerebral rather than just physical
or ‘foot tapping’ - lyrically and melodically challenging rather than
mundane. Little wonder then, that by 1973 we felt it was time to withdraw
with, hopefully, our credibility intact."
Adrian also had this beautiful coda of
feeling to share on the whole trip. "I feel fortunate to have worked with
Martin and Dez. We all lived together, got on well, shared everything and
ran Forest democratically. In short, we lived and starved together and I
have no regrets. On a rare listen, recently, to the Forest albums, and with
some degree of detachment after all this time, I was struck by the pleasing
idiosyncrasy of the music. After all, the Forest sound does not easily fall
into any specific stylistic category. We embraced the rich melodic
structures of traditional song and synthesized these with fresh musical
forms to create a world of dreams, surrealism, Nature, stories and love,
very much in keeping with the spirit of that age. Tracks such as ‘Do You
Want Some Smoke’ – a fine song and in my opinion Dez’s finest composition on
the ‘Forest’ album – or Mart’s ‘Don’t Want to Go’ where his inspired singing
perfectly articulates his plaintive lyrics, or ‘Bluebell Dance’ are good
examples - three worlds in the Forest universe. Well, you know what I mean!
Oh yes, realising these ideas into song was great fun!"
Since Forest, Martin and Adrian have
continued to write, building up a new canon of songs for recording in the
near future. Dez has worked with children with special educational needs for
the last 24 years, and has engaged in many and varied musical ventures in
that time. There was Harry Simon and the Arrears, a sort of garage punk folk
band with Martin and sundry others that did a few gigs in the 70s in London,
and Amazing Music Unlimited - musical arrangements for about 30 children at
a school where he worked doing folk, soul, and a few of his own
compositions. There were residencies at folk clubs and also the excellent
Prism, who were Yorkshire and Humberside Arts musicians in residence for
around five years and toured the region's clubs and festivals. Currently Dez
throws his musical energies into Southernwood doing home-recorded
instrumentals, originals and a few cover versions in with wife Cathy and
collaborator Stuart Fletcher.
It would be remiss of me to conclude
without conveying a few thankyous from the members of Forest to several
pivotal institutions. Firstly, they wish to mention the key inspiration
provided by the Young Tradition -England’s leading unaccompanied traditional
folk band, at that time, and the folks who encouraged them to "make a go of
it" after hearing them sing at a gig as the Foresters of Walesby. As they
say, "Heather Wood, Peter Bellamy and Royston Wood were fine singers, a
great band and good friends to Forest". They also wish to acknowledge the
support and encouragement they received from John Peel, God’s presenter and
leading exponent of ‘cutting-edge’, obscure and newly emerging music for
nearly four decades. "John even put us up in his home when things were
tough. He, too, was a good friend to Forest."
And finally a plea for the release of BBC
Forest sessions. Forest recorded for the BBC many times, including studio
sessions and live sets for DJ John Peel’s ‘Night Ride’, ‘Top Gear’, and
‘Live in Concert’ programmes, several broadcasts as session guests on
‘Sounds of the Seventies’ hosted by Bob Harris and (once) Pete Drummond, and
a BBC World Service programme on which the tracks from the first album were
played then discussed by Martin and the presenter. Altogether, around thirty
different Forest songs were recorded for the BBC, none of which has seen the
light of day to my knowledge or the band’s. I’ve had no luck in finding
anyone at the Beeb who can help with this, so if anyone knows please get in
touch through the Terrascope and together we’ll start a letter-writing
campaign to hold their toes to the fire. Of course writing to John Peel
would be another option, and you can do that by writing to him at ‘BBC Radio
One, Broadcasting House Langham, London W1A 1AA, England’. I’m sure it would
strike a chord with him and probably end up getting passed to the relevant
licensing functionary. Do you really want to wait until any remaining tapes
have entropied into a pile of metal oxide particles? I didn’t think so.
Tony Dale, © Ptolemaic Terrascope 2002