An offshoot of budget-priced-record specialists Avenue Records (q.v.). Forest's advent was announced in 'Record Retailer' of the 12th of February 1972, which revealed that Avenue intended to switch its 'Six Top Hits' series of EPs to the new label. Negotiations were under way for the records to be supplied to conventional record stores by a dedicated record distributor; until that point Avenue's products had been available through general stores such as Tesco. According to the article the first release was scheduled for the 1st of March. The EPs duly started to appear, but in the event they included all of Avenue's 7" series, not just the 'Six Top Hits' ones; no more 7" records came out on the Avenue label, which was dedicated to albums from that point. It wasn't until the issue of the 8th of April that the successor to 'RR', 'Music Week', was able to state that a distributor had been found: Pye was to do the job. As it turned out, the agreement with Pye proved to be short-lived: 'MW' of the 22nd of July broke the news that in future Avenue would be responsible for the distribution of its own records, on both the Avenue and Forest labels. Towards the end of the year, however, Avenue stopped issuing EPs and concentrated its efforts on 12" LPs, leaving the Forest label redundant.
There is no apparent difference between the kind of music which came out on Forest and that which came out on the main Avenue label; indeed, several Forest issues had previously seen the light of day on Avenue in that form, and a few others were complied from recent Avenue LPs. Forest EPs were initially numbered in an EVA-2000 series, the prefix changing to FVA from 2016. They were all issued in 1972 - the '1971' on several of the early releases generally seems to refer to the year of the original appearance of the tracks, on Avenue. The labels were usually of the blue type shown above; a few later issues can be found with yellow labels (2) as well as the blue ones - presumably the yellow ones are re-pressings. Manufacture of the few examples that I have seen in the vinyl was by Pye; 'RR' of the 5th of July 1971 said that Pye was responsible for pressing Avenue records, so it seems reasonable to guess that they would do the same for Forest. The discography below owes a considerable debt to the much more comprehensive on at the Spanglefish site, which gives illustrations and full track listings and is highly recommended.
Copyright 2006 Robert Lyons.