FOREST
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.