Forest - Forest (1969)

Most records you own for the music, some for the artwork, a rare few for the liner notes – say, Pynchon’s prose on Nobody’s Cool, and Spiked!, Geoff Dyer on Rabih Abou-Khalil's The Sultan's Picnic, or perhaps most notably (I mean, who would have guessed?), Dave Stewart’s heart-warming and mouth-giggling recollections on some National Health reissues (not that the music within wasn't reason enough as well for owning some of these).

I’d place Forest’s debut firmly on that pile. Musically it was yet another good-natured, if rather naïve, take on late 1960's expanding (and often simultaneously simplistic) notions of what constituted folk music (from which any correlation with hand calluses (other than guitar-inflicted) was swiftly removed); but most memorable about it is definitely John Peel’s early creative writing workout on the sleeve, beginning with: “In the autumn of a year which historians have, with the aid of carbon dating, pin-pointed as 1968, I was in the gay carbon-monoxide cloud some authorities call Birmingham, in pursuit of a ladye with what I considered to be a dangerously high nubility quotient.”

I’ll take a copy, please.