‘A Forest’: the song that defined The Cure
One of the many things that endear The Cure’s legions of fans to the Robert Smith-fronted group is their fearless commitment to individualism and musical innovation. Embracing a wide range of genres, from psychedelia to nu metal, some of the band’s best-loved tracks arise from Smith’s atmospheric explorations of gothic rock, such as 1979’s ‘A Forest’.
After the release of the incredible debut album Three Imaginary Boys, Smith began to move away from the post-punk stylings of tracks like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, exploring distinctly darker and more inventive sounds. At the beginning of the recording process for the follow-up, Seventeen Seconds, bassist Michael Dempsey expressed a dislike for this shift in styles, prompting Dempsey to be replaced by Simon Gallup, an essential aspect of what became The Cure’s signature sound.
The only single to be taken from Seventeen Seconds, ‘A Forest’ provided the band with their first hit single in the UK, reaching a modest 31 in the top 40 singles charts. Given the subversive gothic stylings of the track, that chart placing becomes much more impressive. Exploring the process behind the track, Robert Smith told Rolling Stone, “With ‘A Forest’, I wanted to do something that was really atmospheric, and it has a fantastic sound.”
‘A Forest’ is not a commercial effort by any means. The Cure are certainly capable of penning such tracks, as signified by hits like ‘Friday, I’m In Love’ and ‘Just Like Heaven’. However, Smith never seems to make a conscious effort to make it to the charts. Of the unlikely hit of ‘A Forest’, he shared: “Chris Parry said, ‘If you make this sound radio friendly, you’ve got a big hit on your hands.’ I said, ‘But this is how it sounds. It’s the sound I’ve got in my head. It doesn’t matter about whether it’s radio friendly.’”
Parry was noted for producing much of The Cure’s early work, including both Three Imaginary Boys and Seventeen Seconds. It seemed to be a harmonious relationship, though Smith recalled the producer’s frustration with the frontman’s lack of commercial awareness, “He sometimes thinks that I’m willfully kind of stopping this from having more success,” Smith shared, “But I’m not. One of the reasons people like the band is because they’re never quite sure what’s gonna happen next. If we were predictable, we wouldn’t have really lasted this long.”
Although their later efforts, in many ways, eclipsed the success of ‘A Forest’ and Seventeen Seconds as a whole, the track still provides a pivotal moment within the lineage of The Cure. While Three Imaginary Boys is inarguably a fantastic album, the group might have met the same fate as many other short-lived post-punk outfits were it not for the pioneering sense of musical innovation and genre exploration.
Today, the band is still going strong with Smith at the helm, having incorporated a wide range of styles and influences into their unique sound. With legions of dedicated fans strewn across the globe, The Cure are undoubtedly one of the UK’s finest musical exports, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that without the fan favourite, ‘A Forest’, that reputation would have never been built.
