Dez Allenby - Forest Interview

Born and raised in Grimsby shortly after WW2, Allenby was influenced early on by church music from Church of the Nazarene and his mother singing around the house. Eventually Allenby heard the Beatles and the Stones like most kids during that time and the rest is history! He formed his first band the Ranting Lands before meeting his future bandmates to start Forest and would quickly go on to write and record two wonderful albums of original, exciting material. In this interview we explore Allenby’s past, future and present, Forest and the legacy they left behind, the late John Peel, what he’s currently working on and so much more!

When and where were you born? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?

I was born in Grimsby in 1949 shortly after the end of the Second World War. Grimsby was then an important fishing port on the East coast of England on the South bank of the mighty River Humber. Dad was fishing off Iceland when I was born; he broke his hand on that trip and spent quite a while in hospital before he came home. I grew up an only child but I had lots of friends because our house was opposite the primary school in a little cul-de-sac. All  the kids used to play out on the street and I would join them from an early age. The whole area had been heavily bombed but we knew the bomb sites were forbidden to us. We were not well off, but we had enough so we could eat well. We listened to the radio. And we had a nice big back garden where I used to play. Mam used to like going to church. It was a Chapel really, the Church of the Nazarene and the congregation used to sing their hearts out and shout out Hallelujah and such so it was quite a wild place to be. I think I got my first real feel for music there except that, but my mam was always singing around the house. And whenever a ship was lost we would go to the Seamens’ Mission where I remember people would really express their emotions as they sung out hymns like Abide With Me in natural harmonies. That had a big influence on my music.

I think I picked up something important there about singing. It also seemed to connect me with gospel and soul. I had no formal musical education but there was always music in my life. My mam had sung in choirs; she loved singing and was often heard singing around the house. My grandma too. She played piano for the sisterhood meetings at her chapel in Lincoln. She couldn’t read music, but she clunked along on the piano and made-up arrangements to back the hymns as she was singing them. I think I got a lot from her too. Dad had been in harmonica bands when he was in the army in the Second World War and he played mouth organ in first position very nicely. He often played at home. I think I was seven when he gave me my first harmonica and I remember sitting under the dining table which had a silk cloth on it that came from Italy at the end of the war. I would happily play the hymns I knew for hours on end. Grandad, my mum’s dad, was a railway foreman, and he would sing too. He also played harmonica and said that he used to play concertina. When I became interested in folk songs in my mid teens it turned out that he knew a couple of old ones including a metaphysical variant of an old King Arthur Ballard. I got a tin whistle for Christmas one year and in a couple of days I’ve got to grips with how I could play it. What a Christmas my parents must have had! But they were happy to sit and watch television which arrived when I was eleven.

What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences? When and where did you see your first concert and when did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a musician?

At that time I went to a boys' grammar school. My mates and I supported Grimsby Town Football Club which was doing quite well in those days. We went to some away games against other clubs in Lincolnshire but generally we went to home games on our bikes and used to rush back to watch Doctor Who on the TV. As a working class lad I’m not sure I ever really fitted in the grammar school, but I made some good friends and it did give me a good education. At this time the music scene in the UK was really exploding, even in Grimsby. I used to hang around with a group of rockers whom I’d met on the terraces at the match. We always stood in the same place so we became friends. They were older than me and very kind, taking me in as part of their group. They used to meet at a coffee bar in the week where the jukebox was packed with lots of black American music. They went on their motorbikes, me on my pushbike. So from my early teens I was listening to the raw sounds of Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Lots of these records were banned by the BBC. Simultaneously, I was becoming friends with Martin Welham who was in my class at school. We went to the Mecca Ballroom a few times together and I remember seeing the Searchers and Little Richard and his band on the same show! I was also totally knocked out to see Stevie Winwood singing Georgia On My Mind as part of The Spencer Davis  Group.

But mainly we frequented the South Bank jazz club. On Friday nights we could see at close quarters emerging rock groups like John Mayall’s  Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, Family and forerunners of Deep Purple and Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson was playing tin whistle in those days rather than flute and that had a deep impact on me as a young tin whistle player. You can play rock on this thing! There was jazz on Sunday nights and some top-notch guests like Jimmy Witherspoon. And we also went to our local folk club where we heard the Watersons from Hull, Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, Dave and Tony Arthur and the Young Tradition and many more top acts. The regular musicians included John Conolly who wrote many well known songs including Fiddlers’ Green. With Bill Meek, he was writing and performing what would be his classic songs about our community as we watched. A big influence. We were very lucky to have been teenagers in those days with such a variety of affordable and excellent music going on and in our town. And of course, we were deeply influenced by the pop music of the time lead mainly by The Beatles and the Stones. I especially liked the Animals, The Yardbirds, The Who and The Small Faces. And Folk music was very hip and often in the charts, thanks initially to Bob Dylan. But it was hard getting to hear pop music because it was hardly ever on TV and only occasionally on the radio. I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg on a crystal set in my bedroom with a little earpiece. It was lying in bed listening to this radio, coming up for midnight, when I first heard John Lennon singing Twist And Shout. I must have been thirteen years old. At this point I knew I had to be a singer in a group.

Did you participate in any groups prior to Forest? When and where did you guys first get together to jam/rehearse and what was the overall chemistry between everyone? When and where did you guys make your live performance debut and what was that experience like?

I think the first group that I was in was the Ranting Lads. It was led by a friend of mine, Ruadhri Greg who had a deep sense of his Scottish heritage. It was a traditional folk group and we were doing little gigs in no time at all. Martin Welham was also in the group with others. Before long, after some jiggling, the group was just Martin, Adrian me, without a group name. The Welhams were very accomplished musicians, playing and singing Beatles songs, Paul Simon songs and much more, and  harmonising beautifully too. There were five siblings in their family, and they had spent a lot of time singing and playing together so they were very good as a pair. It’s because they were so competent that I never learned to play guitar and thought it best to continue with harmonica whistle and now mandolin to add texture. We became The Foresters of Walesby which we thought sounded traditional; it also related to the Welham family moving out of town to Walesby in the Lincolnshire Wolds where there happened to be a nearby forest. Much impressed by The Watersons and traditional music, we largely abandoned instruments and focused on singing unaccompanied traditional songs in harmony. The Foresters Of Walesby rehearsed together at either of our family homes, but especially enjoyed singing in the almost disused Ramblers’ church in Walesby the small Mediaeval church that you can see on the cover of Full Circle. It felt great to sing together in that ancient acoustic space. We might have been seventeen or eighteen when we booked a spot at the ever popular at Grimsby Folk Club and sung some of our harmony arrangements of traditional songs. The guests that night were a group called the Young Tradition; they were a very hip group of three harmony singers who were really big on the folk scene at that time. Amazingly they were knocked out by our music and let everyone in the club know as much. That gave us a huge confidence in what we were doing and we became friends of the Young Tradition members for many years.

Soon after that we started to experiment with playing music and singing harmonies at the same time and essentially writing our own material too. Martin had already written quite a few songs in the pop tradition with a nod to the styles of Buddy Holly and The Everly Brothers and perhaps Paul Simon. But by now it was 1967 and Martin started to write some pretty strange imaginative stuff seemingly from somewhere in his own head. With Martin’s help I started writing some Traditional folk based songs At this point Adrian was not writing. The three of us relocated to a house in Birmingham in 1968. We touted ourselves nationally to record companies, managers and agents, including the Beatles’ apple label. We believed in the music we were playing! Apple wasn’t so sure. It was a time when the stablished music scene knew something was going on but did but didn’t understand at all. Therefore, they were interested. John Peel used to stay at our house when he did gigs at Mothers and through him, we met Marc Williams who was pretty important in the Underground magazine International Times. The result was that we recorded some better demos and were offered a recording deal by Fontana records. On the back of their interest, EMI, who had just established the Harvest label for underground acts, offered us a deal which we accepted.

Tell me about writing and recording the band’s debut LP in ‘69. What was the overall vision and approach to the music? How did the deal with Harvest come about? When and where did recording begin and would you mind giving some back story to some of the songs that are featured on the album?

By now, Adrian had started writing songs and the album was envisaged as being about our new compositions. We really thought we knew how to make the record and remarkably were allowed to experiment and do our thing in Abbey Road! Not just production, but in the studio we could use instruments we couldn’t possibly own like. Hammond organ, a grand piano, a harpsichord and a harmonium. Other things as well. What were they thinking about? We were twenty, nineteen and eighteen. It could only be like that in 1969. Harvest have us real control within the contractual time slot that was allocated to make the record. Our name was shortened to Forest. Individual group members had written the songs. In those days we would invite each other to listen to songs that we had written and before long, as we listened, we were contributing instrumental parts and vocal harmonies to each others songs. So, the arrangements came about in quite a natural and an anarchic way, but it was democratic because we felt that each persons’ songs should be represented equally. I think I still work in this way with other musicians. So we brought into the studio the arrangements that we had worked up and then added to them with instruments we found in the studio. On A Fantasy You, for instance, we brought to the studio the two guitars and whistle arrangement which was augmented by Marc Williams playing bongos and either Martin, or Adrian playing perhaps Hammond organ. I think the album might be a bit chaotic but hey some people like the collective creativity of all of that. It was a smoky album and one that derived as much from Birmingham as any glade somewhere.

That following year the band released its follow up “Full Circle.” What did you guys want to achieve and express with this release that was different from the previous work? What eventually happened to the group around this time? Did you continue to pursue music after Forest? What have you been up to in more recent years?

By the time we recorded Full Circle we were living in London and that had its influence I subtle ways. Previously all compositions were Welham/Allenby/Welham but now we wanted songs to be credited to us as individuals. I think we felt we knew what we wanted to do after the experience of making an album and we turned a little away from happy chaos to structure. The songwriter took charge of the arrangements. My whistle playing changed from controlled freeform to structured parts directed by Adrian (Graveyard), or Martin (The Midnight Hanging Of The Runaway Serf). Malcolm Jones of Harvest kept an eye on the record but there was still space and time to improvise. For instance Adrian, who I think had never played cello before, made fabulous additions to Bluebell Dance and Graveyard. Malcolm also brought in Gordon Huntley to play steel guitar on Hawk The Hawker. He gave the record his best shot. I’m very proud of what we achieved and that a lot of people still enjoy both albums, but Full Circle is my favourite. Not long after the release of Full Circle, I felt the need to live a more normal life, to live with my then girlfriend, to know what it was like to have a weekend. I’d been a full-time hippie for some years. It had been amazing, we had done so much, but it really was time to move on. Since that time I went back to university, I did a year before Forest and I worked in education until I retired.

Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?

I’ve always played music at home, performed music in groups and done solo gigs I identify as a folk singer/musician with all that that can mean. In the last three years of my working life I was committed to trying to improve education services in a northern city and for those years, the going was so though that I actually lost the capacity to play music. But I’ve had a renaissance in retirement. Currently I have a solo presence as Dez Allenby including gigs and widely available recordings. I’m a member of Strawberry Moon, a very exciting acoustic group whose album ‘Seeing Stars’ is widely available. And I work regularly as the musical part of a gigging group of spoken word artists called Three Voices. I especially enjoy playing in the bandstand at Brigg Market from time to time and singing with my wife Cathy. And music continues to fill my life, I’m pleased to say. I hope it fills yours.