The Cure – A Forest

Morgan Studios, the bass line that reached the British chart

In January 1980 the Cure recorded A Forest at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north London, during the seven days it took to make the whole of Seventeen Seconds. The single came out on Fiction on 8 April 1980. The album followed on 18 April. Robert Smith sang and played guitar. Simon Gallup, new in the band after Michael Dempsey left for the Associates, played bass. Matthieu Hartley played keyboards. Lol Tolhurst played drums. Mike Hedges and Smith produced. It was the first time Hedges took the producer credit with the group. He had engineered their first album. This time Smith wanted the musical decisions in the room, and Hedges the sound.

The song starts with Gallup’s bass, a line that keeps moving while the rest of the band stays sparse. Smith wanted the keyboards as single notes, not chords, so the record would stay thin and clear. Hartley played a small Roland keyboard, one finger on the line. He left the band after the Australian dates that followed the album. Tolhurst’s drums were recorded very close, with almost no room sound, and echo was added afterwards so the space came from the machines, not from the studio walls. Smith sang into a Neumann microphone. They did not have time to piece the vocal together from many tries. If a line was wrong, they sang it again.

A Forest was the last song they built for the album, and the one that took the most extra parts. The 7-inch single runs about 3 minutes 54 seconds. It drops the long opening and fades before the guitar ending. The album version runs 5 minutes 55 seconds. The B-side was Another Journey by Train, an instrumental remake of their 1979 single Jumping Someone Else’s Train. The 12-inch was the band’s first 12-inch, and it carried the long album take.