THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,418) Clifford T. Ward — “Path Through the Forest”
The fifth song I ever featured in this thing I do was the Factory’s [see #5, 460, 761] “pulverising cover version”, for which “Path Through the Forest” is now “revered in psych circles”. (Marco Rossi, https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/album/path-through-the-forestthe-secret-world-ofclifford-t-ward-1964-71) Here is the original version by the song’s writer — Clifford T. Ward [see #1,417] — which “is White Noise grade disquieting, overlaid with closemiked giggles and muttering”. (Rossi again) Ward’s version is a totally different experience, sort of like a madman running through the forest. I love it.
Ward recorded the song in March 1967 — “[p]ossibly inspired by the [1871] Renoir painting of the same name”. (dreamerinalowprofile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xOMktGfQjQ)
David Wells writes:
The Factory’s stunning October 1968 single . . . has long been acknowledged by collectors as a UK psych classic, but it’s only more recently that the song has been unmasked as an early Clifford T. Ward composition. . . . In its original slow-motion incarnation, [it] has the same somnambulistic, disembodied, nothing-is-real feel as the recently-issued “Strawberry Fields Forever”, but with Lennon’s hallucinogenic inspiration replaced by a more literary allusion — namely the Keats poem “Ode To a Nightingale” (“Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music — do I wake or sleep?”), although the Renoir painting The Path Through the Forest was surely also on Ward’s mind.
liner notes to the CD comp Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967
Of Ward, I quoted All Music Guide’s biography yesterday (https://www.allmusic.com/artist/clifford-t-ward-mn0000157416#biography). Dave Laing adds that:
The best songs of Clifford T Ward . . . synthesised pop melody and an English poetic sensibility. His most creative years were the mid-1970s, when such songs as “Home Thoughts From Abroad” and “Gaye” brought commercial success and critical accolades. . . . [B]orn in . . . Worcestershire . . . . [b]y 1962, he had become the singer with Cliff Ward and the Cruisers, a proficient local beat group that won the 1963 Midland Band of the Year contest in Birmingham. As Martin Raynor and the Secrets, the group made a recording for EMI in 1965, and several more for CBS as the Secrets, though none was successful. In 1967, Ward enrolled at Worcester teacher training college to study English and divinity, after which he taught at . . . [a] high school . . . . [H]e continued to make private recordings of his songs, and, in 1972, his tapes were passed to . . . John Walters . . . producer of John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. However, his first album, Singer Songwriter, issued by Peel and Clive Selwood’s Dandelion Records, sold few copies. Soon afterwards, Dandelion closed but Selwood, by now Ward’s manager, placed him with the Charisma label. “Gaye”, one of the tracks from the Home Thoughts album released in April 1973, made the British Top 10 . . . . The album . . . was well reviewed for Ward’s tenor voice and lyrics. The title song, contrasting Robert Browning’s lofty verse with the quirky use of domestic details, was the stuff that animated many of Ward’s best songs.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/dec/22/guardianobituaries1
Here is a demo by Ward:
Here is a short video bio of Clifford Ward:
Here is the trailer for a biopic:
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