Focus_____________
As the sun rises on Focus’ 50th anniversary year, Thijs van Leer talks to Prog about recording the first song he ever wrote on Focus 11, the new blood in the band, and why he doesn’t like being called progressive rock.
There’s no let-up in their 50th anniversary with new album Focus 11.
“Idon’t believe in the words ‘progressive rock’… Sorry, because your magazine is called that!” says Thijs van Leer, flautist, keyboard player, yodeller, frontman and founding member of legendary Dutch rockers Focus. It’s a surprising declaration from a man and a band so closely associated with the prog scene over some five decades, but he’s ready to back it up. “I think the only progressive rocker we ever had, who unfortunately died, was Frank Zappa,” says van Leer, “because he combined modern classical music, which he composed himself, with rock. That, to me, was progressive rock. All the bands who call themselves that today, to me, are more regressive rock, because they pick old themes from old times and combine them. Maybe that’s a new aspect, but most of it is regressive rather than progressive. But that’s my very personal opinion.”
Since Focus permanently reformed in the early 2000s, the band have consistently moved forwards, never just content to revisit their past glories. They continue to record and release new music, from the Brazilian flavours of Focus 8.5/Beyond The Horizon – “I love that record, by the way,” says van Leer – to their latest opus, Focus 11. Their sound draws upon classical influences and they’re fond of jazz improvisations, but if van Leer doesn’t like the prog label, then what do they play? “I call it rock,” he says. “Most of the time it’s more swinging than a lot of progressive rock bands because we work on that a lot, so I don’t consider it to be a progressive rock band that much.”
Critics have often written about the classical side of their music – which comes to the fore on tracks like Clair-Obscur on the new record – but van Leer believes there’s been too much attention paid to that element in their writing. “Bach is my main composer of all time and Bartok is number two, but no, it’s not only the classical thing. Of course, Focus is half American-sounding rhythmically. It has too much emphasis all the time, this classical thing,” he says.
Perhaps one of the factors that has helped Focus to continue firing on all cylinders creatively has been the presence of new, young blood in the band. Alongside founder van Leer and drummer Pierre van der Linden, who joined in 1970, the roster includes Menno Gootjes on guitar and bassist Udo Pannekeet. Gootjes and van Leer first worked together in the late 1990s when Focus briefly came out of retirement with a line-up that included bassist Bert
Ruiter, but it didn’t last. “Menno and I worked together in 1997, we did some demos and then we did one concert,” says van Leer. When the frontman assembled a fresh incarnation of Focus in the new millennium, he wanted Gootjes in the group, but the guitarist was busy with other projects. Happily, when the guitar seat became vacant again in 2010, van Leer was able to bring him into the fold. “Menno is a master guitar player,” he says. “He’s just a genius and all this genius has an effect on the band every time we play and every time we do recording sessions in the studio. And Udo is the same. As a six-string bass player, he’s a miracle, just a genius.”
Udo Pannekeet is the newest recruit to the cause, having joined in 2016, a player already on the rise when van Leer reached out to him. “I called Roeland Jacobs, who is the brother of Bobby Jacobs who worked in Focus as the bass player for years,” says van Leer. “And I said, ‘Roeland, give me the name of that man who did a jam in your studio and I was joining in, and I was so impressed by his playing bass, and later on I saw him on television with some jazz gigs and I was really flabbergasted by his playing.’ And then he said, ‘Oh, that is Udo Pannekeet.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Could you give me his number?’ and Roeland said, ‘No, he’s having coffee next to me right now, so I’ll give the phone to him.’ I got Udo on the phone and I asked him, ‘Udo, would you like to be in Focus as the bass player?’ And Udo said yes immediately, so that was an easy one. We became friends and he’s really lifting the band like a monster.”
The jazz side of Focus has often found expression in the way the band improvise both live and in the recording studio. “We always listened a lot to Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Weather Report, Michael and Randy Brecker, so they had a great influence on us,” says van Leer. “I went to a Herbie Hancock concert in Amsterdam which I thought was great, that was more than two years ago already, so that’s not so recent. We play a lot of jazz festivals all over the world and it’s nice to meet the jazz rockers of this planet: that’s fantastic.”
Van Leer may be the main songwriter in the group – he composed all but one of the 11 cuts on the new release – but he still wants his bandmates to contribute their ideas and personalities. “I write down parts for the bass and for the guitar and here and there for the drums, but then the freedom of every individual is great. I respect that freedom, of course, and I love it when they take their own direction in it.”
Yet Focus 11 is lighter on jams and spontaneous improvisation than many of its predecessors. “I don’t know why this happened, but there are a few real, beautiful improvisations, mainly by Menno on guitar, but it’s not 50/50 like we used to do. It’s a little less than normal. Maybe it’s the compositions that urge the soloist to do less than he was used to doing,” continues van Leer. Still, once the band take the songs on the road, it’s all up for grabs. “We already did a few songs on tour in England, and then there was much more room for improvisation than there was on the record, so it already developed in a positive way.”
The bulk of material on Focus 11 is instrumental, but there are vocals on How Many Miles?, while van Leer’s yodelling on their classic cut Hocus Pocus is the stuff of legend. “I always wanted to open my mouth from the beginning,” explains the frontman, who likes to use his voice as a fifth instrument in order “to have a human factor in the band, except for this yodelling, which is more of a solo thing. I use the voice a lot in live performances.” But it seems there’s little danger of Focus becoming a vocal-
“I think the only progressive rocker we ever had, who unfortunately died, was Frank Zappa, because he combined modern classical music, which he composed himself, with rock.
That, to me, was progressive rock.”
led outfit. “Most of the time it was the other guys in the band who asked me very politely to shut up, except for one song sung in English, because How Many Miles? is sung in English,” says van Leer, laughing.
While he’s best known for playing the flute – and yodelling – the flute isn’t the means by which van Leer composes for Focus. “I write most of the time behind a grand piano at home: I’m not a computer writer,” he says.
“In studios, of course, we use a lot of computers, but at the very beginning, let’s say the original thoughts, they come old fashioned, with the piano. Actually, I never wrote for the flute as such because most of the things I did with flute solo were covers most of the time from composers that died a long time ago. That became the bestselling album in Holland ever, called Introspection; it’s a series of five albums.”
The songs on Focus 11 spring from a range of times and inspirations. Theodora Na Na Na is named after van Leer’s late second wife. “When I was playing on the piano, she always sang ‘na na na na’ and her name was Theodora.” Heaven is a track of some considerable vintage. “It’s the very first theme I composed as a child of seven, a very stupid song, and I made a song out of that,” says van Leer, who chose the title to express the innocence of children whose eyes haven’t seen the evils of the world yet, so they’re still in heaven. Mare Nostrum, on the other hand, was written by Udo Pannekeet. “Mare Nostrum is of course the Mediterranean sea,” says van Leer. “The words are spoken by me with a Vocoder, so you can’t understand them very well, I suppose, but it’s really beautiful. It may be the most Focuslike tune on the record because it starts like under zero and it goes to an ecstatic middle part then it ends again like it began. It’s a journey through all the emotions; it’s a beautiful song.”
Van Leer may hold the distinction of being Holland’s best-selling artist at home, but Focus clearly have a great soft spot for the UK judging by their regular British tours and all the live albums they’ve recorded over here, from 1973’s At The Rainbow to Live At The BBC, a 2004 release of material from 1976, and most recently 2016’s Live In England. “We have some special thing with England. You could say there is a lot of understanding of our music, appreciation for our music and human warmth,” says van Leer, and whenever Focus touch down on these shores, the fans continue to come out in droves. “We nearly sold out every place – it’s really beautiful and astonishing actually,” says van Leer about the band’s winter 2018 tour. Perhaps the audiences have been swelled by the people introducing their offspring to the delights of the Dutch masters. “We have a very faithful bunch of fans, but also the generation that they produced are there, and the generation that they produced are there, so three full generations. It’s amazing to see that.”
As Focus 11 adds another chapter to the Focus catalogue, the band have to pick and choose which of the new tracks to introduce to the setlist. “I wouldn’t say that we’ll play them all live because we always have to play our hits, so that is great and very rewarding but also it’s a limitation as far as all the things from Focus 11.
I don’t think we will cover them all: maybe half of it.” Inevitably, any
Focus live show has to include the hits that first brought them to fame – particularly Sylvia and Hocus
Pocus, the latter featuring van Leer’s aforementioned unmistakable Alpine vocal acrobatics. “People want that and I’ll still able to do that yodelling. As long as that goes, we have fun and people get entranced and that’s beautiful,” says van Leer.
The band recorded two shows at Trading Boundaries from the winter tour, so there’s another live release in the works for 2019, and they’ll make their third appearance on Cruise To The Edge. “We will do many other things as well. We will work on Focus 12, we will make demos, go into the studio… blah blah blah… and we will have our 50th anniversary, which is going to be celebrated in Holland and in England, maybe even in other countries… I don’t know yet. So that’s going to be a big time.”
Even as Focus and van Leer celebrate five decades of recording and performing, the frontman’s passion for his chosen profession shows no signs of dimming. “It’s a thrill,” he says about still being on the road as he enters his 70s. “I think the band have not sounded better than we do now. It’s really something I would recommend everybody to come and see. It’s really something now, if I may be so impolite. I still love it, it’s still great to see that so many people really take the risk to come to our shows and enjoy it and buy our stuff at the merch table. It’s amazing.”
Focus 11 is out now via Cherry Red/In And Out Of Focus. See www.focustheband.com for more information.
“We have some special thing with England. You could say there is a lot of understanding of our music, appreciation for our music and human warmth.”