Focus- In the 70s by Stephen Lambe (Sonicbond Publishing)

I really like focus. I have all their 70s vinyl records and seen them a few times in the 2010-2015 period.  The author is quite open about his opinion of how hit and miss their material was and this was clearly a band that was really great live even though Jan Ackerman, was a great improviser, while This, did not really like to jam. These two main guys in the band, were never good friends or saw music the same so they had a lot of personal problems throughout the history of the band, especially after the split after the first record, when the drummer and bass player (who Thiis.) had played with since 1968 together, were sacked and replaced with the drummer that Jan had played a lot with and several different bass players for the next few years.  The authors is good about giving all the history of what was going on in a terse way between the albums. He also discussed the 6 solo albums each that Jan and Thiis made in the 70s, in the order they were released. 

He has a lot of nice detailed comments about the different versions of the albums that exists and edits as the early records were different in different countries and the CD versions, some times were all messed up.  There is a small picture gallery with some of the different artwork covers shown and some live and studio pictures of the band.  The 50th Anniversary Edition Box set sounds like it is a must have for fans based on the input he uses from this box set in the book. 

The author of course goes through each track from each album and he is surprisingly critical of many of the tracks, which makes you believe, he only really loves some of the bands tracks and that there is way too much filler in many ways.  It is a band where two of the guys did not like each other at all and did not even record in the studio together (often) for their albums.  For me, this would be a really hard situation to be in a band with someone I did not get along with at all and do that for years live and in the studio.  The bands last concert was in August 1978 (before getting back together 25 years later). 

While reading this book I listened to all the Focus albums that I own this week. That was fun to hear them. The live one is great and a lot of Focus 3 as well. A very interesting book and I was surprised to find out how popular the solo albums were with several being top 10 albums for Thijs and Jan. Quite an interesting story. If you like Focus you will learn a lot for sure. Well done. 

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