Focus

Amsterdam, 1969

Focus began in Amsterdam in the middle of 1969 as a trio: Thijs van Leer on organ, flute and voice, Martijn Dresden on bass and Hans Cleuver on drums. Van Leer had reached rock by an unusual route. Born in Amsterdam on 31 March 1948 to a classically trained flautist father and a singer mother, he started piano at three and flute at eleven, studied harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and took a degree in flute and composition at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève.

Jan Akkerman joined on guitar in November 1969. The pairing of a conservatoire-trained flautist and organist with a guitarist who moved freely between Bach and heavy blues set the terms for everything the band did afterwards. The rhythm section turned over fast: by 1971 Pierre van der Linden had taken the drum stool and Cyril Havermans the bass, and that version of the group made the record that got Focus out of the Netherlands.

Two instrumentals in the Top 40 at the same time

Moving Waves, released in 1971, reached number two in the UK. It opened with Hocus Pocus — an organ riff, a flute break, Akkerman's guitar and van Leer yodelling over the top — which went to number 20 in the UK and number 12 at home. The other side of the album was given over to Eruption, a twenty-three-minute suite that remains the band's largest single piece of writing.

Focus 3 followed in 1972, a double album that went to number one in the Netherlands and supplied Sylvia, a short, almost pastoral organ tune that reached number four in the UK in 1973. For a stretch that year Focus held two songs without lyrics in the UK Top 40 simultaneously, which is the statistic that has followed the band ever since.

Hamburger Concerto arrived in 1974, reaching number five in the Netherlands and number 20 in the UK. Van Leer's parallel solo career ran alongside it: his first album, Introspection, came out in 1972 and spent three weeks at number one in the Netherlands in early 1973. The group broke up in 1978.

The second act, and the line-up that stuck

Van Leer reassembled Focus in 2001, and the band has released studio albums more or less steadily since, under its own In and Out of Focus Records imprint and through Cherry Red and Spirit of Unicorn Music. Akkerman has never come back. Asked about the friction that drove the early records, van Leer has said the creative tension 'helped here and there. At other times it did not help… it's difficult to define', naming it as his one real regret.

The current quartet has been stable since December 2016: van Leer, van der Linden on drums, Menno Gootjes on guitar and Udo Pannekeet on bass. Van der Linden is the thread back to Moving Waves; Gootjes had served earlier spells before settling in. Bert Ruiter, the bassist through the mid-1970s and into the band's first ending, died on 22 March 2022 at 75.

Recent catalogue work has been substantial rather than decorative: Focus 11 in 2018, the box set 50 Years: Anthology 1970–1976 in 2020, and Focus 50 in 2021.

Focus 12, then an orchestra

Focus 12, the band's most recent studio album, came out on 5 July 2024, recorded at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands with a sleeve by Roger Dean. It is entirely instrumental, running through Fjord Focus, All Aboard, Born To Be You, Nura, Bowie and Gaia. Pannekeet and Gootjes each contributed two compositions, which is as close as the band has come to sharing the pen outside van Leer and van der Linden. One track is a complete improvisation captured in a single take with no overdubs — a first in the group's history and audibly rougher than the rest.

Reviewing it for MetalTalk, Adrian Stonley called the album 'as valid piece of work as any in their long repertoire' and argued the band remained as musically relevant as it had ever been despite the decades between its oldest and youngest members.

October 2025 brought The Focus Symphony, an orchestral treatment of the catalogue performed by the Philharmonie van Antwerpen under conductor Alexandra Arrieche. The band posted a two-part documentary about the project in June 2026. In July 2026 the orchestral Sylvia went further still, performed by a BBC orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a progressive rock Proms night, televised on 18 July.

Where things stand

The band's touring year was rebuilt around van Leer's recovery from illness. A UK and Wales run went ahead from 20 April to 2 May 2026, and the review posted on the band's own site after the Stables in Milton Keynes on 29 April reported a packed room and van Leer in good condition, singing throughout. He had turned 78 a month earlier.

March 2026 also brought the death of Mike Vernon at 81, the British producer involved in the band's earliest recordings, marked by the band on 4 March.

From there the year ran: Gothenburg's Konserthuset on 21 May, SALT in Oslo on 22 May, Södra Teatern in Stockholm on 23 May, an open-air date at Goldenstedt in Germany on 31 July, then Chelmsford Social Club on 4 September and the Nene Valley Rock Festival at Grimsthorpe Castle near Bourne on 5 September, where Focus closed the event after Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash.

The immediate dates are a short British run: Bush Hall in west London on 22 November 2026, the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal on 28 November and The Crescent in York on 29 November. A longer stretch follows in spring 2027 — The Fleece in Bristol on 18 April, Lowther Pavilion in Lytham St Annes on 21 April, Social in Hull on 22 April, Oran Mor in Glasgow on 24 April and the Corn Exchange in Stamford on 26 April — with the Drill Hall in Lincoln on 13 August and the Arts Centre in Colchester on 22 August 2027.

The show itself

Theatre shows run in two halves with an interval; the festival set at Grimsthorpe went for roughly two hours. The shape is consistent. A solo flute passage opens, then Focus I runs into a section of Anonymus, House of the King, an extended Eruption, Focus VII and Sylvia. After the break comes Focus II, the later-period All Hens on Deck, La Cathédrale de Strasbourg, a stretched-out Harem Scarem built around successive solos, and Hocus Pocus to finish, with a long van der Linden drum solo inside it. The encore has been Focus III and Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!

There is no production to speak of — four musicians, an organ, a drum kit and rooms holding a few hundred people. What the recent write-ups focus on is condition rather than spectacle: van Leer on top yodelling form with the crowd in his hand at Nene Valley, van der Linden still playing at a standard that embarrasses drummers half his age, Gootjes taking the Akkerman parts without imitating them. The one consistent reservation is length: the reviewer at the Stables found the long middle passages of Eruption and Harem Scarem inclined to meander before the band pulled them back.