Focus – Hocus Pocus
1973
882 Likes
Best comments
1.“My brain just melted in my skull and dripped down my ass. This is batshit crazy and I love it.”
More comments
- 2.“The original song was much longer and slower. They were closing a show that ran overtime, so instead of switching to a quicker song, they played it at double speed.”
- 3.“The singer looks like he's tweaking throughout the entire clip.”
The story
Here's a minute of a Dutch prog band losing its mind on purpose. Thijs van Leer yodels, whistles, scats and blows flute between blasts of Jan Akkerman's guitar riff, and the drums get a couple of bars to themselves every time around. There are no words. The song is a rondo – big riff, wild solo, big riff again – and van Leer fills every gap with whatever noise his body can make.
It started as a happy accident. Akkerman found the riff at a rehearsal in a castle, right before the band left for England to make their second album, Moving Waves. Pierre van der Linden tossed in a drum break and van Leer started yodeling, something he had never done before. They got it in a couple of takes in London in 1971 with producer Mike Vernon. Akkerman later called it a send-up of rock groups.
The joke landed. The single hit number 20 in the UK in January 1973 and number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 that spring. That year Focus took it to American TV, and on NBC's The Midnight Special, with Gladys Knight hosting, they got about four minutes and played the near-seven-minute song stupidly fast. It never really left. Top Gear, Nike's 2010 World Cup ad, Baby Driver. Decades on, a yodeling Dutchman still sells sneakers.
