Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Focus-Hocus Pocus

The sixties was the bizarre decade in my view, where too many musicians thought they were changing the world and contributing to 'the revolution'. In the same way that every Scouser claims to have been to school with one of the Beatles, every social commentator seems to think that the whole of the UK lived through a haze of pot smoke in Afghan coats listening to Jimi Hendrix in the sixties. In reality the best sellers in the charts in the '60s were Rolf Harris and Englebert Humperdinck.

So I think the '70s were quite refreshing. Yes, you had prog-rock which was pretty self-indulgent at times, but you had the pyre entrtainment too of glam-rock and bands like Sweet, T Rex, Sparks and many others. The '70s also saw the emergence of the greats like Roxy Music and, thankfully, punk rock.

But the joy of the 1970s was that it  was a decade that didn't take itself anywhere near as seriously as the 1960s had. A fine example of that being Dutch band Focus:
                                                                                                              


Then, for the lads who remember watching Gammer at The Gransmoor on Ashton Old Road, Openshaw here is Gammer with his very own version from about ten years ago:

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