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Holland

Amsterdam prog, later knighted

Focus

Thijs van Leer was classically trained on piano from age three and later graduated in flute from the Geneva Conservatoire. He formed Focus in Amsterdam in 1969, at first backing the Dutch stage production of Hair, and guitarist Jan Akkerman joined that November to complete the band's core. The music mixed hard-rock riffs with classical flute, scat singing and even yodeling. Something that eccentric had no business reaching the US Top 10, but Focus got there. The band kept recording and touring for decades afterward, breaking up and reforming more than once, and van Leer and Akkerman were each later knighted by the Netherlands for services to music.

Named short enough to spray-paint

The Ex

The Ex formed in 1979 in Wormer, just outside Amsterdam. They picked their instruments by drawing straws and their name for how fast it could be sprayed on a wall. The band came straight out of the Dutch squatter movement, was occupying its own squat within two years, and built a DIY ethic that shaped everything after. 1984's Blueprints for a Blackout, their fifth album, is where they pushed past straightforward punk, bringing in violin, oboe, marimba, and oil-drum percussion alongside the guitars. Singer G.W. Sok fronted the band for thirty years before leaving in 2008. By then The Ex had drifted even further from its punk origins, into free jazz, improvisation, and a long-running collaboration with Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya. They never really stopped moving.

Renamed itself four times

Xymox

Ronny Moorings met Anka Wolbert while both were students in Nijmegen in the early 1980s. As Xymox they self-released a 500-copy debut EP, Subsequent Pleasures, and it sold out in three weeks. Dead Can Dance's Brendan Perry invited them to open on tour, which led to a deal with the London label 4AD, and the name picked up a prefix: Clan of Xymox, for 1985's self-titled debut album. It went back to plain Xymox after a later move to PolyGram, then got the "Clan" back in 1997 when Moorings, by then the band's only constant member, relaunched it from Germany. The sound changed less than the name did. It stayed brooding, synthesizer-driven post-punk, the kind that helped define the emerging darkwave scene alongside labelmates Bauhaus and Dead Can Dance.

The Collection