Force - The Band I Was in from 1983 till 1985

From 1983 - 1985, I was a member of a band called Force for 2 years in my native country, Lebanon. We did several concerts during that period. The live clips included here were filmed the BUC (Beirut University College) now called LAU (Lebanese American University) The band was made up of Abboud Saadi: Bass, Walid Itayim: Guitar, Kevork Missirian: Guitar, Emile Boustany: Drums. The first clip is a live performance of "Stand Up". Abboud, who composed the song, was a big fan of The Police and Sting and that's evident on this song.




Our repertoire was made up of original compositions only (no covers). We recorded one album which was released in Lebanon on cassette only (you can download the album as RAR file from rapidshare - link below). The leader of Force, Abboud, wrote and arranged 9 out of the 10 songs on the album. I wrote and helped arrange the one remaining track, Boulder Bound (the live clip of the song right below this paragraph).



All the keyboard parts were also written and arranged by Abboud. At the time of recording, we did not have a regular keyboard player so the owner of the recording studio volunteered to play the keyboard parts. This happened to be the very well known composer/arranger Ziad Rahbani. He was an old friend of the band members but still, it was cool to have a living legend as a session musician on our album :-) This was at the height of the civil war and planning rehearsals and concerts was very difficult because of security issues and there was always the chance of our concerts being cancelled at the last minute if the fighting that was almost a daily thing was still taking place on the day of the concert! Inspired by the state of war we lived in, the following instrumental's title was called "Mortar".






In 1985, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was working on a TV news report on wartorn Lebanon and our band caught their attention. Their correspondent, Peter George, who did the report was so amazed by the fact that Force managed to function in the midst of all the fighting and the killing so we ended up being in a small segment of the report! This last clip is the ABC segment:



Here is the link to download the Force album from rapidshare:

http://rapidshare.com/files/405217944/FORCE_ALBUM.rar.html