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justforbooks · 1 year ago

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Thank Christ for the Bomb (1970) was the third album by blues-rockers the Groundhogs, and the first of a trio of releases that reached the UK Top 10. For some connoisseurs, it is an all-time classic and proof of the brilliance of Tony McPhee, the band’s songwriter and guitarist who has died aged 79.

According to Luke Haines, formerly of the Auteurs, Thank Christ … is “a kind of concept album, a psychedelic, very heavy CND album full of class war. The album is a scorched earth manifesto.” The Damned’s Captain Sensible contended that “Tony McPhee … was the British Hendrix”.

The Groundhogs had emerged from the British blues boom of the mid-1960s, and as the 70s dawned they embraced the expansive, exploratory spirit of the era. A performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival affirmed their growing status.

The follow-up to Thank Christ was Split (1971), which climbed to No 5 and found McPhee wrestling with ideas around split personality and loss of self. “I went through a stage of split personality myself and in the lyrics I try to explain what it is like – a very deep, traumatic experience,” he revealed. “One moment you feel all right, the next you don’t know who you are.” The album included the frantic, heavy-metal stomp of Cherry Red, which got the band on to the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

In 1971 they supported the Rolling Stones on their British tour, during which they recorded the limited-edition live album Live at Leeds ’71. The following year they were high in the British charts again with Who Will Save the World? The Mighty Groundhogs, but that year also saw the replacement of drummer Ken Pustelnik with Clive Brooks. The next album, Hogwash (1972), had many admirers but marked the end of the band’s commercial hot streak. Their progress stalled amid a string of lineup changes and regular disbandments. They made their last chart appearance with Solid, which reached No 31 in 1974.

Born in Humberston, Lincolnshire, Tony was the son of Charles McPhee, a telegraphist in the Royal Navy and then a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and Eileen (nee Harrison). The family moved to south London when Tony was one, and he later attended Tooting Bec grammar school. He developed an early enthusiasm for the blues when his brother took home imported LPs of American blues artists. “It was then that I first heard this raw stuff and my ears pricked up,” he told Classic Rock magazine.

Another formative influence on him was the British blues harmonica player Cyril Davies (who would die in 1964 aged 31). “I used to go and see him at the Marquee Club,” said McPhee. “Somebody said something about this R&B band and they were there every Thursday and they were just magic.”

The Groundhogs came into being after McPhee, who had been fronting his own group, the Seneschals, joined the Dollar Bills in 1962. This was an outfit formed in New Cross, south-east London, by brothers Pete and John Cruickshank. McPhee pushed the band into a more blues-influenced direction, as he explained: “We went into R&B and then into blues very deeply – to the extent that I spent most of my time delving into books and records to find material which hadn’t been done by any of the other English bands.”

They named themselves after John Lee Hooker’s song Ground Hog Blues, and in 1964 they temporarily renamed themselves John Lee’s Groundhogs when they backed Hooker on a UK tour, after John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers dropped out. Hooker liked the band so much he recruited them to play on his album … And Seven Nights (1966, later reissued as Hooker and the Hogs) and teamed up with them again for his 1965 British tour.

Hooker’s endorsement was a powerful calling card and the band found themselves in demand, also backing Little Walter, Champion Jack Dupree and Jimmy Reed when they toured Britain. Both McPhee and Eric Clapton appeared on Dupree’s album From New Orleans to Chicago (1966). When Clapton left Mayall’s band in 1965, McPhee was asked to join but declined.

The Groundhogs split in 1966, after which McPhee played with John Cruickshank in Herbal Mixture and spent a brief spell with the John Dummer Blues Band, but in 1968 a new Groundhogs rose from the ashes. McPhee was joined by Pete Cruickshank on bass and Pustelnik on drums, plus Steve Rye on harmonica and vocals. At the end of the year they released their first album under a deal with Liberty Records, Scratching the Surface. The follow-up, Blues Obituary, appeared the following year, now without Rye. The trio’s dynamic, freewheeling playing placed the Groundhogs alongside such progressively inclined blues practitioners as Ten Years After and Led Zeppelin.

McPhee saw the album as a turning point, the moment when the Groundhogs stopped being just a blues band. “I like to call it progressive in the sense that we were progressing away from the blues,” was his assessment. The stage was set for their breakthrough with Thank Christ for the Bomb.

McPhee released five solo albums, the last of them being Bleaching the Blues (1997). His solo debut, The Two Sides of TS McPhee (1973; TS stands for “Tough Shit”), was by far the most memorable. The first side was a feast of raw, mostly acoustic blues, while side two comprised the single track The Hunt, where McPhee recited an anti-foxhunting narrative against a patchwork of experimental synthesizer sounds.

A new Groundhogs lineup released the albums Crosscut Saw and Black Diamond in 1976, and McPhee led two different versions of the band during the 90s. In 2003 the McPhee/Pustelnik/Cruickshank lineup reformed for some 40th-anniversary shows, after which McPhee performed with various players as Tony McPhee’s Groundhogs, while Cruickshank and Pustelnik formed the Groundhogs Rhythm Section with assorted additional musicians. McPhee also performed with David Tibet’s “apocalyptic folk” outfit Current 93, and with the vocalist Joanna Deacon, whom McPhee married in 2008. In 2014, he retired Tony McPhee’s Groundhogs.

He was married twice before, to Christine Payne, with whom he had a son, Conan, and Susan Harrison, with whom he had a son, Vincent. Both marriages ended in divorce. Joanna survives him, as do his children, two grandchildren, Scarlett and Victor, and his sister Olive.

🔔 Tony (Anthony Charles) McPhee, musician and songwriter, born 23 March 1944; died 6 June 2023

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dustedmagazine · 3 years ago

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Groundhogs — Road Hogs: Live from Richmond to Pocono (Fire Records)

Road Hogs: Live From Richmond To Pocono by The Groundhogs

The phrase “white-boy blues” can induce twinges of distaste, for reasons both political and aesthetic. For all the good (Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Taste, Paul Butterfield’s records with Mike Bloomfield) there’s an alarming amount of bad (Savoy Brown, Joe Bonamassa’s cartoonish preening, anything involving George Thorogood…). While Cream and Led Zep still figure strongly in the public imagination of the British blues boom, the bombast of both bands amplifies the worst tendencies of the music — all those endless solos that buried the songs under layer upon bloated layer of cock-rocking excess (not to mention Jimmy Page’s tendency to take credit for other folks’ music, or Clapton’s grotesque descent from garden variety conservatism to reactionary paranoia). The Groundhogs don’t have the same residue of prestige attached to their records and songs, likely because they never achieved the same heights of celebrity, or of Hammer of the Gods-style rock-star mythos. Like the humble critter from which the band took its name, the Groundhogs worked close to the dirt. They stayed tuned in to the grime and misery that gave the blues shape, even when their impulse to rawk long and loud moved toward more expansive moods and musical spaces.

And they could get expansive. Road Hogs: Live from Richmond to Pocono collects a couple Groundhogs live sets from the band’s peak period, and two of its tracks near the twenty-minute mark. Both sets feature the band’s best, most stable line-up: guitarist and frontman Tony McPhee, bass player Peter Cruickshank and drummer Ken Pustelnik. Road Hogs captures the band in action at London’s Richmond Athletic Ground in 1969, and in 1972 at the Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania, a show purported to be the trio’s last gig together until a reunion in the early 21st century. The 1969 set is both looser and dirtier; the 1972 show has sharper, fuller sound quality, and features some of the record’s finest playing. Road Hogs will remind anyone who needs it that the Groundhogs were a potent band, purveyors of bluesy boogie and seriously heavy vibes.

The 1969 recording has a rough-and-ready quality, blown out (a phrase this reviewer uses with some trepidation — these ain’t indie kids driving the needle into the red to be edgy) but sort of charmingly so. The recording is infused with the atmosphere of festival and the attendant pleasures of a big but crappy PA blasting at top volume. The set draws principally on songs from Blues Obituary (1969), which is by far the least loved of the records the trio released between 1968 and 1972. The tunes fare much better in these live iterations. “B.D.D.” is a half-beat faster than the studio version and feels lively, rather than stilted and soulless. “Mistreated” is also nearly revelatory, snarling, chugging and regularly reaching for big, emotionally charged tones. But it’s the songs from the Groundhogs’ earlier LP Scratching the Surface (1968) that explode with the most energy, bluesy in a truculent, nasty fashion that feels dangerously dissolute. The band’s rendition of Muddy Waters’ “Still a Fool” swaggers with palpable ill intent. McPhee imbues his playing with bravado and bluster — but in the mode of a bad man, looking to do bad things.

There’s another version of “Still a Fool” in the set from the Pocono Raceway, and the cleaner sound quality renders the band’s dynamics crisper. It’s also four minutes longer, and a good bit spacier in its long closing section. McPhee’s playing is forceful, but the song sounds more practiced in its excesses. The undertone of wickedness crackling through the 1969 version is lost. The most exciting performance in the 1972 set is the bracing, bruising version of “Cherry Red/Split,” songs the band had recently recorded on Split (1971). McPhee’s engagement with the recent material is energetic, and the band locates a tight pocket. There aren’t any audible signs of whatever stresses would soon sunder the trio, sending Pustelnik packing and resulting in a revolving door in the rhythm section that would turn through the next couple decades. On the days documented in Road Hogs, the Groundhogs were just three English white boys, playing the blues.

Jonathan Shaw

#groundhogs #road hogs #live from richmond to pocono #fire #jonathan shaw #album redraw #Dusted magazine #live #white boy blues #blues #boogie #heavy music

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