![]() ![]() McPhee carried on with Groundhogs, touring and recording on and off. It went gold, reaching No 5, but would almost certainly have topped the charts had the record label not forgotten to order extra stocks. It was followed in 1971 by Split, another concept album McPhee’s lyrics were inspired by a panic attack he had suffered, and his guitar work had some comparing him to Jimi Hendrix. Musically, it marked a shift away from the blues in a more “prog” direction, though without the noodling beloved of many of their contemporaries. ![]() The band’s career really took off with their third LP, Thank Christ for the Bomb (1970), a semi-concept album dealing with alienation and the threat of nuclear war it penetrated the Top 10 and sold a million copies. In 1968 they released their debut album, Scratchin’ the Surface, produced by Mike Batt, later of Wombles fame McPhee – the main songwriter – and Peter Cruickshank were joined by Ken Pustelnik on drums and Steve Rye on harmonica, but by the time the follow-up, Blues Obituary, appeared, Rye had departed, and the three-piece band remaining is seen by most fans as the classic Groundhogs line-up. He was, he recalled, “crap academically” at school, and spent more time listening to his older brother Sam’s collection of blues records another musically formative experience was weekly visits to the Marquee in Oxford Street to watch the British blues maestro Cyril Davies. Their frantic songs of alienation would piledrive along only to disintegrate into whoops of feedback and wah-wah distortion.”Īnthony Charles McPhee was born on Maat Humberston, a village in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, but grew up in Streatham, south London. They had many fervent fans among fellow musicians such as Mark E Smith, while Julian Cope described their music as “a frantic and unresolved blues played with a hard, non-hippy idealism, and drumming that sounded as though the god Thor was using the gasworks as tom-toms. Tony “TS” McPhee, who has died aged 79, was a guitarist, singer and songwriter who co-founded Groundhogs, the power trio who dominated the British blues-rock scene in the early 1970s they were sometimes put in the prog-rock pigeonhole – but as he put it, “I like to call it progressive in the sense that we were progressing away from the blues.” ![]()
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