Groundhogs

Although they are still known primarily as a blues rock band, they did not start that way, nor do they continue that way. They were originally called “John Lee’s Groundhogs” and supported John Lee Hooker on his tour of England in 1964. Supporting Hooker was not easy, he was famous for his constant changes of pace. Closer to spoken blues (Talking Blues), or to his own electric version of Delta blues. John Lee's style is immediately recognizable.

His most famous period came from the time when it was difficult to get blues plays in England, demonstrating what can happen when, starting from a blues base, Tony McPhee's exceptional creativity and guitar skill explode. He says, for example, of the song on his album 'Blues Obituary' (where they are apparently burying the blues), that 'Mistreated' is a blues song, but he added 'a few chords' to it.

As a composer, he frequently disguised his feelings (against war, for example) behind ironic titles, and with a penchant for titles that distort common phrases into puns.

The band is considered a legendary group, but really although the bassists and drummers were top-notch, the center of Groundhogs was always the guitarist, songwriter and singer. Tony McPhee in Groundhogs deserves the description of Captain Sensible as 'the English Jimi Hendrix'. I'll get to the wonderful Robin Trower in a future article naturally.

There are a wide variety of sounds and timbres that McPhee uses, his skill with the pedals is amazing, but his sound never stops being completely original and recognizable. There is a lot of sophistication in the different arrangements he proposes and in his expansion of the limits of what an essentially blues guitarist could be and do, he shows many possible paths to follow.