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 synthesiser 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
• This article was amended on 11 June 2023, to correct an editing error over the chart placing of Solid in 1974.
