The Groundhogs

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

We're thrilled to bits that the Groundhogs have agreed to headline our main High Street event on August 29th.

Here's a short biography from Joanna

Tony McPhee may be the godfather of grunge, ask Nirvana producer Jack Endino, he may have been playing with blues legends (Hooker, Dupree, Wolf)  in the British Blues boom check out BBC4's 'Blues Britania' and 'Blues in Britain' footage. He's still featuring in Classic Rock, Mojo & Music Maker magazines, you will have to buy those… and yet he remains one of the businesses more enigmatic guitar legends, choosing to just get on and play rather than jump on the biz bandwagon.

Who, what, where, when etc…. "In the very early 1970s, the Groundhogs were an ultra-hip, Utopian musical force playing their Top 10 album songs on Top of the Pops and recording alongside Can, Hawkwind and Amon Düül 2 for Andrew Lauder’s groundbreaking Liberty/United Artists record label. And, like the above mentioned groups, the Groundhogs’ albums were housed in supercool gatefolds or triple-gatefolds or even 12” x 15” unfolding comic books which portrayed the individual group members as superheroes. The Groundhogs referred to themselves as ‘Men of Destiny with secret thoughts of saving the world’, and gave their albums titles such as Thank Christ for the Bomb, Split and (best of all) Who Will Save the World? The Mighty Groundhogs!

And the Groundhogs music was something else entirely. It was a frantic and unresolved post-blues played at breakneck speed with a hard non-hippy idealism and drumming that sounded as though the god Thor was using the gasworks as tom-toms… Their frantic songs of alienation would piledrive along only to disintegrate into whoops of feedback and sonic wah-distortion. As a 15-year-old, I’d sit in the living-room of local axe-hero and watch him mime ecstatically to the guitar freakout in which T.S. makes his Stratocaster sound like the flushing of an electric toilet!"  - Julian Cope

Fresh and feisty from touring Germany, The Groundhogs are appearing at THE BRIDGNORTH MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL on 29th August…. Complete with Electric Flushing Toilet!

Contact The Groundhogs
http://www.thegroundhogs.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/tonymcpheethegroundhogs