Welcome! Groundhogs vocalist Joanna Deacon to ROCK-TIL-YOU-DROP

Photograph: Laurence Harvey

ROCK-TIL-YOU-DROP would like to welcome Groundhogs vocalist Joanna Deacon from the Groundhogs to the network. Joanna lives in Wellington in Shropshire and sings with the band, which continues to perform its classic original music, along with early blues material that influenced them.

For those who aren’t familiar with The Groundhogs, Joanna supplied these words about singer and guitarist Tony McPhee who named the band back in the early 60s after the John Lee Hooker song, Groundhog's Blues; as well as few words from Julian Cope's Head Heritage website on the band:

'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 Britannia' and 'Blues in Britain' footage;  he may have been voted 4th best British guitarist by Sounds magazine. He is certainly still featuring in Classic Rock, Mojo, Uncut & Music Maker magazines -  you will have to buy those to see; and yet he remains one of the business’s more enigmatic guitar legends, choosing to just get on and play rather than jump on the music biz bandwagon.'

And this, from Julian Cope:

‘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. 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 Who Will Save the World? The Mighty Groundhogs!

...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!’

News from Louise Rutkowski: This Mortal Coil Box Set, MOJO article and Waves of Canvas release

This Mortal Coil Box Set Release and MOJO Article 

In case you missed the first box set of TMC, or you just want to add to your collection, a re-mastered box set has just been released. It has beautiful packaging design by Vaughn Oliver. There’s a feature article in the January edition of MOJO magazine.

To purchase or find out more click here

Release of “Angel” by Waves on Canvas, Psychonavigation Records, Dublin 

I have collaborated with a wonderful musician and artist in Italy and this is the result! Stefano Guzzetti contacted me as a TMC fan and I loved his own music and website (see www.stefanoguzzetti.com), so we did an artistic exchange: I sang on this track and he made the video for “Mimi” – perfect! I hope to work more with Stefano in the future so watch this space! The release has 4AD connections, with the artwork being done by Vaughan Oliver and a remix by John Fryer. It wasn’t intentional, but just happened that way, which is nice. I hope you like it.

To purchase or find out more click here

New Album

This is progressing well and Irvin and me have been busy writing new material which we’re delighted with. I’ll be launching a Pledge Music campaign soon, so will keep you posted on that. This will be to raise the funds we need to put towards recording, manufacturing, and promotion. You can read more about Pledge at: www.pledgemusic.com. As ever, a big thank you to those of you who keep in touch and are endlessly patient on the emergence of this record!

Rock On, Louise