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!’

Still Gigging. Still blogging. Still tweeting

I picked up the phone today. I should be doing much more of this in 2010. I hate phones. At least I hate talking on them. Drop-kicking them is fun.

Anyway, today I spoke to Neil Fishwick who runs Stillgigging.com. Nice bloke. Much like me, Neil had an epiphany one day; his was a couple of years ago whilst driving his car, and inspired by hearing the Stray Cats on the radio. I wonder whether they're still gigging, he thought? And so it was. The name 'en all.

His website is "a place for legends", and a place for fans and musicians alike to "rediscover, relive & share musical memories". It has a website and a Facebook page. Neil is a music fan, not a musician, and he doesn't promote, but he aims to provide a place on-line for bands who were once more famous than they are today, to be found and to promote themselves.

Sounds similar, don't it? So we shared some anguish and frustration over running our respective sites and social networking and stuff, and by the end I know I sounded thoroughly depressed. I hate phones. I hate social networking. On-line. It's doing my head in. The constant tweeting and pinging.

After the call, I remembered loads of things I should have mentioned like the franchising of the gigs, and the Q&A I want to do with him. See what I mean? I can't think straight on the phone. I hate 'em. Anway, suffice it to say, I hope to stay in touch with Neil in the future, and maybe one day even 'do business' of some kind together. You knows?

Right now though, I'm turning this off and going to watch my Nirvana 'Live at Reading' DVD. And take myself back to a muddy, rainy Sunday night in August 1992. And someone else's pain.

After I've tweeted this of course.