The comic strip cover of the 1972 album Who Will Save the World? The Mighty Groundhogs depicts the trio as a band of superheroes – Powerful Pustelnik, Quick Cruickshank and Marvellous McPhee – battling villains determined to overpopulate and pollute the world. But there’s a sting in the tale. The superheroes are a dismal failure. Limping away from their victorious enemies, they transform into their “secret identities”: a “curiously contrived blues and rock group whose name coincidentally happens to be the Groundhogs”. The final panel thunders: “The rock group Groundhogs might even accomplish more with music than the superhero Groundhogs ever will”, which, given that the superhero Groundhogs have just achieved absolutely nothing, is not saying much.
The illustration was the work of celebrated Marvel and DC artist Neal Adams, but, with its self-deprecation and understatement, it seems very Tony McPhee, the Groundhogs’ singer and guitarist, who died on Tuesday. As guitar heroes of the late 60s and early 70s went – and even the most cursory listen to his extraordinarily inventive and powerful playing on Who Will Save the World or its predecessors, Split and Thank Christ for the Bomb, demonstrates how “guitar hero” was a soubriquet McPhee fully deserved – he was remarkably unassuming. Dressed down and resolutely unglamorous, he claimed his second wife had left him because he was “boring”.
