Radio Gonzo

I was a latecomer to the music of the Groundhogs, only discovering them – almost by accident – in the early 1980s. In fact I discovered them first because I stole a sample from one of their records. I was producing an album for a North Devon punk band and one of the songs had to end with an explosion. In those days before one had all sorts of on-line sample banks at one's disposal purely by clicking a mouse a few times, one had to get one's samples where one could find them, and the bloke who was recording the album turned up one day with a copy of a record called Thank Christ for the Bomb. From this we nicked the sound of a nuclear explosion. I feel fairly safe in admitting this felony 30 years on, because the record was never released and even if it had been I don't think anyone would have bought the bloody thing anyway. However, in the breaks between recording, the engineer played me bits of this record and I soon became very enamoured of their particularly English brand of madness, fusing blues, h