The Groundhogs began in 1962 in New Cross, London, as The Dollar Bills, built around Calcutta-born brothers John and Peter Cruickshank. When guitarist Tony McPhee joined, he steered the band toward the blues and renamed it after John Lee Hooker's Groundhog Blues. Within two years they were backing Hooker on his 1964 UK tour, then supporting Little Walter, Jimmy Reed and Champion Jack Dupree. This episode traces how McPhee took that purist foundation and deliberately demolished it: the 1968 debut Scratchin' the Surface produced by a 19-year-old Mike Batt, the loss of harmonica player Steve Rye that stripped the band down to a power trio with Ken Pustelnik, and the 1969 album Blues Obituary, a title that publicly declared the genre dead to them.

From there the story moves through three consecutive UK top ten albums: Thank Christ for the Bomb  ...