My mate Paul and I headed for the west of England in his blue, short-base, 1200 cc, VW beach buggy. Very lightweight and very speedy! We looked forward to a two week summer holiday in St. Ives. A tiny, charming fishing village on Cornwall’s north coast. I was still 9 years away from getting a driver’s license, so as always, Paul was in the driver’s seat. We travelled through the night, westward from London and crossed the country on empty, unlit roads. There was no motorway.
The only drama we encountered on the journey was passing fields of corn in a soft-top car with no windows. We captured thousands of tiny flies which landed in drifts in the back of the buggy. These we scooped out in handfuls. And on the radio, one item of interest showed up in the middle of the night: Jan Akkerman’s high-velocity guitar playing on “Hocus Pocus”, by the Dutch band Focus. We’d never before heard anything like that.
At that time St. Ives was known for being a hippy-magnet and we naively wanted to be a part of it. I imagined conversations on peace and love and on music and I fantasized about meeting pretty hippy girls. But in reality there was none of that. In fact I don’t think we spoke to anybody apart from each other during those two weeks. The only people I saw that might have been hippies sat tightly together on the pier in St. Ives doing nothing, mostly looking bored. Cool! And there were never more than 20 of them.
The very first pub we visited in the center of the village was packed with people. Mostly men of course. We queued for 15 minutes to buy a couple of pints, but when we reached the bar we were immediately asked to leave. “We don’t serve longhairs in here!” On the way out we saw a hand-written sign saying the same thing, which we’d missed. We were unlucky choosing that dump as our first stop, but we found places that could live with the horror of long hair. Apart from warming soup outside our tent and getting sunburnt, the most memorable event of those two weeks was a concert with bluesy power trio The Groundhogs.
We’d been listening to The Groundhogs for a while, since their third album Thank Christ For The Bomb came out. That album is now mistakenly called “Thanks Christ…” on Spotify. Very naughty! They had a lot of success, especially with their fourth album, Split, which includes the muscular “Cherry Red”. Tony (TS) McPhee was the main man; guitarist, singer and songwriter. The TS is short for Tough Shit (really), and that’s no exaggeration if you check out “Cherry Red”.
Tony was backed by Pete Cruickshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums at that time, but there were very many personnel changes over the years. As late as 2011 Cruickshank and Pustelnik still played in The Groundhogs Rhythm Section and McPhee was active live until 2014, despite having had a stroke 5 years previously. Still well worth a listen!