Known primarily as a hard rock/blues rock group, the Groundhogs have become a legend in the world of rock, they never set out to become a Prog rock band though during 1970-1972 created some imaginative experimental music born from the pen of Tony McPhee, and made much of the band's work interesting material for followers of Prog - social, mindwarp, ecological and psyche/space rock themes and unusual instruments found their way into the band's albums made during this their most progressive and arguably most fruitful period, featuring many regard as the classic Groundhogs line-up of Tony (T.S.) McPhee guitar/vocals, Pete Cruikshank on bass guitar and Ken Pustelnik on drums.

On the surface, the Groundhogs could easily have become one of the dozens of British "blooze and boogie" bands that cropped up in the late '60s and early '70s in the manner of Savoy Brown or Foghat, but Tony (T.S.) McPhee's ideas and ambitions were just eccentric enough to push the band into directions too challenging for most mainstream listeners, and as with much of their catalog it's McPhee's sense of invention that makes 1974's Solid memorable…

This is classic raw British blues-rock with a slightly prog edge and features a ‘juggernaut’ of riffs. The audio has been remastered and this comes with two bonus tracks; the mono single cut of ‘BDD’ plus the B-side of that single, a brilliant solo acoustic McPhee performance of ‘Gasoline’.

Although this nugget clocks in at only a hair over half-an-hour, it reveals the Groundhogs at what was arguably the crest of the Brit blues power trio's creative peak. The band featured the strong sonic personalities of Tony T.S. McPhee (guitar/vocals), Peter Cruickshank (bass) and Ken Pustelnik. Their straight-ahead heavy rock was more than a simple extension of 12-bar blues as their penchant for incendiary improvisation and strong original material rate among their assets. Live at Leeds '71 was recorded on April 13, 1971 as they opened up a series of U.K. concerts for the Rolling Stones. According to urban legend, this live set was documented and pressed in a very limited edition at the behest of Mick Jagger, and as a professional courtesy of sorts…

If you're in a band, you can either go with the flow the music takes or plant your feet and refuse to be moved. The Groundhogs, under the leadership of Tony McPhee, one of England's best guitarists, did the former. McPhee was a bluesman through and through, and the Groundhogs started life as a blues trio, but fairly quickly the music took a rock turn and suddenly the Groundhogs had a sizable following. After the cranked-out heavy blues-rock of Blues Obituary, they found their voice and came to notice with the very political Thank Christ for the Bomb, represented here by three tracks ("Strange Town," "Rich Man, Poor Man," "Eccentric Man") which show that while McPhee's writing might have been blues-based, he'd moved well beyond the three-chord, 12-bar format into something that used the band well, leaving room for his guitar solos but offering real substance in the ambitious songs…