"Strange Town," The Groundhogs (1970) and The Fall (2008)

John Lee Hooker's favorite backing band when he toured England in the 1960s. The Groundhogs. Another one of those Top Ten British bands, like Hawkwind, The Pretty Things, The Jam, that never won the same kind of success in the US. They were not played on the classic rock radio I listened to on the West Coast, for instance, although they absolutely perfectly fit the classic rock radio format. Tony McPhee another guitar god with the tasty rhythm riffing blues licks. Folkie interludes abound but full-on maximum r&b pounding and stomping jamrock when it counts. Biker gang cousins to Derek and the Dominos, who were all over classic rock radio. You go for any of this sort of music, blues rock, progressive rock, classic rock radio from the 1970s and 1980s on the harder edged garage rock side you will love their '71 album, Thank Christ For The Bomb (right, the sacrilege probably didn't help their cause in US markets). Not to be missed, anyway. Underrated classic rock album great. Although, if you must forgo the full album experience, "Strange Town" is the peak. The song. 

And here's Mark E. Smith, The Fall, being a Groundhogs' "copyist" (as he once said of Pavement, mere "Fall copyists"). And almost four decades later, 2008, Smith sounds drunk, slurring his way through his crank paranoia. It's a "Strangetown," everyone is so glum. He turns the hippie rock into an abstracted studio pop punk noir. A tight edgy riff rock rhythm with a few space rock sound effects. It scales down the original, gives it that Smithian (Mancunian?) bleak, scrappy Fall twist and demonstrates, again, Smith could still sometimes push the right buttons. At age fifty.