Steamhammer were a short-lived band who emerged in Britain’s blues-rock boom of the late Sixties and disappeared soon after.

I have to ‘fess up and admit I’d never heard of Steamhammer until this week when their 1970 album Mountains was recommended by an unlikely source – Captain Sensible of The Damned.

I say unlikely because you couldn’t get much farther away from the minimalist punk of his own band (at least in their early days) then these proggy blues-rockers from the Sussex coast.

But what do I know of those pre-punk, pre-Glam days?  Steamhammer’s entire career began before my time in 1968 and ended four years later, when I was listening to T. Rex and Slade. 

They were formed in the seaside town of Worthing by a bunch of blues and folk veterans, most notably Martin Pugh and Martin Quittendon, two hardworking session musicians who co-wrote Maggie May with Rod Stewart.

Starting out as an electric blues group in the late Sixties, they found work right away as backing band for blues legend Freddie King on his European tour. But transformed into full-blown progsters in 1970 on their third album Mountain – the one loved by Sensible.

That’s where we find this track, Hold That Train, on which they sound – to my ears anyway – like an English equivalent of ZZ Top (if ZZ Top had come from the Sussex coast.

Their sound was typical of the times. As Wiki puts it: “Like many of their peers, the band experimented with instrumental passages, introspective lyrics, and ultrasonic guitar effects, along with folk, jazz and classical influences.”

Within a year of their debut album, which included the single Junior’s Wailing – a hit when covered by Status Quo the same year – original members Quittendon and Michael Rushton had left the band, who broadened their sound with the addition of Steve Jolliffe on sax and flute.

Their third album Mountains was critically acclaimed but Steamhammer lost most of the band members over the course of their subsequent tour. By the time it was over, they only had original guitarist Pugh and drummer Mick Bradley in the fold.

After their fourth and final album was poorly received, the band broke up before they could even promote it, and Bradley died the same year of leukemia, aged 25.

Several Steamhammer members would go on to work with each other in projects like Armageddon and in 2020 Pugh put the band back together and they recorded a new album, Wailin’ Again, in 2022.