The growling blues-boogie of La Grange gave ZZ Top their big breakthrough in 1973, though they were already on to their third album by then – and would go on to enjoy a second lease of life in the ’80s.

I was 15 when I first heard ZZ Top, and they were a big change from my musical diet of Slade and Sweet, Bowie and T. Rex at the time.

I liked this song so much I went out and bought the album, Tres Hombres, and I loved that too, with its distinctive green cover, sun-bleached snapshots of the band, and the kind of typeface you’d find on a poster reading: “Wanted – Dead of Alive.”

It was their third album of sleazy stripped-back blues-boogie but the first to bring them to attention, presaging a third-album breakthrough for another stripped-back blues-boogie band called The White Stripes 30 years later.

La Grange was the single that sparked the breakthrough for ZZ Top, and listening now it sounds more than ever like a John Lee Hooker hommage; almost to the point of pastiche.

It’s about the notorious Chicken Ranch brothel on the outskirts of the titular Texas town – the same one immortalised on stage and screen as The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas.

That rhythm is basically the same as his signature groove on Boogie Chillen, played by bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard – amusingly the only member of the trio not to have facial hair – with Billy Gibbons’ growling guitar mathed by his growling vocal.

That driving rhythm surely started life long before ZZ Top and long before John Lee Hooker somewhere in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta.

That’s certainly what the judge thought when Hooker’s music publisher Bernard Besman brought a court case claiming authorship 30 years later, only to be told the rhythm part of the public domain.

By the time of their next album, Tush, the trio had become stadium stars, performing on a vast stage in the shape of Texas, decorated with native cacti and yucca plants, a steer, a buffalo and several rattlesnakes.

I have to admit I wasn’t as much of a fan when they reinvented themselves in the ’80s with sequencers and synthesisers and became MTV video stars, playing further on the comedic value of the lavishly bearded Gibbons and Hill in their big hats and sunglasses – but still grinding out the same old blues-boogie with an electronic undercurrent.