Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i UNCUT

Hallelujah Anyhow MERGE 9/10 IN times like these, it is easy to see everything as political. A letter in last month’s Uncut complained about what the writer perceived as the “anti-Trump sentiment that is threaded across one issue to the next – little jabs sprinkled in album reviews and articles”. Just over half a year into Trump’s presidency, however, how can artists – so many of them, as our correspondent noted disparagingly, “progressive” – articulate themselves without acknowledging that their music now exists in a changed world? Hallelujah Anyhow, the eighth album by MC Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger, is a product of that world, but it features no overt references to our political realities. Instead of a specific language of protest and indictment, the lyric sheet is home to…

“I’M a strong woman who is ready to stand up and claim what I created, and stand in the light and fucking own it,” Brix Smith Start tells Uncut , explaining why she and a raft of her ex-Fall bandmates reconvened as the Extricated, first to play old songs and increasingly – as documented on debut album Part 2 – to write new ones. After leaving The Fall – for the second time – in 1996, Smith Start never wanted to play again (“I’d been broken,” she says). Mark E Smith’s companion from when they met in April 1983 to their divorce six years later, she brought California sun to some of The Fall’s most celebrated work, but had embraced a new…

Folksinger Vol 2 ACONY 8/10 As Old Crow Medicine Show moved through the Noughties, they steadily outgrew their reliance on old-time American folk and blues, opting instead to create their own brand of raw-boned, high-energy string music. It was a transition that brought a fair amount of success during Nashville’s Americana boom, but founder member Willie Watson clearly had unfinished business. Since quitting the band in 2012, having played on six studio albums, the singer-guitarist has re-immersed himself in the trad canon. 2014’s fine solo debut, Folksinger Vol 1, offered variants on tunes by Lead Belly, Utah Phillips and others, alongside thoughtful arrangements of songs from the public domain. This follow-up pretty much follows the same formula, with Watson once again bringing in David Rawlings as producer (the pair first…

Arise BROWNSWOOD 8/10 THE British jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine once observed how young jazz musicians always seemed to be embarrassed about their non-jazz influences. “In private they’d be talking about funk and punk and dancehall,” he said. “But put them in front of a camera or a journalist and they’d only talk about Art Blakey or Duke Ellington. It’s as if they were ashamed of admitting that they had a life outside of jazz.” A new generation of jazz musicians, however, particularly British ones, are less hung up about such things. For the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, GoGo Penguin, Laura Jurd, Femi Temowo, Seb Rochford and Matthew Halsall, “jazz” is less a genre, more a portal into another world, an interface that can be used to transform and translate any…

Music For The Age Of Miracles TAPETE 8/10 AROUND the time of the 2009 release of The Clientele’s Bonfires On The Heath, Alasdair MacLean described the imminent cessation of his band’s activities as more like a chapter’s close than a final page. Either way, it was quite an achievement for the story to last so long given The Clientele’s happenstance existence. After evolving in fits and starts in London through the ’90s, the band only solidified into an ongoing concern when Merge released the early-works collection Suburban Light in 2000, thereby minting an American following that became surprisingly passionate for an act brandishing such thoroughly British reference points as the poetry of Ralph Hodgson. The influence of Surrealist art and literature provided a more continental air to the four exquisitely…

In The Kingdom Of Dreams LOOSE 8/10 IT no doubt says much about the ties that bind and the like that to back him on his first solo record, Ian Felice has basically reformed the original lineup of The Felice Brothers, the band he’s fronted now for 12 years and almost as many albums. So there are discreet appearances here by brother James on keyboards and Josh Rawson on bass, while the LP also marks the return of the errant Simone Felice, as drummer and producer, following recent successful production work with The Lumineers and Bat For Lashes. Simone has been no stranger to subsequent Felice Brothers sessions, but this is his closest collaboration with Ian since 2008, when Simone quit the band to form the short-lived The Duke &…

DAF Das Ist DAF GRÖNLAND 8/10 “Sex, dancing, love, politics, that’s what it was about,” said DAF frontman Gabi Delgado when asked recently to reflect on his perverse act’s unlikely legacy. Boiling things down to the basics, after all, is what the Düsseldorf duo of Delgado and drummer Robert Görl did best. From the crude acronym of their name, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, to their efficient dismantling of Suicide and punk, through to the accelerated creative streak in the first phase of their career that resulted in four striking albums in under three years, DAF made a little go a long way. Across pop culture, the pair’s brutal, tongue-in-cheek approach and rather stern, homoerotic image has had a profound effect on a certain strain of outsider artist, shaping all manner of…

ASKED about religion in 2015, Morrison replied: “I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.” A former born-again Christian who flirted with Scientology in the ’80s, the singer has referred to himself as an atheist for some years. But in recent months a video has appeared on YouTube showing him singing with members of what look like an American evangelical church. “What an adventure!” he’s heard to exclaim. A charismatic minister introduces him as “our brother Van Morrison”. The video was uploaded by an organisation called the Agape International Spiritual Centre, founded in 1986 by Michael Bernard Beckwith and based in Culver City, LA. The YouTube video’s blurb, which has since been removed, explained that Morrison generally live-streams Agape’s services from his Belfast home, and that this was his first…

IN the earliest days of The White Stripes, Jack White found a 20-foot American flag in an antiques shop, with the blue and white field cut out. White’s nephew Ben Blackwell recalls how this particular version of Old Glory became integral to the band’s very first performance, during an open-mic night at Detroit’s Gold Dollar club in 1997. “He said, ‘Oh my God! I want you to put this up behind us when we’re playin. And I’ve got this red carpet that I want you to roll out before we set up our instruments, so everything’s red and white.’ Unlike others, Jack didn’t seem overly concerned about partying. It was all about the performance and whether or not people were into it. It was a sort of underground professionalism. But…

STEVE Wynn manoeuvres his chopsticks around a chicken momo and theorises that he might not actually be there. He might not actually be at Phayul, a Himalayan restaurant hidden in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens, New York. He might not be talking about the triumphant new Dream Syndicate album, How Did I Find Myself Here?, the band’s first in nearly 30 years. He might not even have formed the band in 1981. They might not have recorded four records of incredibly influential and ear-bending indie rock during the ’80s. He might not be holding chopsticks or biting into that dumpling. Everything around us – including you, the reader, clutching this magazine – might simply be a dream deep in the subconscious of Kendra Smith. This sneaky existential postulation begins…

“I always felt the need to work with the people with crazy ideas…” STEVE WINWOOD “I WAS playing with Eric Clapton at his house when we were trying to get our music together,” remembers Steve Winwood, “and Ginger Baker just showed up at the door. I thought, ‘Great, we’ll have someone who’ll play drums with us.’ But I didn’t quite realise that Eric had a much different, more extensive relationship with Ginger on the back of Cream. Ginger has a specific personality… and um, I think Eric had issues with the way he was playing. It was a complicated old band, Blind Faith… “I always felt a need to work with the people with crazy, vibrant ideas,” Winwood adds later. “I needed those wild ideas, otherwise my music would be…

Although “Light My Fire” was written by Doors guitarist Robby Krieger, it was a hit born of many hands. The song was written by Krieger over a weekend, after Jim Morrison challenged his bandmates to take the songwriting burden off his shoulders, but the sultry vocal was all Morrison, while the distinctive introduction was by keyboardist Ray Manzarek. The band were then persuaded by producer Paul Rothchild to place the organ at the start, fixing the song with a spiralling upbeat sense of momentum before it had even begun. “The song trumpeted its own arrival,” recalls Elektra founder Jac Holzman, who signed The Doors by persuading them his boutique label could give them the attention they felt they deserved. The success of “Light My Fire” turned The Doors into the…

“HOW we doin’?” asks the ever-genial Richard Hawley, making the best of a four-second gap in this headlong hurtle through the music of Scott Walker’s most celebrated years as he prepares to take on “Montague Terrace (In Blue)”. Answer: pretty good, in the circumstances. This breathless tribute (18 songs in 75 minutes, no chitchat) sets the indie tag team of Hawley, Jarvis Cocker, John Grant and Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør a daunting task. While Jules Buckley and the Heritage Orchestra forensically recreate the Wally Stott/Angela Morley studio arrangements of Scotts 1, 2, 3 and 4 and ’Til The Band Comes In, the four have been left with little in terms of artistic wriggle-space. Fill a Scott Walker-shaped hole, or be found wanting. All four both succeed and fail; Cocker and…

“To Alan, it was a death knell to go back and listen to what you’d done before” LIZ LAMERE “IT really was a work from the heart and something Alan felt very proud of,” Liz Lamere says of her husband’s final album before his passing in July 2016. Lamere collaborated with Alan Vega – one half of the cult protopunk duo Suicide – on the album, as she has done on numerous of his solo releases since 1980. Six years in the making, IT was posthumously released in July and is one of Vega’s most potent and visceral LPs. There are heavy throbs and industrial clangs, fizzling electronics layered beneath Vega’s vocals, which switch from an angsty croon to something recalling a grizzly Mark E Smith. It’s an album that…

“Keith became this rock-star frontman; I was the backroom boy” MARK WIRTZ EVEN now, it’s difficult to get to the bottom of A Teenage Opera, a hallucinatory project that was born 50 years ago and has always existed somewhere between fantasy and reality. One of the first proposed rock operas, it spawned a surprise hit, “Excerpt From ‘A Teenage Opera’” (better known as “Grocer Jack”), co-written by producer Mark Wirtz and Tomorrow singer Keith West, but the project died after the follow-up was a flop. Now, inspired by his love of “Grocer Jack”, writer-actor Peter Gallagher has written a version of A Teenage Opera for the Youth Music Theatre, finally bringing it to the stage for a premiere in Bracknell last month. Mark Wirtz, then an in-house producer with EMI,…

1 THE CLIENTELE Everyone You Meet Alasdair Maclean’s group return with their first album in eight years, Music For The Age Of Miracles, reviewed on p34. This bittersweet power-pop gem is a highlight, driven by gauzy strings, distant horns and autumnal, finger-picked guitars. 2 CHRIS HILLMAN Here She Comes Again The former Byrd recruits some of his old compadres for this robust run through a Hillman/McGuinn co-write that only ever appeared on an Australian live album. Tom Petty provides the production, while assorted Byrds and Heartbreakers appear on the full album, Bidin’ My Time, reviewed on p25. 3 WAND Plum Almost as productive as their friend Ty Segall, these Los Angeles psych-rockers, led by the talented Cory Hanson, have got quieter and weirder on their fourth album, Plum, reviewed on…

Bidin’ My Time ROUNDER 8/10 BIDIN’ My Time, Chris Hillman’s first solo album in more than a decade, opens with a familiar tune: a new version of “Bells of Rhymney”, adapted by Pete Seeger from lyrics by the Welsh poet Idris Davies. Hillman has been living with the song for most of his life, having first recorded it for The Byrds’ 1965 debut, Mr Tambourine Man, an album that melded folk songs with electric guitars and invented a new genre, simply called folk rock. Naturally, Hillmans’ voice has changed over the last half-century, taking on a slightly gruffer grain and adding a soft twang to his syllables, but the guitars still chime like church bells and he still harmonises sweetly with former bandmate David Crosby and long-time collaborator Herb Pederson.…

THERE’S a good reason why Robert Sotelo’s debut album often recalls The Beatles. “I’ve always actively avoided them, due to my musical snobbery and obscurist tendencies,” he says. “It was only recently that I realised how good they were! “This album is me trying to imitate people like The Beatles, Paul McCartney, XTC and Steely Dan, but with a limited technical ability, so it ends up sounding like the lo-fi stuff I’m really into, like Beat Happening, Karl Blau or Cate Le Bon. It’s ambitious, but not technical.” Robert Sotelo is the nom de plume of Andrew Doig – Robert being his middle name, Sotelo his Argentinian mother’s maiden name – who has waited until the grand old age of 36 to release a solo LP. He’s spent years playing…

“In The Style Council we really wanted to catch the initial spark of things…”MICK TALBOT HOW did the working relationship with Paul Weller begin? When we were starting out we talked about a lot of things we had in common and Paul gave me a lot of 7-inches – mainly soul stuff. The more commercial end of jazz – the Blue Note stuff that became jukebox hits in America. But there were lots of influences. Books by Colin MacInnes. And films – À Bout De Souffle, all the French new wave, clothes, style, the soundtracks. And we talked about clothes. A lot of that might seem superficial to other people, but that really informed a lot of what we did, how we presented our artwork. Stacked up together, the LPs…

ACETONE 1992-2001 LIGHT IN THE ATTIC 8/10 ACETONE didn’t go completely unnoticed in their time. Formed at the back end of grunge in 1992, they were packed off on support tours for The Verve, Spiritualized and Oasis over the following years, though none of those audiences were likely to embrace the bucolic subtlety of their foraging guitar music. They were a three-piece without a natural frontman, a band who sang in hushed tones or else none at all. And their songs tended to be impressionistic pieces that nosed around for a groove rather than concerning themselves with hooks and snappy choruses. Bassist Richie Lee and guitar player Mark Lightcap had met at the California Institute Of The Arts in Los Angeles during the ’80s. Hooking up with local student Steve…

BOB Weir’s friendship with The National began in 2012, when he invited Aaron and the Devendorf brothers to his TRI studio in San Rafael to participate in a live webcast. After hooking up with The National for their Day Of The Dead project, Weir reunited with the Devendorfs and Dessners for 2016’s Blue Mountain , his first solo album in three decades, and subsequent tour. “We’re definitely fans,” says Bryan. “I saw five Dead shows. They were very popular for kids in our schools. Grateful Dead. The Allman Brothers. Phish.” “Touring with Bob was educational,” adds Scott. “He is very organised about the music. It was interesting to see how much thought had gone into it, just the changes and all the bits…

“There was a conflicted tone to Grant’s work …a sadness” “IN early ’77 I asked Grant if he’d form a band with me,” writes Robert Forster in Grant & I , an elegant memoir-memorial to his band and his bandmate, and the events which formed them. “‘No,’ was his blunt reply.” Nonetheless, the pair, already well bonded via film and literature amid Brisbane’s arty milieu, hatched The Go-Betweens later that year: brittle and smart, sweet and sour, they were rarely less than compelling. Grant & I follows the band’s treasured yet choppy course, as well as the twists and turns of Forster’s own life, but at its core it explores a friendship which evolves from arch student know-alls, to indie-star cohorts, to two slightly care-worn middle-aged men falling in and…

HYPE! SHOUT! FACTORY 9/10 “WE were the guys in high school that people used to beat up, and we couldn’t talk to the pretty girls,” Van Conner explains partway through the 1996 music documentary Hype!. “We’re nerds, goddammit!” He’s talking about his band Screaming Trees, but the bass player is also talking about nearly everybody in the Seattle music scene, none of whom resembles the traditional rock star. There’s a chuckle in Conner’s voice, but also pride: rather than the angst-ridden young men long identified with grunge, most local musicians were just regular people driven indoors by the constant rain and a fanatical love of rock music. They weren’t bred to be celebrities. They were rock geeks. That discrepancy between how Seattle saw itself and how the rest of the…

SAM SHEPARD Playwright, author, actor (1943 – 2017) IN her foreword to Sam Shepard’s final book The One Inside, Patti Smith describes the narrator as “a loner who doesn’t want to be alone”. This character, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Shepard himself, has “been an actor for most of his adult life, enabling a kind of travel that requires no passport, just a truck, script and his dogs on the scent of nostalgia”. It is an evocative description of Shepard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, sometime actor and aspiring drummer whose work obsessively mapped the deep contours of the American soul. Smith is one of the many rock luminaries to fall into Shepard’s orbit – the pair met while he was drumming with The Holy Modal…

“I like standing behind someone who knows what they’re doing” PETER BUCK So, Corin Tucker, you’ve got a new band, and you’ve got Peter Buck playing guitar. Fancy doing 220 shows in the next year, driving around America in a van? Tucker laughs, in a manner that suggests she’d rather scoop out her eyes with melon ballers. “No! No thank you! We’re old enough to know the parts of being in a band that are super fun and to concentrate on those.” Tucker and Buck’s new band is Filthy Friends – in which they’re joined by fellow Pacific Northwest luminaries Bill Rieflin, Scott McCaughey and Kurt Bloch – and their first album, Invitation, is a fizzing and concise piece of sturdy guitar pop that will satisfy fans of either Sleater-Kinney…

HIS parents were holding out hopes for law school for their son, but Moses Sumney always had a very different idea of his future. As early as seven, his twin passions were singing and writing, and he went on to graduate from UCLA’s creative writing programme in 2012. He soon surrendered, though, to the pull of his first love – music. Five years on, the 27-year-old Californian native, born of Ghanaian parents, is releasing his debut LP, Aromanticism , a set of sophisticated yet intimate, cosmic soul-jazz songs with the kind of emotional power you might expect of someone who as a teen looked first to India Arie for expressions of self-esteem. Later, Sumney turned to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, and he admits he “finds it difficult to connect…

“I’m looking forward to making more records…” JAMES MURPHY You’ve said you were feeling ‘uncomfortable’ about reforming LCD – is that still the case? I wasn’t uncomfortable – I knew I had to make an imperfect decision and that, I think, was really healthy to do. Breaking up the band was in a way smashing something, then putting the band back together was, in a way, smashing how perfect breaking up the band was, like, ‘OK, I’m gonna get rid of all that safety that was in having done the perfect finish, and get back in where I can be judged again…’ You had a huge number of songs going into this record. I had a huge number of pretty developed ideas. This record has 10 songs, which I never…

IT’S not as if Emily Haines has been idle in the decade since her last solo album, with four albums fronting Metric and a couple more with Broken Social Scene. “But in a funny way my life has functioned in decades,” she says. “A lot of things aligned to make this seem like the time.” Recorded in Toronto in autumn 2016 with a borrowed grand piano, Choir Of The Mind was conceived “with the idea of escaping from what sometimes feels like a very narrow definition of my identity, exploring other sonics, broadening the scope of who I am”. More personal and “nuanced” than her work with Metric, she’s not explicit about the life circumstances behind the record, but describes “a form of healing” that involves…

TIM Mislock’s debut solo LP, Now Is The Last Best Time , is an intensely personal affair. It was inspired by his stepfather’s drift into Alzheimer’s and his mother’s devotion as caregiver. The Brooklyn-based avant-rocker calls the album “a meditation on the ideas of sacrifice and service within a relationship and how you can lose yourself in love”. The subject may sound gloomy, but Now Is The Last Best Time is a sublime exercise in sumptuous, sensual, freeform post-rock. Mislock cites Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor as influences, as well as minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley. But his prime inspiration was The Sinking Of The Titanic by Gavin Bryars, the modern classical piece that…

“IT’S not the done thing to talk about how happy you are with your record, but I’m really pleased with it,” an excited Stuart Braithwaite says. Every Country’s Sun marks an interesting time for Mogwai, who find themselves making their first proper album without founding member John Cummings, who left in 2015. “There’s one less person writing songs, so we had to write a bit more music each, but we just got on with it.” The band went back to America to record with Dave Fridmann, who produced their 2001 album, Rock Action . “We’d remained friends with Dave and we just wanted to get away and immerse ourselves in the record, and he’s been doing really good stuff since we worked with…

WAND Plum DRAG CITY 9/10 Best yet from prolific psych-rockers. CORY Hanson didn’t hang about when he formed Wand with fellow art school chums Lee Landey and Evan Burrows in 2013. Their first three albums were released in a creative dash of just 14 months, a prolific flurry to rival that of friend and fellow West Coast adventurer Ty Segall, on whose God? label Wand made their start. In fact, Burrows and Hanson, the latter dressed in a natty safari suit, spent most of last year touring as part of Segall’s backing band, The Muggers. Hanson has slightly eased up of late. Last November saw the arrival of his comely solo debut, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo, whose sound marked a clear departure from Wand’s crunching psych-rock. Loud guitars were…

Absolutely Free ZAPPA RECORDS/UME 7/10 FRANK Zappa’s name isn’t featured on the front of 1967’s Absolutely Free, The Mothers Of Invention’s second album. But, as his looming mustachioed face on the cover hints, the disc would serve as the introduction of the real Zappa, for whom the word “iconoclastic” seems to have been invented. Reissued with a rich remastering job, eight bonus tracks and a reprint of Zappa’s mail-order-only libretto, Absolutely Free remains a difficult and ambitious manifesto a half-century later, a sometimes literal overture for the more major works that would follow. Released in May 1967, at the dawn of the Summer Of Love and a few weeks before Sgt Pepper, Absolutely Free was Zappa’s first crack at freedom in the recording studio. With producer Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan,…

 WHEN Matt Berninger moved from Cincinnati to New York in the mid-’90s, he ended up living in Gowanus, Brooklyn’s former industrial neighbourhood then fallen on hard times. “I lived in a loft, in an illegal apartment,” he says. “It was on a desolate block where people would torch their cars for insurance. One night, when we were practising, a car exploded during a huge rainstorm. The fire department was there. It was beautiful. There was a dairy distributor who dumped all their spoiled and expired milk, so the streets would be filled with rotten milk. I came to New York with a bit of an attitude. New York sucked, but it was fascinating, like coming into the Emerald City in The Wizard Of Oz. But at that time, everything sucked.”…

ON July 14, 1997, The White Stripes made their debut live apearance, playing three songs during an open mic night at Detroit’s Gold Dollar. Twenty years later, Jack White, the band’s creative mastermind, has announced plans for a new solo album, his third, which he is recording in New York and Los Angeles. In the intervening two decades, much has happened to White – he is no longer simply a rock star, but he is also a songwriter, producer, label boss, businessman, impresario and collector of esoterica ranging from vintage comic books to modernist furniture. It’s not bad going, admittedly, for a man who began his professional career at the age of 15, working as an apprentice furniture upholsterer. The weight of White’s work can be measured, to some degree,…

MOST people would buy a cake. But in July 2016, to mark the seventh birthday of their Nashville HQ, Third Man launched the first-ever vinyl record to be played in space. Inspired by a video of a father and son who attached a camera to a weather balloon in upstate New York, Jack White contacted Kevin Carrico, Third Man’s electromechanical expert. Carrico duly set about creating The Icarus Craft, a pyramidal aluminium frame with a “space-proof” turntable fixed to a high-altitude balloon. The disc chosen was Third Man’s three millionth pressing, a recording of Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn”. As the craft hit peak altitude at just under 18 miles, the turntable continued to play. Even after the balloon had burst and a parachute brought the craft down to earth,…

FANS may have thought Kendra Smith disappeared, but really she just appeared somewhere else. “It’s pretty primitive and I like it that way,” she says of her home in a remote part of northern California, where she’s lived for more than 20 years. While her music career was spent moving quickly from one project to another — one LP each with The Dream Syndicate and one with Opal, an EP with The Guild Of Temporal Adventurers, and finally a solo record on 4AD – she has committed herself to this one plot of land for longer than she was with any one band. “If you get intimate with a piece of land, you get super attached to its well-being. “Part of the culture I experience here is having this large…

ZZ TOP are not a band that believe in making their fans wait for the good stuff. On the very first song, pretty much everything in the locker is thrown at the audience. There’s Billy Gibbons laying down a growling vocal of barely comprehensible grit. There’s the effortless swing of Dusty Hill and Frank Beard’s rhythm section. The singalong chorus. The cartoon noir lyrics about dangerous women. The frequent guitar solos and occasional bass solo. The choreographed line-dancing and guitar-swinging from Hill and Gibbons that holds a line between entertainment and self-parody. From the opening salvo of “Got Me Under Pressure” to the closing second encore of “Jailhouse Rock” 20 songs later, the Top barely waver from delivering these same ingredients over and over in slightly different combinations, but without…

DETROIT For a filmmaker used to working on a big canvas, Kathryn Bigelow thrives when shooting in tight spaces. There is that bar scene in Near Dark – “I hate it when they ain’t been shaved!” bemoans Bill Paxton’s vampire – the unbearably tense vignettes set in Iraq’s Kill Zone in The Hurt Locker or the night-time operation at Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in Zero Dark Thirty. For her new film, Bigelow uses a sizeable backdrop –five days of rioting that took place in Detroit during 1967 – to tell an intimate story, set for the most part in cramped, uncomfortable confines. Bigelow has done riots before – in her millennium-set thriller Strange Days – but those depicted here are real events. The trigger was a heavy-handed police raid…

US AND THEM? It’s testament to the broad and harmonious appeal of Uncut, and to the music that unites its readership, that the September 2017 letters page is dominated by American contributors. I expect those living within the US will see the country from a different perspective than mine, but it seems nakedly apparent to me that the current US president seeks to divide nations and destroy precisely the sort of international harmony encouraged by Uncut. Some of the criticism levelled at Roger Waters was therefore less than edifying. Yes, of course rock musicians are sometimes afforded a luxury in political naivety that simply isn’t practical or viable for ordinary punters. Waters is not unusual in this regard. Pink Floyd’s output from The Dark Side Of The Moon through to…