American ruse

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.

A few weeks shy of a year ago, I was at the 12 Bar Club in London’s Denmark Street, the Tin Pan Alley of pop legend, to see a young Los Angeles-based band called Dawes. They’d been brought to my attention by an Uncut reader, who couldn’t recommend them highly enough. As an example of what they did in his opinion better than anyone he’d recently heard, he sent me a track called “When My Time Comes”, a rousing country rock thing that I hadn’t been able to stop playing.

Away, again, from Animal Collective – and into a world of rapture, reveries, and great washes of beautiful sound...

25 years on, Howe Gelb’s band are still a vital force...

Still passionate. Still rocking. But now in some pretty hip company. Yes, Richard Ashcroft is back...

This week’s new issue of Uncut features another 50 Great Lost Albums – those that are unavailable new or as legal downloads right now – chosen by the mag’s readers. Consequently, I thought it’d be useful to put our original Top 50 online, as they appeared in issue 156 of Uncut (Neil Young was on the cover, narrowing it down a little).

We count down from 100 to 51...

Well, this is a surprise. The White Stripes might have made their comeback on American TV the other week, but it seems Jack White's most pressing engagement right now is yet another band, pleasingly called The Dead Weather.

Final trawl of the vaults turns up a double CD’s worth of lost sounds by the Scottish folk starsailors

Intermittent greatness from Americana's hardest-working man