They should have just started a 35-date European tour as guests of The Hold Steady, who pulled all their shows earlier this week due to the hospitalisation of guitarist Tad Kubler. Instead, Philadelphia’s War On Drugs find themselves stranded in London, where they were probably considering busking as an alternative to starving on the capital’s streets before being added at the last minute to tonight’s Club Uncut bill at the Borderline. I’m sympathetic to their current circumstances and being left on their uppers by the cancellation of the Hold Steady tour and the exposure it would have brought them is no joke in anyone’s language. At the same time, I’m wholly glad they’re here tonight, because what their opening set, a frantic 30 minutes or so, packed from floor to ceiling with moments of startling rapture and abandoned mayhem, is as good as anything I’ve seen all year. You may have read in reviews of their debut album, Wagonwheel Blues, that WOD’s music occupies an interface between the classic American songwriting of Dylan, Springsteen and Tom Petty and the sonic adventures of The Velvet Underground, say, or My Bloody Valentine. It’s a notion you may briefly have entertained and them dismissed without hearing the album as surely fanciful. The thing is, the description – especially when you hear them live – isn’t at all far-fetched, begins in fact to feel like it actually undersells a lot of the amazing things they get up to and the fearsome noise of which they are capable, breathtakingly exciting aural landscapes wrought from nothing more apparently than a Rickenbacker, a drummer with the dynamic whack of the young Mitch Mitchell, an acoustic guitar and what looks like an array of wired-up kitchen utensils one of the band must have found at the back of someone’s garage. They’ve just started “Arms Like Boulders”, which also opens Wagonwheel Blues, when I arrive hot-foot from Pete Molinari’s Uncut promotion at Borders and they are already in full flight, Adam Granduciel, looking beneath a tangle of hair uncannily at times like lost West Coast singer-songwriter Dino Valente, whaling away on a battered acoustic guitar, the band whipping up a firestorm behind him. You can hear echoes in his voice of Petty, for sure, but the exclamatory phrasing, daring and acute, is more noticeably reminiscent of a Dylan just gone electric and simply buzzing. You can hear Dylan in the following “Taking The Farm”, but here the backing sounds like a demented version of Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, warped, furious, insanely catchy. As is, you’d have to say, the somewhat more serene drift of “Buenos Aires Beach” they’re playing now, its warm glow an overture to the absolute meltdown of the 10-minute “Show Me The Coast” they play next. Years ago, in Glasgow, I saw Dylan play a version of “Masters Of War”, whose arrangement that night seemed inspired by the Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song”. Tonight, War On Drugs give us a hint of what it might have sounded like if Bob had appeared on “Sister Ray”, whose relentless annihilation is fearsomely replicated. They end with an equally fierce version of “A Needle In Your Eye #16”, which Granduciel reminds the audience appeared on Uncut’s Let It Roll CD that accompanied “issue 152, the one with Liam or Noel Gallagher, the ugly brother, whoever he is” on the cover. War On Drugs have been so good that what follows has an almost inevitable air of anti-climax. The Dudes are loud and rocky, two of them sport unfashionable moustaches and severe haircuts and a third is wearing an AC/DC T-shirt. I’d been expecting some bar band rumble, but they turn out, surprisingly, to be more Queen than Crazy Horse. On one number with a typically big chorus, they even attempt a kind of “Radio Ga Ga” clap-along. Vancouver’s Ladyhawk are louder and hairier, their between-song banter makes them sound like characters from South Park and with names like Duffy Driediger, Darcy Hancock and Sean Hawryluk, they would not be out of place among Thomas Pynchon’s intrepid Chums Of Chance in Against The Day.

This was in a way like returning to the scene of the crime, or something like it. By which I mean, that when Uncut was still in its robust infancy, we regularly ran live shows here at Borders, memorable showcases that about a year featured great performances by mostly noble singer-songwriter types, among them Richard Hawley, Thea Gilmore, Tom McCrae, Glenn Tilbrook, Ben Christophers and Ed Harcourt. We are back here tonight for a special appearance by Pete Molinari, as part of Uncut’s association with Borders during the PPA’s annual Magazine Week. Molinari, of course, reaches us from the Medway Delta, via Nashville’s Music Row, Greenwich Village in its boho 60s pomp and Sam Phillips’ Memphis, a Chatham kid eerily possessed of the kind of musical chops you’d most likely associate with something that came out on Sun records in its glorious heyday. His new album, A Virtual Landslide, has had critics fairly drooling over its unforced authenticity, his effortless assimilation of vintage influences, and he counts among his fans Paul Weller and the aforementioned Richard Hawley, as well as flag-waving supporters like Bob Harris, Radcliff and Maconie, Robert Elms and Mark Lamarr. Listening to him here at Borders, just him on guitar with Matt, the stand-up bass player from his touring band, an incongruous rockabilly spectre in Borders harshly-lit music department, you would not be surprised if static was part of the sound, so redolent is the music he plays of something reaching us from a bygone time, crackling down history’s wires. What he calls “the hallelujah blues” of songs of heartbreak and anguished redemption like “Love Lies Bleeding”, “I Don’t Like The Man I Am” and “One Stolen Moment” are the kinds of things you might expect to hear on the jukebox of some beat-up roadhouse way off some highway in Mississippi, Texas or Tennessee, the kind of bar where you have to check your guns in at the door, an Arkansas hard-ass like the teenage Levon Helm is playing drums with the house band, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins are arm-wrestling over open pits of scorpions in a corner and Hank Williams is passed out under the neon beer sign. Molinari clearly has an ear for the classic verities of soulful country music as sharp as practised aficionados of the craft as Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello – it’s not hard to imagine a couple of the tracks from A Virtual Landslide on King Of America – while the new “’63 Chevrolet” sounds even in this sparse musical setting like something from Dave Edmunds’ back catalogue, a rockabilly classic plucked from a piece of scratched vinyl in a dog-eared sleeve. “Dear Angelina”, meanwhile, dissolves into a flashback to the Village, smoky rooms, drinks flowing, the young Dylan at a microphone and people asking each other who this kid is, because they don’t yet know his name. He ends by reminding us that he’ll be playing Camden Dingwalls on October 9 and he’d like to see us all there, although I am not sure this constitutes an opportunity for everyone to get their names on the guest list. Pete’s still chatting to fans when I leave, only 15 minutes to go before tonight’s Club Uncut kicks off around the corner at the Borderline. I’ll see you there shortly.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seemed to accumulate a pretty impressive bunch of folk and folk-rock reissues on my desk. The most recent to turn up is a straightforward reissue of Anne Briggs’ first self-titled LP, on the excellent Water label out of San Francisco. In truth, there’s not much new to say about this wonderful record, though it’s one of the minuscule number of things that make me remotely proud of, or even remotely connected to, my Nottinghamshire cultural heritage (which reminds me: fuck you, Durham, Hampshire and Sussex County Cricket Clubs). But it’s interesting to play “Anne Briggs” next to that recently released compilation of Shirley & Dolly Collins material on Harvest. The starkness, a certain still and faintly unnerving beauty, might be similar. The difference in East Midlands and Southern English traditions and accents, though, are striking. Great music, but you probably already knew that. As is the debut by Trees, “The Garden Of Jane Delawney”, which is getting a rather more lavish makeover, with a cluster of extra tracks (some of them actually recorded this summer). Trees often get a bit of a bum deal, being seen as a rather second-rate Fairport Convention. But “Jane Delawney” is a fine record in its own right, maybe even better than “On The Shore”. There a much-used comparison point between early Fairports and Jefferson Airplane, and a later one that relates the “Liege & Lief”-era band as a British analogue of The Band. Trees, though, often sound like a Notting Hill Grateful Dead, as the traditional songs and Bias Boshell originals frequently spiral off into very Dead-like, labyrinthine jams (“The Great Silkie”; “Lady Margaret”; “Glasgerion”). The version of “She Moved Thro’ The Fair”, especially, has a weightless elegance not a million miles away from “Dark Star”. “Snail’s Lament” is superb, and the new tracks aren’t bad either – it’d be nice if they played some live shows since they’re evidently back together in the studio. Which reminds me; I wonder if Comus might play again, after their reunion was limited to that weird Opeth festival on a Scandinavian ferry? Not much chance of that happening with Fotheringay, sadly, though that band’s surviving members – Jerry Donahue, Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway – have worked together to do a fantastic restoration job on the tapes which would’ve made up that band’s second album, had not Sandy Denny departed for a solo career. The resulting “Fotheringay 2” is something of a marvel, a properly ‘lost’ album from the golden age of British folk-rock. Not all of it is completely unfamiliar: “John The Gun” and the peerless “Late November” ended up on Denny’s “North Star Grassman”, of course, and there are one or two other Denny leads that have turned up on various comps over the past few years (don’t ask me which ones; I think I’ve lost control of my ever-increasing Denny/Fairports collection). The whole thing hangs together fantastically well, though, not least because the songs fronted by Trevor Lucas are surprisingly strong, and there’s a real sense of a band – remarkable given that they were falling apart at the time – rather than a Denny project. One of the best things here is his noble, faintly martial take on “Bold Jack Donahue”,with some magically subtle, aqueous playing from Jerry Donahue. I guess the biggest lure, though, is Denny singing “Wild Mountain Thyme”, as strong and pure and affecting as you’d imagine. An amazing find, all told.