‘Led us down such a dark path’: documentary explores how 9/11 changed America

Millions of teenagers are going back to school in France, with one major change: mobile phones are now banned in high school, in a bid by the government to improve pupils to focus on their study, as it is concerned that passing too much time on their phone is arresting their development. But for schools, a major issue is how the measure can effectively be implemented.

From Waxahatchee and Florry in the US to Brown Horse and Little Grandad in the UK, a wave of young songwriters are reinvigorating the subgenre’s earnest emotion and twang ‘It’s so important to talk about this before it’s gone,” says Francie Medosch, singer, guitarist and songwriter of the band Florry, “because it’s really a flash in the pan.” The flash she means is a brief moment where it feels as though on both sides of the Atlantic, scores of exciting indie bands are playing something that, without slavish copying, has plainly drawn inspiration from alt-country, the music that emerged in the US in the late 1980s and early 90s, when former punks such as Uncle Tupelo – featuring future Wilco co-founder Jeff Tweedy – and the Bottle Rockets picked up picked up fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars. In the UK, Brown Horse and Vegas Water Taxi have the weeping pedal steel, in the former case tied to something very heartland and in the latter paired with a very English indie sensibility. Westside Cowboy and Little Grandad both borrow from the spiky rootsiness of early Wilco, while Wyatt play slacker country rock. Over in the US, where there’s always going to be more of this sort of thing, you can point to the current indie-rock holy trinity of Waxahatchee, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, plus Florry, Ratboys, Thomas Dollbaum, Fust, SG Goodman, Lily Seabird, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band and more...

PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, September 1: It's back-to-school season in France, this time with tighter rules on mobile phones. In other news, local opposition to data centres across the US and Europe could be a spanner in the works of the AI revolution. Finally, in footballing news, Lionel Messi retires from the Argentinian national team, and some English men play football in a river.