It Must Be America

(for Indieoma.com)

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’.

In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American.

...read on at indieoma...