STIFF LITTLE FINGERS POINT WEST
After four decades, Belfast punk legends make their first appearance in Calgary
Nobody is the same person they were when that first wave of U.K. punk made it to the grainy shores of this prairie town four decades ago: not the bands, not the fans.
But the mark it left is one that remains.
So although it will likely be an older, greyer, slower and, presumably, wiser crowd in front of and on the stage during Belfast’s mighty Stiff Little Fingers gig Friday at the Marquee Beer Market and Stage, there will undoubtedly be an energy in the room that will roll everyone back — helped in part by the fact this is their first time washing up on the city’s landlocked shores.
“One of our managers is Canadian and we were sitting looking at him and we said, ‘Um, Canada: Is there anywhere we can play beyond (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal)?’ and he said, ‘Of course there is,’ ” laughs frontman Jake Burns from his home in Chicago when asked about the delay.
“So he rattled off eight or nine places and we went, ‘Great. Book those, we’ll go there.’ So we’re coming to Canada.”
Well, for those who’ve been waiting to hear transformative material such as Alternative Ulster, Straw Dogs, Suspect Device, Nobody’s Hero and Tin Soldiers, it’s likely better really late than never.
Those songs and Stiff Little Fingers helped define a time, an anger and a movement that was made all the greater on that side of the ocean with other acts who harnessed it and made it their own, such as The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Jam, The Stranglers, The Undertones and, of course, the Sex Pistols.
No, they never reached the heights of those other acts, but their first three studio albums — 1979’s Inflammable Material, 1980’s Nobody’s Heroes and ’81’s Go For It — are considered required listening for any punk fan anywhere.
For Burns, while he’s flattered to hear they still resonate, he has a difficult time putting it all in perspective.
“My memories of any record are about how difficult it was to pull it together or how easy it was to pull it together — it turns into practicalities rather than how good, bad or indifferent the songs are or what they mean to other people,” he says.
“I know what they mean to me. I have my favourites, I have ones that I look back on with more affection than others, and again even then that’s coloured by whether we were all getting on well together or whether it was a completely difficult period.
“It’s hard to divorce one thing from the other, really.”
Perhaps a great part of the reason is that, save for a five-year stretch in the mid-’80s when they were completely broken up, Burns has kept Stiff Little Fingers alive and kept adding to their legacy.
True, members have come and gone, with the band now featuring guitarist Ian MacCallum and drummer Steve Grantley, who’ve been part of the act for two decades, and bassist Ali McMordie, who was with Burns as part of what’s considered the classic lineup, left for much of the ’90s and returned to the fold a decade ago.
But Burns takes great pride in the fact that Stiff Little Fingers have never entirely been about focusing on that past.
“Obviously at this stage of the game, being 40 years into it there’s an element of, ‘This is one we wrote back in 1970-whatever,’ ” Burns says.
“It’s always important to us that we moved forward and didn’t live off past glories and basically fight the temptation to become a cabaret act.”
True to that, their last studio album was 2014’s fan-funded, fittingly titled No Going Back.
Burns admits it was one that at first he struggled with, trying to balance the past with the present.
He notes that he’d actually written an entire other album before realizing he’d “(taken) my eye off the ball in terms of songwriting … I’d written songs by numbers,” what he thought a Stiff Little Fingers album should be.
So he scrapped everything and began to write from the perspective of who he actually was in the present. “Once I’d done that, of course, you sit back and listen to what you’d gone and written and it was the moanings of a middle-aged man,” he says and laughs.
“It’s complaining about banking classes and recessions, and the fact I’d suffered from depression for quite some time, and I thought, ‘This really isn’t revolution in the streets and stuff. I can’t see people punching the air to this.’
“But the incredible thing about the band is that a lot of people who were fans in the first place have stayed with us all the time.
“And mainly because we didn’t make stadium-sized money we’ve lived very similar lives to our audience, which means the concerns that I had were still very much the concerns that they had.”
Consequently, the album went to No. 1 on Rock Album Chart in the U.K., vindicating Burns’ instincts to forge ahead.