Punk band forged in Ireland’s troubles
It began in Belfast almost 40 years ago, but Stiff Little Fingers has never lost touch with its hardscrabble roots
What: Stiff Little Fingers with the Vicious Cycles When: Tonight, 9 p.m. (doors 8 p.m.) Where: Sugar (858 Yates St.) Tickets: $22.50 at Lyle’s Place and Ticketfly.com
Jake Burns has a unique perspective on punk rock, one born from and shaped by civil strife and political unrest. It has served him well during his stretch at the helm of U.K. agitators Stiff Little Fingers. The 58-year-old singer-guitarist was born and raised in Belfast, a city in Northern Ireland whose violent and hard-scrabble ways provided Stiff Little Fingers with much of its early identity. Burns wrote often about the environment around him, topics that meshed well with the rapid-fire, politically charged punk Burns and his bandmates were pioneering.
“One or two of the Belfast bands had songs that pertained to what was going on, but they often had one song and left it at that,” Burns said from his home in Chicago, where he has lived since 2005. “They saw their role as a form of escapism, and I understood that. It was perfectly valid. But I’m not built like that. If I see something wrong, I tend to moan about it.”
Burns was 11 years old when “The Troubles” — a term used to described the war between loyalists and nationalists over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland — rocked Belfast during the late 1960s. When he formed Stiff Little Fingers in 1977, it was an outlet to showcase the anger growing inside him.
“It was definitely cathartic from my point of view. Had I stood on a soapbox and shouted some of the things we were writing about, I probably would have been beaten up — or worse. For some reason, simply because I had a guitar, we got away with it.”
He had very little musical talent at the time, which was no different than others of his ilk during the early days of punk. But anything was possible back then, which enabled Stiff Little Fingers to have a fighting chance at a career in music, Burns said.
“There was a lot of anger there, but there was also a lack of craft. We didn’t know what we were doing. In common with a lot of bands when they started, the singer becomes the singer by default, and that was certainly the case with us.”
Anti-authority tension fuelled the band’s spectacular debut, 1979’s Inflammable Material, which became the first album on an independent record label to make the Top 20 on the U.K. charts. The record, now dubbed one of the greatest in punk history, produced a series of singles (Suspect Device, Wasted Life, State of Emergency and Alternative Ulster) that let audiences around the world peek into life behind the barricades in Belfast.
“It just felt like normal life to me, and I think to everybody of my generation. It was all we really knew,” Burns said. “It sounds bizarre, but initially it was quite exciting — it felt like a game really. Until it moved closer and closer to where you actually lived, then it wasn’t quite so much fun.”
Stiff Little Fingers soon grew tired of the situation in Belfast and members were living in London when other punk bands from the era — the Clash and the Sex Pistols, among them — were turning Olde England on its ear. Stiff Little Fingers became key contributors in England’s punk community during the decade that followed, but the influence of Belfast never diminished.
Burns was always amazed to hear how interested his audience was in Belfast. “We were writing about our lives and our situation there, but that defined us from that point on. But to us, [Belfast] eventually became boring. When you reached your teenage years, there was really nothing to do because the town itself was closed down from 6 or 7 o’clock in the evening. The army had erected security gates right around the city centre, and they closed those gates at 7 o’clock. You could get through them on a bus, but the buses didn’t stop at the city centre, they just drove straight through. It was bizarre.”
Things are different for Burns nowadays. Having spent the past decade in the U.S., he’s not in touch with the lives of his countrymen to the degree he once was. And he has his own problems to worry about, thanks to the economy south of the border.
“The fact that we haven’t been ridiculously successful means that we have lived lives that are very similar to the lives of the majority of our audience. Our concerns have managed to mirror theirs all the way through.
“That’s why people have stuck with us. The things that have upset me still upset that majority of our audience. I was writing songs about packing cardboard boxes and moving, things that were happening to us. People were losing their jobs and losing their homes — my wife lost her job and we lost our home.”
Stiff Little Fingers, which today includes bassist and cofounder Ali McMordie and longtime members Ian McCallum (guitar) and Steve Grantley (drums), is on tour in Canada for the first time in two years, and will play several cities, including Victoria, for the first time. The shows are in support of 2014’s No Going Back, the band’s 10th studio album and first since 2003. Burns said the in-progress run will be the band’s most extensive tour of Canada to date, although that could be trumped by a possible 40th-anniversary tour by the group in 2017.
The way things are going, that looks to be a distinct possibility: Stiff Little Fingers scored its first No. 1 album in the U.K. with No Going Back, and recent concert reviews have earned Burns and his bandmates high praise.
The frontman is taking it all in stride. Burns said he has learned over the years to slow down and enjoy things when they are good, because fame is fleeting.
“I’ve seen periods where we dipped and lost interest. But there’s definitely a renewed vigour after the last album. It’s something we all believe passionately in. It’s not an exercise in nostalgia.”