Stiff Little Fingers Mark Cooper, Record Mirror, 2 May 1981 Weve got to get out and weve got to fight back is still the message from SLF and their commitment hasnt evaporated since the heady days of 1977. MARK COOPER updates their saga of roots, rock and rage. IM HEADING down to this recording studio somewhere in West London to meet a well known Irish combo and Im getting close to a well-heeled looking joint with all the right fittings. Suddenly the most unholy noise breaks out of the soundproofed walls like a musical version of the Incredible Hulk. Stiff Little Fingers are practicing for their sell-out British tour, flexing the old muscle, making sure their digits arent too rigid. They are in a sound booth, dressed in SLF black, all leathers and tight trousers, rock and roll street kid togs and theyre bashing their way through the new set with a rusty kind of conviction. Even in rehearsal, Jake Burns voice is quite incapable of sounding anything but whisky drowned desperate, the rhythm section unable to be anything but hardline precision and the guitars – well, Stiff Little Fingers guitars just get better, solid chords mustered in a permanent state of emergency, Henry and Jake putting over the message in no uncertain terms. This must be the band, says I! So we retire down a couple of alley ways to a nearby local that is full of rock London with anyone from Phil Lynott to Rockpiles Billy Bremner doing the rounds – and begin to discuss the current state of affairs in SLFs master plan to stay alive, stay happy and stay SLF. Manager and co-lyricist Gordon Ogilvie is there and as talkative as Henry and Jake. Jim Reilly is playing what looks like Space Invaders over in the corner and Ali McMordie is listening to the conversation and looking a little restless and elsewhere. Stiff Little Fingers are not the most fashionable of bands in the current rock climate. Theyve gone from being press darlings as patronised examples of a genuine punk Culture, of having their praises sung for being young and original and Irish and, best of all, my dears, committed, to being part of an old guard with punk ideals that are well under fire. Not that theyve lost their large grass roots following around the country but that theyve ceased to be new and news and settled into being a working band. Not only have they ceased to be news but some would say, not mincing words for a moment, that theyve ceased to be relevant. With all that thrashing guitar and angry commitment, SLF are definitely a 76 model which both dates and defines them. Theyre not futurist or peacock people, they dont say Waaaagh! or Aaamaazing! all the time and, not to beat around the bush, theyre a bloody punk band. Not an OI punk band and not a Clash type the first rule of punk is that there are no rules punk band but an honest to wickedness hard-hitting punk band with a sense of humour and a sense of commitment. NOT THIS years model exactly and reactionary in ways we shall explore, but if SLF have to go out of the window in the name of rockism then Im going too. John Lydon may its convinced that rock and roil is irrelevant but theres a baby here worth cherishing going out with the bath water. Rockism? explodes Jake who up to this point in the conversation has mostly been concentrating on his drink and another table, what does that word mean anyway? I cant find anyone who knows. A friend of mine tried to explain it to me and he said this was being rockist. This, as Jake proceeds to demonstrate, consists of standing up and banging down on an imaginary guitar –the kind of gesture that wild and wasted youth makes every day in front of its collective bathroom mirror. Gordon Ogilvie goes on to explain that most of his favourite moments in rock are the classic moments of the Sixties, early Who, Kinks, you name it, the early British energy of a rough explosion that is rock to many of its believers. Just because Spandau Ballet and the like dress up in weird costumes and play synthesisers and use disco rhythms doesnt mean that Elvis Presley is irrelevant or even needs to care. I mean the way its heading now is getting as boring as 1972 was. Suddenly the world is full of introspective short haired hippies. The whole point of things when we began was that you could be in a band, anyone who could barely play a guitar could; whats wrong with a melody, a chorus, three minutes and out? Jake still delights in recalling his realisation that rock was something that he loved that he could actually do: I couldnt do anything else, couldnt pull women, I wasnt good at school and then suddenly here was something that I loved that I could do. Rock for Jake has been about escape and resistance, not escapism. Weve always written about what we see, what we experience. When we wrote about Northern Ireland, people loved it because no one had written about it before. We began doing covers and then Gordon saw us and said why dont you write about your own lives, how it feels to be living where you are? Now we write about real things, we write about the people we meet, unemployed kids, anyone we meet out on the road. They tell us their stories and then we try to tell them as best we can. Were still as much in touch with everyday life as the next person. Weve always looked at outside things at the world around us and tried to describe it. IRELAND FOR a lot of people means politics and politics means boredom and soapboxing. There is a distinct preaching element to the SFL style, musically and lyrically they have a tendency to beat the audience over the head in fire and brimstone righteousness. They cling to clarity and straight-forward commitment when all around them the old rock clichés are being taken apart, boys in leather jumping up in the air to crashing guitar chords may be part of the problem that bands like SLF attack. If the form is reactionary, does it matter about the content? Could SLF just as easily be singing right wing lyrics? Well, no. But there is a problem here. We tried on Go For It to be as straightforward as possible while remaining as clear about the world as we could. We ran into problems before for being too subtle because people dont always see the humour in our songs. White Noise on Inflammable Material got us banned from Newcastle for two years or so. A councillor read the lyrics and ordered that they couldnt have bands spreading such racist ideas in Newcastle. There was a headline, PUNK ALBUM COULD START NORTH EAST RACE RIOT. And we had the same problem with Gimme Gimme on Nobodys Heroes which is as outright a condemnation of the Thatcher doctrine as you could hope to get. Both songs are sustained exercises in terminal irony and irony and straightforward punk dont always go hand in hand. The limitations there in the form and, perhaps in the audience, headbanging and pogoing contentedly away. Can punk disturb anymore or has it become reassuring as heavy metal? Safe as houses, as SLF put it. Were in a double bind really, Henry explains. People expect us to write about Northern Ireland all the time and three of us dont live there anymore. We cant go on and on repeating ourselves, playing Inflammable Material over and over. In West Germany, they threw bottles at us for not playing the first album. Over here its not so bad but were determined not to play Suspect Device this tour and that may well be difficult. But youve got to mean it, otherwise whats the point? Were very pig-headed, very stubborn people, we intend to keep on doing it our way. We don t want to turn into cartoon figures or parodies of ourselves, its something weve fought against. CHANGE IS the crucial problem for SLF. They have an audience that wants them to repeat themselves, still committed to and glorying in the first headlong rush of punk. They are rooted in a style that as Jake agrees is necessarily reactionary. Punk is hardline which is fine until youve been around longer, can play better, want more. SLF are no longer beginning. They have a career, mostly live in London. Theyre committed, in some worlds, ordinary blokes though they are, theyre even kind of stars. They want to grow and change while retaining belief in rock as release and confrontation. Theyve avoided the stupid thuggery of the second generation punk bands, a thuggery that was probably implicit in punks original championing of basics at the expense of all else and they continue to be committed to causes, to describing what they see in more than personal terms. Theres a theme running through Go For It and its there in all our work, it all knits together and its there in the title. People think we should have long faces, given what we write about, but we think its a very optimistic album. In our society all the pressures are to conform, to repeat, to go under. Youre told to stay as you are, to marry young, to live like your parents. Stay in your place, youre told over and over in all kinds of ways. What were saying is Go for it, dont go under, dont be told, theres more to life than that. Look at Silver Lining or Safe As Houses on the album, theyre describing rat traps and weve got to get out, to fight back. Now thats a composite statement of things said by all the band and Gordon at one point or another in our conversation. And when you think about it, its true. Those traps do exist and they are what SLF have always sung about – getting out. Its as if Northern Ireland taught them their central theme, not to be bullied into taking what you cant stand, not being ground down. Getting out. Over and over their music rages, boils with pent up frustration caged in in the three minute form. Rage and rage again and then burst out, get out, go for it. SLF are committed to rage, to attacking complacency. For a time they were correct with a certain kind of audience who thought, patronisingly, they were authentic: its still funny at our gigs, 70 percent come to dance and then up at the back theres this balding contingent who nod their heads and tap their feet, sociology lecturers. The press and those types seem more interested in what we say than what we play. This is true. SLFs lyrics are a great focus for discussion and the fact that theyve grown into a tight, precise and imaginative hard rock band in the process of going for it goes unnoticed. On a good night theres still nobody as riotously righteously angry as they are. Theyll make you sweat and theyll make you dance. But whether theyll ever recover from their beginnings is another question. Punk created, and suffers from, the first album syndrome and only the Pistols went all the way, made the album and then the ultimate statement of refusing repetition, they broke up. Stiff Little Fingers have chosen to continue with dignity and the real world has not disappeared from their songs. Just sometimes its endangered by SLFs dogged commitment to the hard rock thrash and the old punk rage. Theyre obliged to stay angry, to keep to the old rock forms and sometimes that makes them safe as houses. Still, I admire them, they root and they rock and they rage and they stand up to be counted and thats one value Im not prepared for rock to lose.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:15:58 +0000