Here's acontemporary interview from Record Mirror from the 8th March 1980, the week of the 'Nobody's Heroes' release.
POLITICS AND CHIPS
Pic: George Bodnar
I’m sitting in the Chrysalis Press Office with my plastic bag and my Dudley Reporters notebook, my coffee, cigarettes and lyric sheet. On the wall there’s a cartoon-cut-out from one of the dailies: “You are lazy, drunken and ignorant about Art, Literature and Music” the doctor is saying to his patient. “Why don’t you become a rock journalist?” Ha ha, Chrysalis.
There’s Chris poole, press officer, casually country that’s read white and blue/Gimme the British way honest and true/Gimme the chance to be one of the few”…
There’s Chris poole, press officer, casually hinting at the song’s irony and how it’s open to misinterpretation and all that stuff. ‘Fly the Flag’ from whence the lyric, is a new Stiff Little Fingers song; by intent, it’s a stab at bland patriotism, though it could be taken to represent the absolute reverse. Danger:
“That’s very much how we imagine the philosophy of someone who voted for Thatcher in the last election,” defends Jake Burns, “and to try and enhance that irony, we built Rule Britannia into the guitar solo – it should hopefully make people realize it’s a piss take; before you know it, you can end up with moron Nazis jumping around to it if you’re not careful.
“Hmmm I see.”
Burns is essentially the front-man Finger; in glasses, trilby and Inflammable Material T-shirt, he’s arrived with a tongue like a dead fish – it was his birthday party last night and he drank a lot. Jake Burns is 22…
Now he sits in an official Chrysalis interview room, three floors up on Stratford Place, where you can look over at Oxford Circus roof tops and dull sky, nursing cans of lager.
Ali McMordie sits with him; Ali, the bass playing Finger, drinks a lot, too. He contents himself with odd comments, asides, and Burns does the talking…
Stiff Little Fingers: a potted historical saga of formation for “fun”, as a recreation in 1970s Belfast – “Because there was nothing else to do” (McMordie). A saga of rejection letters from record companies, of a capsized contract with Island, and of a chart album for Rough Trade – ‘Inflammable Material’; That was the start of things.
‘Inflammable Material’ was loud and spiteful – an album bulging with ferocious frustration, flaws lying in occasional lapses towards News At Ten sloganeering, attributes lying in its seemingly limitless supply of ugly, concentrated venom.
“ I still stand by those songs,” reflects Burns. “I still feel as passionately about them as I did then – we still play them – but it’d be hypocritical to do new songs in that vein, simply because we don’t live there now… and we lose either way. If we write songs about Belfast now we’re copping out – and if we don’t we’re still copping out.
“I don’t believe in standing up and preaching to people – I think it’s wrong trying to use an entertainment medium to do that. Individual problems are only solved by individual people – I mean, it’s understandable what’s happened to us… we were only singing about our lives in the first place, but if your life happens to be in Northern Ireland you’re immediately classed as political, so you can’t win…”
Burns and McMordie drape themselves about the interview room while George Bodnar flexes his lens; they’re not quite sure how to pose. Stripped of stage and album polemics, there’s a fair air if stroppy light-heartedness about the pair that is quite endearing – there’s no real concerted effort to shield their faults or limitations.
Burns constantly breaks into his own streams-of-thought with “I donno,” as if surprised he’s expected to divulge actual answers and solutions to problems.
Ulster?
“Ulster? It’s far more subtle than bullets whizzing past your head; it’s like… there’s Belfast Shopping Centre, let’s say, which is packed on Saturday morning – but go there at six o’clock at night and it’s empty, absolutely deserted… and that’s because people just don’t go out at night.; you’re scared to. It’s never so much a physical thing as a war of nerves, ‘cause if and when something happens it’s all so unexpected. But because it’s unexpected it’s all the more frightening.
“The last time I was in Belfast, walking down the main street, I saw a building on fire, just thought, Oh, a bomb. And then I stopped and thought Wait a minute – there’s a building on fire and that’s all you think about it??”
McMordie: “It’s amazing what you learn to live with – something like that happens over here, and it’s totally different.”
Was that part f your reason for leaving?
“Yeah,” answers McMordie, plus, the way things are over there, everything’s geared up to keeping you in Northern Ireland, growing up, getting married, living close to your folks. I don’t think we really wanted to be part of that…”
That as it may be, guitarist Finger Henry Cluney still resides in Belfast.
Burns, presently resident in Earl’s Court, occupies a place with manager, co-lyricist and Daily Express personage, Gordon Ogilvie, someone whose presence must’ve proven initially suspect, perhaps?
“Well at first we were a bit wary, a bit suspicious,” goes Burns, “suspicious of what he was going to do – that he’d try putting words in our mouths; but he hasn’t done that… he’s written lyrics we haven’t liked, individual words even. I’ll tell him look, I can’t sing this word… if he comes up with something I’m not sufficiently annoyed about, something I can’t put myself into, it’s handed back.”
There’s no way you’re likely to be trapped singing things you don’t associate yourselves with? A shaking of heads and no-no-nos from the two Fingers. Much stress is placed on “experience” as the fuel of creative activity – otherwise Stiff Little Fingers don’t function. Jake Burns talked about his ‘Tin Soldier’ …
“That was written about a friend of ours, Alan, who’s actually in the army; that’s perfectly true, everything in that song. I sat up with him until about three in the morning, in a hotel, and he told me evetything about it.; about how he got into it, what he’s done to get out – hes even swallowed silver paper, so it’d show up as shadows on his lung – he’s tried claiming he’s homosexual, all for the good it does…”
“Tin soldier/he signed away his name/Tin soldier/No chance for cash or fame/tin soldier/Now he knows the truth/Tin soldier/He signed away his youth…”
Pop goes the missive: still, the Jake Burns across the table from me is barely the embittered Belfast youth who spat “We’re gonna blow up in your face” on ‘Suspect Device’: nor, for that matter, is he a vitriol-pumping upstart who goes “You oughta scratch from the human race/You are a waste of a name/A waste of time and a waste of space” on ‘I Don’t Like You’.
“Well that was a joke,” he maintains, “something Gordon wrote – he still won’t tell us who it’s about; it shouldn’t be taken seriously… we do tend to do so far over the top sometimes we end up halfway down the other side.”
You said it. But haven’t Stiff Little Fingers - perhaps through their own exploits, perhaps not – been placed very much in the role of political crusaders, purely because of their more extreme outbursts?
Burns: “We were really crusading against anything. We were never really standing up to anything; all we were doing was pointing it out – look, this is what happens, this is why you’re looking over your shoulder at night.
“I refuse to believe we’ve affected or changed anything – it’s just not true, impossible anyway. As a political situation it’s insoluble.”
Do you think that music should have any real function?
“I don’t know if it can have, I don’t think it’s that strong a medium; we’re not politicians.”
Ali McMordie butts in. “Well, perhaps it can – there are bands over there who’d seen us or seen the first album come out, and then decided to do it for themselves. I think it was Ian Dury on Something Else – he’d been playing in Ireland – he said the best thing for people to do was to just start their own things.”
Burns thinks for a moment, says “The solution to Northern Ireland’s problems is 10,000 punk bands?”
The deliberation flutters on.
Stripped of their Ulster environment, their social polemics and their barbed-wire spoof attachments, the Stiff Little Fingers of ‘Nobody’s Heroes’ and ‘At The Edge’ are cleaner, tidier, more… crystallized, more… personal. Jake Burns?
“Personal? It couldn’t not be. The newer songs were written about things particularly close to us… like ‘Wait And See’, which was about the last drummer… and had quotes from my father in it. It was also about how, when you’re just starting out, say in Northern Ireland, you just can’t get gigs – if you’re not playing country and western or Top 30 cover versionsthere they don’t wanna know.”
McMordie: “Hell of a market for show-bands there. Its’s all people seem to want to listen to.”
And now, of course, things are different. For all their naiveties, shortcomings and connotations, SLF’s most lasting quality is the air of pride, of dignity that pervades their work: and besides they already have so many faults and built-in paradoxes it’s hard to be suspicious anymore.
“What’s best,” Burns is concluding, “is it’s nice to know now, that somewhere in Northern Ireland there’s a show-band playing a cover version of ‘At The Edge’… and that the guy who wouldn’t let us into his hall two years ago is now paying them a hundred quid a night to do that song.”
That’s it.
No new ground, no revolutionary insights – purely because the SLF institution has few strings attached: they don’t wear masks.
Burns and McMordie reminisce the events od last night’s party, McMordie claims the remnants of the alcohol, I look for the toilet, then take my leave via the plush Chrysalis lift and the plush Chrysalis reception area, where all those plush gold discs line the wall, and out onto plush Stratford Place again – all the tall buildings and important offices. Two Fingers are in there somewhere, I think. Seems funny than…
And of course, this feature has no punchline.
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