Monocled Alchemist

Article published in NME, 29th March, 1980

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices | Gavin Martin first came to NME’s attention when he launched a fanzine called ‘Alternative Ulster’. The fanzine also got noticed by Jake Burns and Stiff Little Fingers. They copped the title for their best known single, and headed for gullible London carrying the cares of Northern Ireland in their guitar cases.

While the English media acclaimed them, the folks back home just felt exploited. Earlier this month, with their new single and album po-going up the charts, SLF began a British tour. We sent Gavin along to make their ride a litt1e-rougher

I USED to see quite a lot of Jake Burns and his band Stiff Little Fingers when they started out on the road to success back in the autumn of 1977. At that time the Fingers played a slapdash set of K-Tel punk cover versions and dressed in a rather pathetic hybrid of old and new wave styles: long hair and safety pins, flares and chains.

You’d see them at venues hired from private licensees like the Glenmachon Hotel in Hollywood and the Trident Bar in Bangor. Along with a steadily proliferating pack of punk-inspired people, SLF were creating the first vibrant alternative to Ulster’s staid conformity of the previous eight years.

Bounds and barriers didn’t matter in the new twilight world, as a generation worked with and experienced rock and roll for the first time. As frightened outsiders often gave ‘punk rockers’ a hiding for ‘being different’, they tended to be a pretty unified bunch. Most importantly, a whole load of people began to have a whole load of fun and that was something to treasure. It’s easy to view those days with nostalgia — and sentimentality doesn’t come into it, Bub.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

SUBMERGED in the flurry of excitement, Dave McCullough (now of Sounds) and I started a fanzine. Its name — Alternative Ulster— was as good a way as any to label the combined musical, cultural and social ‘alternatives’ offered by Ulster punk.

Burns used it for a song which Terri Hooley of Good Vibrations was going to press as a flexi-disc to be given free with one issue of Alternative Ulster as the debut release from SLF.

Looking back, I’m glad the idea fell through —though the basic premise that Jake Burns’ Alternative Ulster was playing in a rock band and mine was writing about rock bands is almost touching.

SLF won a small place in my heart as a new wave showband. There were no discos where you could hear records by the Pistols or The Clash so Jake, Henry, Ali and Brian (Faloon, their former drummer) filled the bill.

Y’wanna hear ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘White Riot’, ‘Anarchy In The UK’ or ‘Complete Control’? Then a Fingers gig gave note-perfect covers of those songs by groups we never thought we’d see.

But if they were to continue, the Fingers had to become something more than just a compensation for the deprived young Irish music fans and their own musical background (which as a group switching from Deep Purple era covers to Pistol era covers they patently were).

Gordon Ogilvie

They sought guidance; unto them guidance was given. Goaded into seeing the group by a series of letters from Jake, Colin McClelland and Gordon Ogilvie — both journalists for scummy newspapers, the Sunday News and the Daily Express respectively — developed a friendship with the band.

That McClelland and Ogilvie should become the group’s managerial team with Gordon also contributing lyrics to the group’s songs was the logical course for their friendship to take; it suited all concerned.

Naturally the liaison looked a little odd, naturally allegations about possible string pulling by Ogilvie were made, naturally these were denied. The group have always said that in all decisions regarding management and compositions they have the power of veto.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

That may be so. Still, it’s impossible to ascertain the personal influence Ogilvie has over Jake, with whom he shares a flat, or how easily led the group are; maybe they don’t really know the truth themselves.

Let’s just say that since the day I sat in a bollock-freezing church hall and watched as Gordon instructed Jake how to phrase his vocals on ‘Johnny Was’, I’ll always have my doubts.

THE PROCESS used to bring today’s SLF into being was slow, deceptive and cunning. Gradually their set became infiltrated by their own compositions, but right up until their last gig in Belfast before leaving to join Island Records (a deal which was subsequently aborted by Chris Blackwell who, returning from a holiday in Jamaica, declared himself unimpressed by his A&R department’s latest catch and dumped them) these were buried in a morass of Clash, Pistols and Damned.

This disorientating slapstick made it hard to put the new ‘politicised’ Stiffs in serious perspective. They moved away to record their album and live in London, having signed their self-financed Rigid Digits label to Rough Trade, and in doing so came sharply into focus.

The reels began to roll and right from the first few frames it was obvious — this was a horrid movie. It was OK once — ‘Suspect Device’ — but twice was dodgy — ‘Alternative Ulster’.

Boring songs

By the time the album came along, the pattern was firmly set. Proud pallbearers at their own funeral, the group shouldered a coffin called ‘Inflammable Material‘: an LP of boring songs which were damagingly repetitive and sensationalistically packaged.

How curious it was to hear tales of a nation going absolute bananas because four guys climbed onstage and kept saying “We don’t want any more” over and over again. Honestly, you people can’t see the sham-rock for the clover.

Making their mark on British live audiences by bagging a plum support spot on the TRB tour during 1978, SLF had the London record company directors drooling over their cheque books. A hot angry punk band from Ulster was too good to miss, and Chrysalis drooled the most decisively.

When their Rough Trade LP leapt to 14th slot on the charts, that was the clincher; they signed in the second half of 1979. Right now SLF have just released their second album ‘Nobody’s Heroes‘, which is being promoted by a two-month national tour.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

They’ll not be playing Belfast on this one, but they came home at Christmas and predictably played to a full house. That’s pretty much the form with Stiffs these days, solid hardcore punk favourites.

Last night the group played in Bracknell, and settling down in the coach, which is now making its way to Bournemouth, I’m sitting face to face with their vocalist, guitarist and chief spokesperson Jake Burns.

Times have certainly changed. We’re surrounded by evidence of that — the luxury in which the group travel, the hotels they can stay in and the lives they now lead. (On tour Jake and Ali like to finish the gig with a drink which sometimes doesn’t end until six o’clock the following morning.)

Onstage the group have a shiny professionalism, using pretentious fanfares to herald their arrival, a slick light show and an expensive sound system. SLF have made it, whatever ‘it’ is.

Jake Burns

0BVIOUSLY abrasion isn’t usually part and parcel of all this merriment, so it’s refreshing that Jake should welcome the invitation to talk about his group with an avowed dissenter. I’ve never really been on anything but friendly terms with Jake, which is why now as we look back on SLF of the past two years it feels odd that our discussion should be so business like.

Trying to argue with Jake Burns is a perplexing business. He’s much too polite, modest and accommodating to ever explode into a furious barrage of abuse. At one point during our conversation he confesses that “the only thing I can’t stand is being called friggin’ friendly”, and that’s fundamental to the problem: Burns is friendly, but in Stiff Little Fingers he tries to be something he isn’t.

He’s fighting a battle against himself. A shy, small, scrawny 22-year-old, his puppy-like face veers towards gawkiness. Thick-lensed aviator specs perch on the bridge of his nose, and a grey trilby threatens to overshadow his insignificant frame as it sits on a crop of short light brown hair.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

He obviously hasn’t shaved for a few days as his jowls and chin are covered with bumfluff. A flashy leather jacket has replaced the old, hideously overrated garment which he used to plaster with ridiculously sized badges and tour stickers.

The new jacket is unzipped to reveal a T-shirt advertising the loathsome UK Subs in a variety of nauseous hues; a thick studded belt is worn over the T-shirt, hanging loose around his waist. He speaks in a low, unassuming voice.

Living in England has taken the harshness out of his accent and given his timbre a slight affectation. He likes to think for a short time before answering my questions, considering and weighing them up as he rolls his fingers across the contours of his face.

RIGHT. To work. There were obviously dangers in starting a punk rock band in Belfast singing about Belfast — dangers both physically and in terms of credibility — so how did you deal with it, Jake?

“We had to avoid sensationalising what was happening over there and I think to a certain extent we did.

Breakout

“It was a decision right from the start to just write about what we saw and what happened to us. We’d written ‘State Of Emergency‘ and ‘Breakout‘, they were the only two songs we’d written when we met Gordon (Ogilvie, manager and lyricist).

To be honest with you I thought ‘State Of Emergency’ was all we could write about Northern Ireland. We didn’t want to go over the top basically because we didn’t want to be accused of cashing in and exploiting what was happening over there.

What happened to make us change our minds and decide to write songs like ‘Suspect Device‘ and ‘Wasted Life‘ was that Gordon said to us, ‘What else are you going to write about?’ and we said, ‘Y’know, what’s happening to us, like Henry’s on the dole etcetera’.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

“He said, ‘Well that’s been done a thousand times before. Why don’t youse write about your lives in Belfast as opposed to what could be anyone’s life anywhere?’

“We thought, if we approach it from that angle then it’s OK. Just as long as we write about our lives and nothing else, which we did.”

So it wasn’t really a natural decision?

“Well, it was obvious — and maybe because it was so obvious we needed someone to tell us. It sounds strange, but that’s how it struck me once it had been pointed out to us: ‘Shit, he’s right —we can’t offend anybody if we only write about what’s happening to us. The only people we can offend is ourselves’.”

Did it never feel lonely?

“No, because I never really was that happy with Good Vibrations and the whole clique that things was setting up. The big thing in Belfast was to not like Stiff Little Fingers, but we still managed to pull bigger crowds than virtually anyone else. Basically it was just a question of believing in yourself.”

Press coverage

You got ecstatic press coverage when you came to London.

“That’s basically because people misunderstood what we were doing. They thought we were exploiting the situation. They thought this is great, a little radical rock band from Belfast who’ll scream and shout for six months and then get themselves killed. It’s all great rock writing, isn’t it?”

Not at all. Did you think they were just looking for a stream of vitriol to match the LP?

“Oh yeah. I knew the quotes they were looking for and to an extent I gave them some of them. I was always careful to make sure they had to be taken in the way I intended them and not open to different interpretations.

Not so much for our safety but our families’ and Henry’s welfare, as they were still living there. That would be making money out of people’s misery.”

Inflammable Material

However, Burns had no hesitation in informing Melody Maker of threats made to another Ulster band in SLF’s first interview.

“I said no more, no less than I intended. There was really obvious stupid things that everyone knew anyway. But because I said them it made it sound like we were playing up to that dream they were hoping for, which we weren’t. We never wanted to be like that. We knew we had a lot more to offer.”

‘Inflammable Material’ is always referred to as the Ulster album and out of 13 songs, six are about Northern Ireland.

“People cheerfully ignore the other things—’Breakout’ was written about my job, I was fed up working in an office, it could apply anywhere. Everyone goes on ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘State Of Emergency’ and they don’t look any further.

‘Here We Are In Nowhere‘ could be written about anywhere — it’s just about being fed up with where you are. “No More of That‘ isn’t written about Northern Ireland, it’s written about people telling you what to do, but the immediate assumption everyone makes is it’s about people getting killed on the streets of Belfast.”

His observations lack credence. Sure, these songs are just what he suggests — an Urban Teenage Lifestyle colouring book. But in the contact of the album they lock in tight with the specifically N. Irish theme of the other songs. Anyway, why moan about it now — wouldn’t it have been better to explain this earlier?

Urban teenage lifestyle

“Maybe so, maybe so. Maybe we would have been, but at the time no one gave us a chance to. Even if we had it probably wouldn’t have been printed because it didn’t make good copy at the time. Now of course it does: everyone can look back and say there’s more to SLF than that.”

Doesn’t your heart bleed for misunderstood and creative musicians like Jake Burns? Wise up, mucker. The music press — this branch anyway — isn’t geared solely to what’s ‘hot’ or ‘sensational’, it’s also a channel for conversation and explanation and I don’t think you once stooped to use it as such.

Tanked up on dexies

Naturally you had absolutely no intention of matching your mucky marketing (more about that later) with a very trendy image which would sell lots of records, make you extremely popular and stinking rich?

“No, I wasn’t using it at all. You’ve got to remember I didn’t do a thing. They did it all for me.” Mmmm, that was convenient.

0NSTAGE Jake studies well on his Strummer and trims off the more demented edges. He stands to the left, allowing the tallest and most handsome member of the group, Ali ‘Poser’ McMordie, the middle of the stage to move around in.

On the right-hand side there seems to be a man digging up roads, a navvy tanked up on dexies. But you can ditch that idea right away because what we have here is a non-smoking, non-drinking and non-swearing rhythm guitar player called Henry Cluney (as much an oddity in his neighbourhood—where rumour has it he used to be a Sunday School teacher — as he is in the world of rock music).

Henry is the only member of the group who still lives in Belfast. He hates London and goes there only when he has to. The rest of the time he stays in Belfast where he can see his girlfriend, hang out in his local record shop and take the odd trip to the glamour of inept local radio interviews. So what motivates him?

Chubby figure

“I have all that sort of stuff everybody has inside them,” he admits, “but I don’t drink or swear and I’m not violent so the only thing I can do is take it out on my guitar. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It might hurt me but it doesn’t harm anyone else.”

The awkward chubby figure chopping and slashing at his guitar once stopped in mid-chord to see he’d put his fist through a low level ceiling in an unintentional fit of excitement. He regularly lacerates digits and is already running short of plectrums although he had over 100 when the tour began three days ago.

The group’s smallest and youngest member is their most recent recruit — drummer Jim Reilly. Originally from Belfast, he was working with his uncle in Sheffield “cleaning windys” when he saw the group were advertising for a new drummer. He phoned up to tell them: “I’m your new drummer!”

When they met him and he played ‘Closed Groove” exactly as it appeared on ‘Inflammable Material’, where the drums had been overdubbed, no one argued. Brian Faloon, the guy who Jim replaced, turned up to see the group in Bracknell at the start of this tour. ‘Wait And See‘ —the story of his departure from SLF — was played for him.

ON BOARD the group’s stylish tour coach, replete with video, coffee machine, beds and toilet, it’s quiet and relaxed with the odd outbreak of ribbing. Burns usually has the upper hand by dint of his dry, sly wit.

Black leather jacket

Most of the time, though, he buries himself in books: Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings and a slim volume by Dylan Thomas.

But not now. Jake Burns and I are talking about Jake Burns: the one in Stiff Little Fingers and the one outside SLF. That means talking about rock realities, rock fantasies and the ‘black leather jacket theory’.

John Burns left school after ‘A’ levels with enough grades to scrape into the local polytech, which he left after only four months. After spending five months on the dole he got a job as an accounts clerk; he was only there for two weeks when Stiff Little Fingers formed.

He’s already told me his songs were written from personal experience. That is the sum of Jake Burns’ experience: four months as a student, five on the dole, a fortnight in an office. Yet the language of SLF (“Blow up in their facer, “Every time I’ve kicked it out the door!”, etc.) is vicious and vivid, an arty, blood-spattered portrait.

They’re shouting from the point of view of rock performers, not human beings in Belfast.

Frustrated

“Well, it depends, because I was totally and utterly powerless against what was going on around me. I mean people keep saying ‘Do you think you’ve changed anything?’ — well you know yourself there’s no way you can ever change it, it’s much too big. It wasn’t so much vicious as frustrated. I was really angry that there I was and I thought I knew what I wanted to do and I knew so many other people could have done so much more if it hadn’t been for the atmosphere in the country at that time.”

But what about representing your human reaction to the situation in Belfast?

“The human reaction in Belfast was to bottle it up. In that sense the band gave me an outlet. In that sense it was protective.”

Stiff Little Fingers is more theatre company than rock band, the leather jacket their costume. As Jake is fond of explaining:

“When I’m onstage 80% of me is the leather jacket. Offstage $0% of me is Jake Burns. Talking in between songs it’s me.”

That’s how personal, honest and human the songs are. Burns feels the need to change 80% of his character before he sings them.

“It was the product of eight years of standing back and taking it. In that space you have a lot of time to think about what you want to say. Not only were we trying to say it in a way which would mean something to people in Belfast, but we were trying to say it in a way which would mean something to people over here. To that extent you have to use, if you like, journalistic language.”

Hey Jake, I don’t think your songs are written from personal experience.

“Well I wrote them all from a personal angle.”

Wasted Life

What about ‘Wasted Life‘? I heard you distorted the facts surrounding the guy’s death —that he wasn’t part of an ‘organisation’ when he was killed.

“Maybe I heard it wrong. Maybe I was totally wrong. But either way the guy died and either way lots of people died that way. If it was wrong then I apologise to everyone for causing distress but that was the way I heard it at the time.

Now, I’d rather go on evidence I heard at the time than evidence I heard two years later but if I was wrong then I apologise to everyone concerned. But it doesn’t make the song any less valid. But I apologise sincerely if I was wrong, because I knew the family well and I knew the guy very well.

“You must remember I wrote the song two years after the event. I had a lot of time to sit back and think about the waste of a friend.”

Still, it is bound to infuriate those who worked to get his name cleared.

“Well, the minute you start to deal with specific incidents where you weren’t there you’re open to all sorts of criticism. The song was written about the way I felt, it’s not a damnation of anybody or anything. Well, it is a damnation of things — but not anybody in particular.”

Law and Order

So how ‘personal’ is a song written two years after an event at which the writer wasn’t even present? Probably, in the circumstances, intensely personal — but you wouldn’t know that from listening to ‘Wasted Life’.

There’s no hint of personal emotion, no link to the nervous system: Burns’ rage is totally flat, desensitised by the one-dimensional musical backdrop. Indignation and disgust at police brutality towards a friend suffers a similar fate, packaged into a song called ‘Law And Order’ and loaded with slick but sticky slogans and brazen banner-waving.

The only time they leave their Daily Mirror headline vocabulary — catch phrases which roll off the tongue with knee-trembling anticipation like ‘Sus-Sus-Suspect Device’ and ‘Ba-Bar-Bar-Barbed Wire Love’ — and deal with one thing all this actually affects, they dismiss it as if it were a throwaway triviality.

Love is somehow not a part of their world, where easily digested images flash past like so much rubble, timing devices, barricades and British Army land rovers on News At Ten.

The tidily trenchant terrain of SLF could no more bear the unsettlement of real passion than it could approach something as crucial, something as simple, as ‘boy meets girl.’

Joy Division‘s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ says more about Northern Ireland than ‘Inflammable Material’. Dammit, ‘The Undertones‘ says more about Northern Ireland than ‘Inflammable Material.

“We go over the top in that we shout too loud when we shouldn’t,” Jake admits. “There’s a lot of screaming in the songs which sometimes don’t deserve it — they get elevated above their station. Like ‘Barbed Wire Love‘ — I definitely should have sang as opposed to growl that.

Piss-take

So many people have taken it the wrong way. It’s supposed to be a piss take of us, and a lot of people have come up to me and said it’s the sickest thing they’ve ever heard in their lives or ‘Isn’t it terrible that you can’t meet someone like that?’ and I said no, it’s a joke.”

Jake’s fond of jokes that I find funny, as in peculiar. The last time I met him before this interview he’d gone onstage in Belfast and told the audience the group were just back from England where they’d been telling “lotsa little lies about you all”.

So SLF’s much vaunted battlefront love song is a piss take. Don’t you think love is important, Jake?

“The thing is, I hadn’t fallen in love at the time. The song was intended as a piss take of us. When the Island thing fell through Colin McClelland (SLF’s then co-manager) got absolutely pissed and decided that the only way we could get a recording contract was to write love songs.

We thought, ‘fawck awf’.”

This is Jake Burns speaking. Y’know Jake? ‘Nobody’s Hero’? No bloody wonder. S0 YOU were pushed into this unenviable position of being the voice of Belfast’s youth, the definitive late ’70s Ulster rock band, blah blah blah, by forces beyond your control.

Demo tape

Hang on Jake, what about the part played by the band themselves in all this? How do you justify promoting your first single by packaging it in a demo tape designed to resemble an incendiary device?

“I think that was justified by that time,” he replies, “because it was one of the little things Jake Burns had wanted to do as a person for some time. I mean we didn’t just send them to record companies, we sent them to all the Fleet Street news agencies, just to make them open their eyes a bit.

Belfast

“For so long the troubles in Belfast had been reported —first it was stone riots, petrol bombs, then it was bombing, then it was shooting. Then it was five people killed, then something ridiculous like 12 or 24 people killed. Things like letter bombs were ignored.”

There’s silly old me thinking it was one of the most terrifying methods of causing carnage.

“They were black and white. There was no way they could have been mistaken for incendiaries.”

But you all know what these thick Englishmen are like . . .

“One record company had to actually ring us back to get another one sent because they’d thrown theirs in a bucket of water!”

Christ, he sounds almost boastful. It’s a sick way of shocking people into effect — like wearing Nazi insignia. In ‘Wasted Life’ Burns calls indiscriminate bombers “fascists”, but he had no qualms about using what was, in effect, one of their weapons to promote his group.

“I didn’t see it like that.” I wonder how the poor buggers who had to open the parcels saw it. INTRIGUED by what seem to be very odd promotional tactics for a group who weren’t trying to exploit the situation, but felt quite at ease going across town to pose in some rubble for the cover of their debut single, and using pictures of local kids and soldiers on future releases, I continue to talk about packaging.

“Punk is dead but we’re still dying” bleated the label on ‘Alternative Ulster’. The mother of the kid who was being used to sell the single with his picture on the cover, without his or her permission, wasn’t too keen on such flagrant exploitation.

Single cover

“It’s the paradox thing,” Jake tells me. “If you’re writing about something like that what do you put on the cover? Flowers growing in the wood? We put a soldier with a kid pissing himself laughing on the cover which seemed to sum the whole bloody thing up.

There’s still a chance for people to grow up and create their own alternative. But the minute that came out it was totally fucken misinterpreted. The kid’s mother thought he was going to be killed.”

They used to say it was unwise to make a film with children or animals; it’s outright stupidity to construct a single cover from soldiers and children. Can’t you see the mother’s point, Jake?

“Course I can, but what’s the first thing she did? She gets the kid to stand holding the cover. He looked nothing like what he did on the cover, which was taken several years earlier. Then she splashes it all over Northern Ireland’s only Sunday newspaper.”

Even so, if I had children I wouldn’t let any politicians kiss them, in the same way I’m damn sure I wouldn’t want SLF using them to sell their records.

Child with a soldier

“It was a spur of the moment picture that happened in Northern Ireland. So why set up a posey photograph? I don’t think what we done was wrong in the first place. I don’t think we used him at all.”

HOW WOULD you feel if you lived in Belfast and your kid was out playing around and some modern ‘social artist’ type photographer snapped a picture of the child with a soldier in a sniper position and then three years later a rock and roll group unearthed the unpleasant memento and plastered the picture on the cover of one of their records?

It’s that sort of inviolate superiority and self-importance which spills over into their new ‘Nobody’s Heroes‘ album. They always said they’d only write about what was happening around them, but at least a third of the LP is about what happens inside the group as a unit. Jake seems a little unsure about this.

“I don’t know, I really don’t. ‘Wait And See’ is obviously a personal song and mmmm, no, I think all the others are fairly across the board. ‘Wait And See’ is obviously a bit boastful and a bit braggish.

But, sod it, people did tell us that we weren’t going to get anywhere, people did tell us that we were useless and hopeless and that we should give up. It’s not sort of ha ha ha —we did it! It’s more sort of up yours Sam, we were right and you were wrong.”

From office clerk nonentity to much sought after chic city spokesperson for the life he left behind — he’s naturally been affected, who wouldn’t be? But with predictable overstatement, they hammer the same point out three times until there’s nothing left at all.

No Change

Hear them bawl about us and our problems (‘Nobody’s Hero‘), us and our success (‘No Change‘), us and our drummer (‘Wait And See‘). It’s hard to think of a more infuriating practice: rock groups singing about themselves as if they were locked in some sort of mysteriously impenetrable bubble. We talk more about the new album.

Jake: “It means more to me because it was a lot harder to do, an awful lot harder to do. There was a lot of effort went into it. We were determined to make a record that would stand up in ten years’ time as a good record.

Nobody’s Heroes

“We went out of our way to make it sound important to a lot of people. Now that’s going to sound strange. What I mean is, the lyrics I wrote, although fiercely personal — a lot more so than ‘Inflammable Material’ — were written in such a way that people who listen to them, if they come from a similar sort of background, would be able to identify with them.

So that in ten years’ time the soundtrack for some kid’s adolescence is quite easily going to be ‘Nobody’s Heroes’ and that’s what we were aiming for.”

A lot of people think manager/ lyricist Gordon Ogilvie wrote the words, but . . . “He gets indiscriminately slagged off for lyrics he didn’t write. The Melody Maker said ‘At The Edge‘ was the only real lyric on the album because Gordon hadn’t written it.

That was to slag off things like ‘Wait And See’ and ‘Nobody’s Hero’, saying they were obviously written by a 30-year-old man who didn’t have any idea what the kids in the group were singing about. That’s bollox. I wrote those lyrics. Gordon probably changed two lines, but he has to get a full credit because the band don’t individually take credit for what they’ve written.”

Ogilvie

Ogilvie has been the subject of much debate, but he’s never been interviewed. As he was on tour with the band, I took an opportunity to have a chat with him, which served the dual purpose of pleasing Jake and giving me something to do during the soundcheck.

Gordon is bland and uncontroversial. He admits that his job on the Daily Express has made him very rich. He claims to take no money out of SLF. If you find it annoying that so many people buy his songs, just be thankful that they’re not all copying his haircut. The most interesting thing Gordon said to me was after our inconsequential exchange:

“I find it really insulting to the integrity of Jake, Ali, Henry and Jim when people accuse them of being marionettes.”

That’s interesting, because our polite chat hadn’t even raised the topic of puppeteering. Don’t look over your other shoulder, Gordon, there might be a three-eyed monster with-a cudgel following you!

SO JAKE Burns sees ‘Nobody’s Heroes’ as a great misunderstood meisterwerk, a sort of early ’80s equivalent to ‘Forever Changes’ . . . I find it strange he should want to cover a Specials song (‘It Doesn’t Make It Alright‘) as he’s had nothing but bad words for 2-Tone everywhere from Radio One’s Roundtable to Sounds.

“Hmmm, yes, well it’s not exactly a cover version. It’s more than a bit different to theirs. It was exactly the opposite to admiration. We thought, Jesus that’s a good song, they’ve fucken wasted that. So we went out and decided to show everyone how it should be done, but because The Specials are everyone’s pet band we suffered for it. But again, I think given time that track will stand up easily enough on its own.”

Teenage stereotype

Personally, I’m not standing around waiting for me dentures and wheelchair. This particular ‘teenager’ has had quite enough stereotyped teen dream rock and role play.

On ‘Nobody’s Heroes’, stripped of their Outer City Curfew Blues, SLF can only create a picture of adolescence that rock music has been painting over for nigh on 25 years.

It’s an unbelievably dreary world without one iota of the verve and agility that true documenters of teenage trauma must have —silver tongued bards like Brian Wilson, John O’Neil and Pete Shelley.

The whole deal reeks and hisses like a punctured, septic sheep’s bladder, it’s oh so old and croaky — a sterile emasculation of adolescence. The Top 20 single, a botchy cliched song called ‘At The Edge‘, is just another snotty perspective on the generation gap, very much “my ma and da don’t have a fucken clue” type of thing.

Did the song not make your parents angry, Jake?

“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to them about it yet. When they get the album and read the words they’ll probably be a bit annoyed. But I think they’re marvellous.

Generation gap

The time the Island thing fell through they were wonderful. My dad even offered to mortgage the house so we’d have enough money to go on. The song’s not bitter, they just didn’t understand what I was trying to do at the time.

It’s about the generation gap, which has been written about a million times before, but I’m sure some people could find a bloody N. Ireland twist in it if they wanted.”

Here we are again! The black leather jacket and the 80% factor proving that their main functions are dis-functions. Burns is playing with discarded images — “written about a million times before” — and he can only give his give his audience the cloak and swagger, the dull heroics of a mouldy, outmoded kind of rock performer. Jake justifies it with some vain notion of ‘commitment’.

“They’re people who’ve paid money to come and see you, who pay your wages every week, and we’ve got certain commitments to them. The black leather jacket is a commitment to them in so much as I would stand up there larger than they are and shout for them. We’re committed to jump about, to put on a show.”

Kindergarden

I think I’ve heard that all before. It’s time to think about a far more important commitment. Commitment to a respect both for yourself and your audience, Jake. What you’re doing isn’t rock ‘n’ roll, it’s kindergarten.

Stiff Little Fingers cater for a considerable market with their cheap comic-strip punky politico prancing and their complacent, retrogressive music — they’re sure to be a big hit with all those people who buy Sid Vicious and Sham 69 records.

In fact it’s quite easy to see where they take their place — in the apres-punk party cockfight along with The UK Subs, The Ruts and the rest. If rock and roll is a mental hospital, this is the wing for the terminally insane.

In the ward next door you can see Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Girl (Girl??) struggling in their straitjackets. If it weren’t for the peculiarities of tribalism they’d all be one big happy family enjoying that very special kind of feeling generated by aural assaults, headaches and ear bleeds.

Listening to the dull monochromatic thud of Stiff Little Fingers and their London counterparts, it’s not hard to see what they spent their youth listening to. Even the lyrics on the new album show the hallmarks of misspent youth.

“You were part of everything and everything was part of you” (‘Wait And See’) is blatant reheated hippy trash, the sort of thing John Lennon fingered when he sang “I am you and you are me and we are all together”.

Do we need embarrassing pontifications like “But no-one is a nobody/Everybody is someone”(‘Nobody’s Hero‘) — oh yeah man, like really meaningful.

Stiff Little Fingers | Suspect Devices

Additionally, ‘Tin Soldier‘ sounds like aspiring fourth form war poetry that fell out of the school magazine. Hearing the forced, pseudo-savage snarl of the Burns larynx it’s no surprise to learn he once played a dog in his school play.

ALL OF WHICH is a shame, because away from all this messy pretence, this silly shadow boxing and those unbearable yappy vocals, Jake is a considerate, sensitive and level-headed person.

Outside of SLF, I have a lot of time for him. Inside, he comes over as another would-be teen messiah, a political prophet and an angry young bore.

Onstage he just gets careless, carried away with his M.C. spots. “If you see anyone spitting just put your fist in their face, OK?”

That seems a strange thing to say for a man who calls himself a wimp and admits to being shy with it. Why try to be as arrogant as Bob Geldof when you’re really as reticent as Pete Shelley?

As he chats with fans after gigs, his interest is much too keen to be considered anything but genuine. In fact when the kids begin to talk about their mates and the accompanying social camaraderie, a feeling of envy is detectable.

Belfast

Do you miss Belfast, Jake?

“Yes, very much so, very much so indeed. I miss my mates. It was like being part of two things over there: we had the band and we had all our friends.

“Having friends over here is totally different. Friends over here are people you phone up every two weeks, people you meet in a pub every two weeks. Back there it was a bunch of mates you went out with every night and got pissed with. I suppose it’s a totally different lifestyle now.”

BEFORE WE finish, let’s go back to the start. Why don’t you ever talk about your, err, musical background, Jake?

Montrose

“Well I have. It’s come up but it wasn’t printed. But I’ll cheerfully admit to what I used to listen to, and why shouldn’t I?”

Then you won’t mind admitting that ‘Suspect Device’ is a straight lift from Montrose’s ‘Space Station No 5’?

“Yeah! Now they’re going to sue us! It’s just the guitar intro is stolen from ‘Space Station No5′”.

As any fool knows, the song’s intro is used for the entire tune. It’s such a glaringly obvious steal, Montrose probably would benefit from taking it to law. Jake strides into one of his great I’ve-got-nothing-to-hide dissertations.

‘Wasted Life’ is stolen from ‘Baba O’Reilly’, ‘Barbed Wire Love’ is ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’, ‘No More Of That’ is ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. I’ll cheerfully go through and tell you where they all come from, they’re all I rip-offs.

‘Breakout’ is stolen from ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ — we’ve stolen ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ more times than anything. It’s a good riff though.”

What may seem a frivolous exercise in self-deflation does actually hold a fair degree of truth. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Ed Hollis, the Hot Rods’ mentor, produced SLF’s early demos and gave them musical advice early in their career.

Eddie and the Hot Rods

“But I don’t think the Eddie and the Hot Rods album sold 85,000,” he objects facetiously.”

I’LL TELL YOU where Stiff Little Fingers stand in my world: right ‘At The Edge’, worthlessly detached, incommunicative. To put it plainly, Stiff Little Fingers are a very contrived, a very weak-kneed and a very dishonest rock and roll fantasy.

It’s past locking up time in Bournemouth’s Stateside Centre. But despite reluctance from 44 the management and the fact that the group had their dressing room rifled during their performance, they stay behind for the customary chat with the fans.

I sidle up to Jake Burns as he signs his umpteenth autograph of the evening, using my pen. “I-fere, I’d like to have some ink left,” I say. “Ach, for God sake stop your whining, Martin,” he replies.