Stiff Little Fingers still foster punk pride

Belfast band's songs chronicle generation of political conflict

Singer-guitarist Jake Burns is one of the most influential punk rockers of all time, but no one is more surprised than him.

“I certainly didn’t expect to be doing this 37, 38 years later,” Burns says during an interview to promote his band Stiff Little Fingers’ show at 7 p.m. Friday, July 24, at the Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 S.E. 39th Ave.

The current incarnation of SLF includes Burns, as well as original bassist Ali McMordie, along with longtime members Ian McCallum on guitar and Steve Grantley on drums. SLF shares the bill with Rum Rebellion and The Brass. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 day of show. Info: hawthornetheatre.com.

A lot of post-punk bands, most especially skater outfits, owe a larger chordal and melodic debt to Stiff Little Fingers than to more famous punk bands like the Ramones. To wit: No SLF, no Offspring, no Green Day, no Bad Religion and definitely no Vans Warped Tour.

Along with the Clash, SLF brought to punk a folk rock sensibility lyrically as well as tunefully, creating anthem after anthem of songs you could actually sing as opposed to snarl or scream. It’s a sound that defined the Belfast band as a sonic chronicler of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the bloody 1969-98 conflict between mostly Catholic nationalists fighting for a united Ireland and mostly Protestant unionists fighting to keep the province British.

Tunes like “Suspect Device,” “Wasted Life” and “Alternative Ulster” evoked the frustration of a generation robbed of normalcy by political violence. As Burns famously sang in “Device”: “Inflammable material is planted in my head/It’s a suspect device that’s left 2,000 dead.”

Burns was 11 when the Troubles began, and remembers Belfast becoming a no-go zone for many touring British rock bands — save one, Led Zeppelin, who came to town in 1971, and actually played as a riot went on elsewhere.

“That should have been the first show I went to,” Burns says wistfully. “But my dad reckoned I wouldn’t go.”

So he missed the first-ever live performance of “Stairway to Heaven,” and laughs when asked if that fueled the angst that created SLF’s music later on.

Fast-forward to 1977 when Burns formed SLF along with Henry Cluney, Brian Faloon and Ali McMordie, inspired by bands like The Clash, to create their own sound. Along with their purported Derry rivals The Undertones, SLF offered a musical respite for youngsters in Northern Ireland from the sometimes bleak world the Troubles created. Rock ‘n’ roll allowed SLF to talk about subjects that might get you hurt or worse if you shouted about them on the street, Burns notes.

“Amazingly if you do that on a stage with a guitar, people don’t kill you,” he says.

In fact, the band was really only nervous about playing its strident music once, he says, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army questioned why the group was coming to Drogheda in the Irish Republic, apparently thinking they were a British propaganda front of some sort. Burns wound up briefly talking to a member of the IRA on the phone and seemed to clear things up, noting the band wasn’t taking sides, just singing about their lives.

“At one point, some shadowy figures came in and watched a few songs and left,” he says of the gig, which went off without a hitch.

Like many folks from Northern Ireland, Burns welcomed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which effectively ended the conflict. Violence has erupted from time to time since then, but Burns says it’s nothing like the bad ole days.

“You can’t put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound and expect to fix it,” he says of the occasional violence that happens. “However, I think what there is now is that people have had a sense of normalcy for a really long time that they don’t want to go back to what they had before.”

As for Burns, he’s never stopped singing songs of social conscience. For example, SLF released a critically acclaimed album last year titled “No Going Back,” which included such number as “Liars Club,” named after a bar in Chicago that Burns drove past as he listened to a radio report about Tony Blair, George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Another tune, “Full Steam Backwards” addresses the complacent workingman who can’t see the “trouble headed right your way/On the financial page.”

Burns bemoans the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.

“It’s pretty much a chasm these days,” he says, saying he’s struck by “the active dislike that’s coming down from those that have.”

Then again, Burns is used to being disliked — SLF’s rivals for rock glory in Northern Ireland was another equally innovative band, The Undertones, who would blast SLF for what they saw as its glorification of the Troubles, a charge Burns always refuted.

“They wanted to escape it and ignore it,” he says. “We wanted to confront it head on.”

He adds that one member of The Undertones reportedly said even if he didn’t like SLF’s political lyrics, he still wouldn’t like them because they sounded like a poor man’s version of another famous Irish rock band, Thin Lizzy.

“I was like, ‘That’s great, I never knew we sounded like Thin Lizzy!’” Burns says with a laugh.