“What I’ve heard doesn‘t do anything for me,” Jake Burns says about Fontaines DC. “That’s not in any way disrespectful to them. It’s just not my thing.”
As for Kneecap, according to the lead singer of Stiff Little Fingers, the North’s most durable rock band (48 years and counting), “They certainly know how to get a headline, don‘t they? With regards to their music and stuff, sorry, lads, I haven‘t listened to it. Not my thing, either.”
The standing joke in Stiff Little Fingers is that Burns doesn‘t listen to much new music. “I’ve become better since my wife and I moved from Chicago to a small town in West Virginia, two years ago. I try to immerse myself in local music, so I’m hearing a lot of Appalachian and newer country music. Not the rock acts with hats, but people such as Sierra Ferrell and Billy Strings.
“With regards to Ireland, I’m late to the party. I just got the Muireann Bradley album. It’s phenomenal – and the only recent one I’ve been buying and sending to friends and family. God, listen to her: she’s amazing. I come down here to my little basement studio, pick up my acoustic guitar and try to play half of what she’s doing, but there’s no way I can do it.”
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The walls of Burns’s basement are adorned with framed gold and silver discs, markers of Stiff Little Fingers’s success. He is recuperating after surgery for an umbilical hernia – “I should have had it looked at ages ago” – but looks healthy enough, and he talks nine to the dozen in an accent unaltered by his years in the United States.
Moving from Chicago, where he and his wife had lived for 20 years, to a more rural location was part of a plan to cut back his work schedule. They did a Google search for the 50 best small towns in the US (they also considered small towns in Ireland and Scotland) and decided against moving anywhere with colder winters than Chicago’s.
“That wiped out at least a dozen towns straight away. And then it was, ‘Let’s try not to move to where there are too many Trump dickheads.’”
Burns loves where they moved to. “Seriously, after a five-minute drive in any direction I found myself going, God, it looks just like Templepatrick.”
Stiff Little Fingers formed in the summer of 1977. Burns and the band’s bass player, Ali McMordie, are the remaining original members of an ideological band that have had their share of controversies. These include the early outrage – and empowerment – of their first two singles, Suspect Device and Alternative Ulster, both classic punk rock, the latter a contemporary anthem. Anti-racism songs such as White Noise (“a burst of anger because it was an ugly subject”) and Fly the Flag also caused conflict.
More than enough time has passed for Burns to be sanguine about the combative reaction to the songs. The band never had much in the way of disagreement over the songs about Northern Ireland. “The worst misunderstandings, which were totally misread, were directed at White Noise and Fly the Flag. I don‘t regret them. I still think they’re powerful songs.”
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Burns, who is 67, dismisses the significance of having passed the landmark age of 65, “when you were supposed to retire from your job. For many people, however, there is no cutoff point, unless it’s self-imposed. Realistically, part of my wanting to move to the country was to put the brakes on completely, but my wife said I’d miss it too much. She was right.”
The topic of semi-retirement was broached. “Festivals are fun to do, so they’re not a problem, but in the end we decided to cut down on the duration of tours. Without blowing our own trumpet, we’ve always had high standards, particularly in live performances. We didn‘t want to let that slip, or want to be doing 30-date tours and finding that halfway we were going through the motions. I’d rather do nine shows that were high quality than 20 that were just okay.”
Ever the pragmatist, Burns realises that Stiff Little Fingers’s legacy rests on fewer than a dozen songs. How does a band of their vintage balance the creative need to write new material with the awareness that their fans mostly want to hear the core tunes? It’s a conundrum that plagues many acts.
“The way the music business operates these days, there’s an element of ‘what’s the point?’. You write a new song, you play it at a show, somebody records it on their phone, puts it on YouTube, and it’s pretty much a perfect copy. So why bother? I still get angry about stuff, however, and writing songs is my release valve, my ‘rage against the dying of the light’ thing.”
And the nostalgia aspect? “You’ve got to be careful not to become a cabaret act, and that’s one of the main reasons new songs are important.
“Of course, some people come to see us just to hear between eight and 10 songs that they know we’re going to play. Our allotted stage time allows us to play around 18 songs, so that only gives you about nine opportunities, at best, to play a new song or perhaps a slightly obscure album track.”
When Stiff Little Fingers do that, he says, he can sense the audience’s attention waning, or see people drifting towards the bar. “It’s a difficult balancing act, because for everybody that comes away saying it was a great show, somebody will say we just play the same songs every year. But if you don‘t play those songs you get mangled. It’s the equivalent of damned if you do, damned if you don‘t.”
Burns has described Suspect Device and Alternative Ulster as the band’s star substitutes. “Yeah, they’re the band’s Alan Shearer songs. If you feel the gig is sagging it’s, like, ‘For f**k’s sake. Put Shearer on: see if he can get us across the line.’” He raises his Newcastle United mug, a reminder of the 15-plus years he spent in the English city from 1987 onwards.
Burns has always wanted his best songs “to have legs” and to be regarded as “folk songs by this stage, which in a way some of them are”. When he and Gordon Ogilvie wrote Alternative Ulster, “it was a song about being bored and under the thumb. There was an element of rebellion in it, of course, but I don‘t expect it to be a call to arms for anything any more. I think the song now is more a celebration of things”.
The past near half-century “still feels like the blink of an eye to me. I don‘t think in terms of places as much as in terms of people, and what led me to meet them at various times in my life that has enabled me to end up here in West Virginia”.
Burns lives in a community of “solid country folk who have no idea who Stiff Little Fingers are. You sit in one of the town‘s three bars chatting, and U2 will come on the jukebox. They’re, like, ‘Did you ever meet these guys?’ I don‘t even want to tell them, because it’s like I’m boasting, so when they say stuff like that I just change the subject.”
What does he speak about instead? “I start talking about Newcastle United, and bore them to death.”
Stiff Little Fingers: The Singles 1978-1983 is released via Cherry Red Records. Stiff Little Fingers play the Academy, Dublin, on Friday, August 15th, and Custom House Square, Belfast, on Saturday, August 16th
