There are a couple of things about Stiff Little Fingers that I didn’t know I didn’t know. I didn’t know that their debut album, ‘Inflammable Material’ was the first release on Jeff Travis’s Rough Trade label (and now home to The Strokes, British Sea Power and a host of other new inspirables). I didn’t know that ‘Inflammable Material’ was the very first Independent album ever – ever – to enter the national UK music charts. That’s pretty lax isn’t it? The thing is, just as Channel 5 seems to think that it invented sex, the average 18 year old seems to have convinced themselves that the Libertines and the Yeah, Yeah Yeahs have somehow invented punk- pop punk. Not the cynically commercial anti-pop of the Sex Pistols, but the precise – ney – ball-breaking anarchy that characterized every angry agent provocateur from Joe Strummer to Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto: the British New Wave, for want of a better word. And just before I lose the point completely – I just want to say they didn’t. We might like to think the present crop of surly unkempt youngsters are the first crazy casualties of amphetamine charged anti-music – but the likes of Stiff Little Fingers did the whole thing years ago; long before it ever became fashionable. In fact, long before anything was very fashionable.
Back with a new album for EMI, ‘Guitar and Drum’ sees the Clash inspired Belfast quartet crank up the riffs and inglorious three part harmonies in a manner totally befitting their cantankerous and edgy legacy.
It’s a simple premise: here’s a guitar and here’s a drum – together they provide the basic core DNA of rock n roll. And as a testament to that, there’s even a song called ‘Guitar and Drum’ – equally core and equally basic. There’s the jerky, antagonistic verses, the wiry, spidery riffs and the hooky-as-velcro chorus. And what’s more it’s totally devoid of all that self-reflexive, Post-Structuralist, ironic nonsense that seem to go hand in hand with the current Garage movement. And it’s a point more than ably supported by the robust Joe Strummer tribute, ‘Strummerville’ – a song characterized by that same traditional urban folklore feel that made ‘London Calling’ and others like it so vital. Whilst others may have forgotten that true punk-rock is rooted deeply in the Anglish beer-swilling shanty-song (with the exception of The Coral and Greenday) Stiff Little Fingers raise a titanic rebel yell with the thoroughly uncompromising ‘Still Burning’, the sparkling ‘Best Of Fools’ and the beautiful Byrds inflected ‘Dead Man Walking’ – a brand new shiny spanking classic of a song.
If anything ‘Guitar and Drum’ just goes to show you that making culturally resonant ‘conscience’ music doesn’t have to be as crass or as pussy-footing as the Levellers. It can in fact just rock. And this album does – with the best of them. Still burning? You bet.