On the 37th anniversary of the their 1979 debut album inflammable material. I got the chance to speak to the Stiff Little Fingers front man Jake Burns. Speaking from his home in Chicago, we talk about their up and coming UK tour, playing in France just days after the Paris attacks and discuss their nearly 40-year career.

Stiff Little Fingers sprung from Belfast in the late 70s when the troubles were at the highest. It was a time when punk was growing throughout the UK and they now have an impressive 25 albums under their belt. Their songs Suspect device and Alternative Ulster will go down in punk history.

They are about to embark on UK tour starting at the Oxford O2 and finishing 24 days later at the Ritz in Manchester.

Your tour is starting on the 25th in Oxford at the O2, this will be the first of 18 gigs in 24 days, and how do you prepare for that?

Ummm... it's actually not that many really, we've been doing it for that long now it's kind of like a well oiled machine. We got a routine we stick to, because we are all scattered to the four winds as well. We all live all over the place. We all email each other set lists of what we want to play and what we kind of need to play. So we spend the next couple of weeks at home learning your own part and then we get all together a few days before hand in London, book ourselves in a recording studio and knock the whole thing in to shape. So that's about as much preparation we need as a band and obviously the crew are doing other stuff in the interim, hotels have to be booked and stuff like transport and making sure we got enough string and drum sticks to get round, you know.

Do you find it much different touring now compared to the old days?

It a lot less frantic than it used to be, like I said we settled in to a routine and we all know what we are doing, umm... You know back in the day it all seemed a bit helter-skelter, plus everything was new then you know, you kind of wanted to do everything when you got to town because you had never been there before, you didn't know what it had to offer. These days we kind of, not saying we've been there done that but we've kind of been there done that. It's a much easier thing to do now you know, we all grown up and you don't rely on each other so much, back in the day it was like we hung out together, it was like if one person was going out, then everybody had to go out. Now we are all much more relaxed, on the day, for example, on the day I sort of just lock myself in my hotel room and watch television and don't go out, basically try and rest a bit more. That's because we are all getting to be old geezers now.

Out of all the places you've played, which has been your favorite?

Well again it's a standard answer to this, but its defiantly Glasgow, just simply because I think there is a lot of similarity's between folk on the west of Scotland and those from northern Ireland, so we had a lot in common when we first started. The Glasgow audience kind of adopted us almost from day one, much more fervently than everywhere else. We got pretty good reception else where but Glasgow was always that little bit more fervent, as I said. Also this year it's out 25th year of playing Barrowland on St Patrick's night. So that's kind of specials. So we are filming and recording. Just to give us two more things to worry about on the night.

That's going to be some gig then?

It should be yeah, it sold out very quickly, I mean it always sells out, but this year it was particularly fast. I think because people realized it was the 25th anniversary and they recon they we are probably going to do something special. So yeah it should be a really good night, as long as everything works, that's the trouble with having done it so long, you know when you are 18 or 19, although you get slight stage nervous, you don't have that many because you know, at that age you think you can conquer the world and rightly so, but you also don't know what the hell can go wrong but having done it for this long, I know everything that can go wrong. So I'm always petrified something's going to fucking break before we get half way though the show.


I saw in the news that you played in France a couple of days after the attacks, how was that?

To honest with you Owen, it was just another show. We never really thought about it, I mean our own concern was once the atrocities happened, the French government put the whole country on a kind of public lock down. So much as public gatherings weren't allowed. So our only concern was whether we were going to actually be allowed to play or not or whether the venue wanted to go ahead. We obviously didn't want to be seen as disrespectful but by the same token, having grown up in Northern Ireland, I was of a mind that, well we all were, that anything that's seen as a return to a normality as soon after something like that, can only be a good thing, we are very lucky, that the three day ban on public events stopped on the day we got there. Also the venue, we contacted them, make no mistake, If the venue had said they didn't want to do it, we wouldn't have gone but they said they very much wanted the show to go ahead. So we just went ahead and did it. I mean if anything the audience deserves more credit than we do because obviously they must have been more shaken up and the thought of going out to another show after what had just happened. So it was certainly an emotional evening but we tried to make it as normal as possible.

The French people showed Great Spirit in the days following the atrocities and I think, even going back with the Charlie Hebdo attacks, French people seem to really rally around each other in those times.

Well I think most people do, its one of those things, it's your life, well it's more than that, it's your way of life. I think most people believe that you can't be dictated to by outside forces.

No defiantly, almost showing that they can't win by disrupting our way of life. On a happier note it's the 37th Birthday of your first album Inflammable Material.

Yeah it's a long time, I just saw that today on Facebook, I was like 'really'? Its one of those weird things, obviously some times it feels like it was just yesterday and other times it feels like it happened to somebody else, it was so long ago.

If someone told you back then you would still be playing music in the same band 37 years later, would you have believed them?

Probably not, I mean I think once we released the record and once we saw the impact it had, we knew that it wasn't going to be something we were just going to stop doing in 6 months. You know when we made the record we didn't have a record deal. Rough trade had never made an album before and we had never made an album before and it was kind of like, 'well lets do it together' which was great, it was incredibly brave thing for them to do, to make us their first album release. We had been turned down by every major record company, so we almost thought we would go in and record the songs and at least, if nothing else in years to come, we would have something to play to our grandkids and say 'I made this record once'. So no, we never thought that it would go on for this length of time but once the record came out and did so well, we realized that we are certainly going to be doing this for the next few years. At the time we thought like most bands, we didn't think like it was a career but if we do get 5 years out of this, we are doing well. So to still be doing it like you said 37 years as well. As a band this is our 39th year, next year, well assuming we get through this year with out killing each other, then next year will be our 40th anniversary, which is just incredible, again it really does seem like a blink of an eye that I was in my bedroom in my mum and dads house, writing those first songs. So to be here this much later is just astonishing, and very humbling and an audience has stuck with us so long.

Yeah, you do seem to have a very loyal fan base.

They are, I mean again something I've often said, they are more like a football crowd and a rock crowd. Its like we are their team and they're going to stick with us though think and thin you know. It's very flattering.


What kind of songs can the fans expect to hear on the coming tour, some old stuff and new

A bit of both, I mean to be honest I've never been a fan of going to see a ban with a new album out and they play the whole dammed thing. You know, everybody wants to hear the new songs but you don't need to play it to death, 3 or 4 off the new record is enough really. So I'm also like, as we were just saying, we had such a long career really we have got to reflect that in the set list, we try and hit as many of what we consider to be the best songs, songs that the audience consider to be your best songs as well. At the end of the day we are there to entertain people. We try to play as much or as many bits and pieces of our whole career as we can. We only get 75 minutes but we stretch it out to about 90 before the crew start yelling at us and looking at their watches.

Out of all the songs which is your song is your favorite to play?

That's a really hard question. It kind of changes, if you ask some people they will say it the most recent thing they have writing, just because it freshest in their mind and its the thing they are most excited about. The benefit of hindsight, I couldn't put my finger on one to tell the truth Owen. The song that will follow me to my grave will always be Alternative ulster, that's the song the band is most commonly identified with. I don't have a problem with that, I think it's a decent song, certainly to have written it when I was 19 or 20 years old I look back on it and think 'yeah that's pretty good for a 19 year old to have written'.

Do you think your writing techniques have changed a lot of the years?

Yeah, any songwriter will tell you there are song-writing tricks to use that make anything exciting. I remember seeing years ago, Elton John being interviewed by Michel Parkinson, he was asked 'could you actually sing the phone book' he said 'yeah sure' and they got a phone book and sang the phone book and every one was really impressed. I remember watching it saying 'how's is he doing that?' but of course, now I know the easy tricks you get so everybody could sing the phone book if you know what your doing. So over the years at first you think the song is great but then you realize that they are tricks and everybody knows them so if anything its become, not harder to write but I think its more about trying to avoid the obvious tricks and throw something in that surprises people. With actually making it sound like its not supposed to be there. On your latest album the song My dark places is one of my favorites.

Again it was a song I wrote because I went through a long period of depression myself and I had finally come out the end and I basically wrote down everything that had happened to me and how I had dealt with it. It was more of an exercise for myself, I never really meant for the song to be published. If I hadn't been a songwriter, it would have just been written as a poem or a shopping list almost. Just something I could refer back to whenever I could feel myself depressed again, I could say 'hang on a minute, you know how this works, you know how to deal with this'. Being a songwriter, I put it to music, I never wanted it to be released but the band heard it. It was actually Ali turn and sat me down and said 'we got to record this' I said 'its just kind of me moaning on about being depressed, who wants to listen to that' and he said 'the bottom line is your not the only person in the world that get depressed' so I'm really glad we did record it because of all the other songs I've written including 'Alternative ulster' its one song that most people have come up to me and thanked me for writing and said its helped them and they are glad some one is talking about it out in the open. Because somehow there is this stigma to do with what is perceived as mental illness, has this weird stigma to it like your not allowed to talk about it or its something to be ashamed off almost. It seen as a weakness and its not and realistically talking about really is the first step in getting better.

It really is a great song.

Well thank you. Pink Globe: Being one of the major punk bands in the late 70s and early 80s, the genre of punk was such a revolution in music, fashion and youth culture. Do you think we will or could see anything like that again?

I would imagine so; I imagine there are just as many bored, disaffected kids about today as there were when we were kids. I don't see any reason why not, I think it expresses itself in form of rap music but unfortunately that's just became much like punk rock did, it became distilled down to some sort of basic common denominator. In rap music is became about gangster rap misogynist nonsense, in punk rocks case it seems to be, you've got to have the right hair cut, the right leather jacket, write songs about drinking and fighting. Which is like 'OK fair enough, if that's your thing'. It used to be so much more, you know.


With the way music is made, produces and sold these days, do you think it affects the new teenage bands, actual musicians rather than X-factor rubbish from making it big?

Yeah, I mean it's a weird thing; there was a period before the real complete rise of the Internet when I would have hated being in a band starting out. Because live music was dying on its arse and unless you were an established band, people weren't getting booked. No one was taking the chance going to see an unknown band. The record companies were just signing up like x-factor acts. It really did look for a long time that the music industry was going to die. It's a strange economy that because of the rise of the Internet and the fact that the kids can afford to fairly cheaply make records in their bedroom, where as when I was a kid it was just writing the songs was as much as you could manage. You needed a recording studio to do these things, now they can be put out on the internet with millions of followers on YouTube, they can build a following, so when they do finally go play live, should they want to, they have a ready made audience. Of course the downside to that, is that there is so much illegal downloading and stuff going on that really the incentive to write new music is taken away. Particularly if its what you do for a living, everyone had to pay bill at the end of the day. If you're spending years working, writing, making a record and then basically putting it on the Internet and people just steal it, then your incentive disappears. Its kind of harder for younger bands to make money but much easier to be heard.

What kind of modern day music that grabs you now, that pack the same punch of Stiff Little Finger.

I always dread this question because I'm the world worst for going out and watching bands and stuff. I know the minute I hang up the phone on you, I'll think of about 4 bands, but right now I can't think of any. I know they are out there. Soon as I hang up I think 'dam I should have mentioned them'. We've done a few festival tours and stuff now and there you see bands, again I would probably never have heard of and while watching on the side of the stage you would think 'god these guys are good'. So there are acts out there certainly, its not the desert that a lot of people have you believe there is.


What kind of genre of music to do listen to the most

Basically I'll listen to just about anything apart from jazz, I cant get on with is jazz at all. It never made any sense to me what so ever. At home I'm just as must likely to out on an old Howin' Wolf album as I am to put on the newest Elvis Costello. People I grew up with, and by that I mean people who are contemporizes at the time just ahead of us. Like Costello, I'm always really interested in. I like to see what he is likely to come up with because he has changed direction so many times. A lot of his stuff he has done hasn't been as successful as you would hope it terms of, not by the record sales but on how it worked. Equally there are some chance's that he has taken that have come off brilliantly well. I think it started when he made a country and western album in 1980. The Clash are putting London Calling and he is putting out Good year for the roses. It was like where the hell did that come from.

That's all I got for you Jake, thank you very much for the interview

Absolutely my pleasure, thank you for taking the time to call.