JAKE BURNS of STIFF LITTLE FINGERS: Personal Spaces Create A Voice For All
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
Stiff Little Fingers have seen it all; formed in 1977 they started out doing rock covers until they discovered the intoxicating world of punk. But even punk couldn’t fight the waves of some of the new music coming through and Stiff Little Fingers disbanded.
In 1987 they reformed and have never looked back since. While the band has been through numerous personnel changes, at their heart Jake Burns remains steadfast, many of the songs coming from his own personal experiences and viewpoints; a fact that he sometimes struggles with.
Now back in New Zealand for two shows, I spoke to Jake about how he looks back on the career of Stiff Little Fingers, the punk scene and just what three songs sum up Stiff Little Fingers as a band!
You’re the only member that has remained constant throughout the history of Stiff Little Fingers, what has kept you going personally?
“Probably the fact that I’m unemployable at anything else… [mutual laughter] I mean quite seriously it’s the best job I’ve ever had. I know it’s an old cliché but if you find something you love you’ll never work a day in your life, that’s pretty much the truth and I’ve had an absolute ball doing it!
Personally I have felt very fulfilled in doing it and I honestly can’t imagine myself doing anything else. I’ve done some other things, bits and pieces outside the band with other musicians and in other branches in the music industry but realistically being in Stiff Little Fingers is kinda what I do and it’s what I love doing so it’s as simple an answer as that.”
Looking back on your first album Inflammable Material [1979] now how do you see the album this many years down the track?
“That’s a difficult one, it’s an important record for a number of reasons; one its important in so much it – just from a personal point of view – was the bedrock upon which our whole career was built. But I know it’s an important record to a lot of people not in the band, the people that bought it. It’s one that seems to have made a huge difference to a lot of people’s lives which is very, very flattering.
I think looking back on it now, when we recorded it you know people often ask us ‘Did you know you were recording a classic album when you did it?’ Well no! We’re just a bunch of souls, we’d been turned down by pretty much every record label and as far as we were concerned this was just a chance to – if nothing else – we’ll get all these down on plastic and when we’re all old and dottery like now [mutual laughter] we can play them to our grandkids and say ‘This what your Grandad did when he was young and daft!’
We didn’t actually realise what it was going to be become, I don’t think anybody does in any band, when you’re making the record you’re just making the record you know? But if you ask me to go back and listen to it now I find it very hard to listen to because you know back then we had no idea what we were doing in a recording studio – which was wheeled in – and we set up and we played basically a live set and I think there were like two guitars on the whole record.
So it was done very quickly, but it’s out of time, it’s out of tune [mutual laughter] it’s very roughly recorded. It’s one of those things, if we were to go in and do it now we’d probably do it completely differently and it would probably suck as a record! I think it’s those imperfections that make it the record it is for a lot of people, they like that particularly raw edge to it, the fact that it sort of careens about all over the place and there’s a charm to that and if it was somebody else’s band I would argue that ‘No, no you can’t change a thing on it, it’s perfect as it is’ but because it’s my own record all I kinda hear are the mistakes and the bits that are out of tune.” [mutual laughter]
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there; because of that rawness it has an honesty to it, a sincerity if you will, that makes it such a beloved record.
“Well yeah I think we’ve always tried to be honest in everything that we’ve done, but yeah there’s certainly no place to hide on that record that’s for sure. Again we had somebody say ‘Wow, wish I could have seen the band live back then’ and I’m thinking ‘Really?’ listen to that record, that’s pretty much exactly what we sounded like.”
Obviously punk is close to your heart, it’s what drives you guys; how have you seen the scene change over the last forty years?
“Going back to when we started it was always more of an attitude rather than even a form of music; again when we started the likes of Blondie were considered a punk band, Television, the Talking Heads, all these people were lumped in under the same umbrella and it was a very broad church and I thought that was really exciting. I never wanted to play in a band like Talking Heads or whatever, but I loved the fact that everybody was willing to give all this stuff a listen and give it a chance you know and I think that that’s kinda gone from it now.
There’s a number of reasons for that, I think in the sort of death throes of the first wave of it and I’m talking around 82’ to 83’ when we actually called it a day because there was such a lack of interest in guitar bands in general, you know the new romantic thing had happened and people were rifting off to do other things. I think the core, the hardcore punk rock audience kind of solidified probably through necessity more than anything else, I don’t think that they realised at the time that they were setting these rules in stone but it became kind of … unless you had the right leather jacket with the right number of studs on it, and the right band you know stenciled on the back and the right haircut, you couldn’t be a punk rocker and that wasn’t what I took out of it at all in the first instance; what I took was the ability to be yourself and do whatever the hell you wanted!
And then suddenly there’s all these rules and that was the first time it changed from my point of view. And then of course once bands like Green Day started making billions of dollars for the record label it got to be just another branch of the entertainment industry. And in fact I think now you know I see a lot of bands and I don’t really get where they get their inspiration from, it seems to be a bunch of people all singing identikit songs about you know, they get up in the morning, they get drunk, they get in a fight and their life’s good. And it’s like ‘Ok, if that’s your life then fine but that’s kinda limited, you’re limiting yourself on what you’re writing about’ and that doesn’t inspire me in any way. I think it’s kinda sad that it’s become watered down to that degree, I’m not saying that everybody is like that, I’m sure there are bands out there that are still – if you will excuse the expression – fighting the good fight. As a general cover all, I see more of that sort of thing than anything else, which is sad but there you go.”
I do see how the more ‘manufactured’ version of punk music has watered down the true meaning. To me punk is more the DIY aesthetic, with bands whose material focuses on social injustices and issues etc.
“Yeah, as I said, the bands, a lot of them … the subjects that they pick to write about are identikit; they’re all drinking, fighting or having sex. And I’m like ‘Ok, that can’t be all your life is!?’”
Now there was quite a big gap between your albums Guitar and Drum and No Going Back, I understand Stiff Little Fingers have been working on some new material; can you divulge how big the next gap may be? Will it be as big as the last?
“I sincerely hope not I can tell you that! We hopefully not as long as the last one, that was kinda ridiculous, but there were reasons for it, basically just real life kinda got in the way. I went through a divorce, I moved to a different country, I got remarried, so you know that sort of stuff occupies your mind and your time rather than getting the chance to sit down and start writing songs you know?
And also I have a bunch of songs written five years before we did the No Going Back record and I sat down and listened to them after a tour and I didn’t think they were good enough, I mean I think the only one we kept was ‘Liar’s Club’ that was the only one that made it as it was through to the record; all the others I kept little bits and pieces of them or I just discarded of them completely.
I realised I wasn’t being honest with myself, and I wasn’t being honest with our audience you know? And so I wrote the songs that became No Going Back and then when I listened back to them I was like ‘Oh god, it’s a fifty year old man complaining about not being able to pay his mortgage and being depressed! Who the fuck wants to listen to that!?’ But amazingly a lot of our audience were in the same boat! So I think – I used the word honest before – it’s certainly a much more honest record than the one we might have made if we had rushed it out five years earlier.”
It’s funny actually as I hear that from a lot of bands who have been around for over thirty – forty years; the comment of who would want to listen to us at this age. Your fans do, because like you said they are often experiencing the same things. So you are just as much a voice for them now as you were in their teens!
“Yeah I think a lot of bands are concerned about it you know, and my advice to them would be ‘Just cast a net and do it’ because I think you find in a lot of cases your audience have – like you said – your audience has grown with you and the concerns you’ve got are the same as us, and in a way I think it’s a blessing that we didn’t make Green Day money or something like that because we do still try to live the same lives that our audience do and we have the same concerns that they do.
Occasionally I might think ‘God it would be nice if I could make enough money that I could just put my feet up [laughs] but that wasn’t the case and so if for nothing else at least it’s kept my pen sharp! [mutual laughter]
You moved to the United States about twelve years ago, do you feel that the move has influenced your sound or your writing, especially in light of some of the current situations?
“I find it very hard. I’m very aware of the fact that I have seen other bands make this move, you know come across from the UK or Ireland and live in America and they’re here five minutes and they’re suddenly writing songs about the Californian highway system. It’s like ‘What the hell do you know, you’ve only here five minutes!’ it’s almost like they can’t wait to leave everything behind them. So I’m very much aware and I try not to Americanize the band and then Americanize the material.
And that’s why more and more of the songs tend to become quite personal – I’m just talking from my perspective – and I think that way I’m more readily connecting with our audience on a one to one basis. I mean you’re absolutely right, friends have said to me ‘You must have no shortage of material since you’ve gone and elected Commander Cookie-Bananas here’ The trouble with Trump and the administration that is going on here, and writing songs about it is, it’s not so much a shortage of material it’s more like you have been confronted with the biggest all you can eat buffet you know? You don’t know where the hell to start… [mutual laughter]
I mean some of the material does concern itself with not just my perceiving of his mishandling of the American government but also just looking back to governments around the world. I think that the UK government has gotten themselves into quite a mess as well. It’s also quite frightening what the governments have done, it’s how it effects everybody’s lives and the consequence that’s what concerns me much more, and as far as I’m concerned Donald Trump can go on making bloody mistakes until the day he dies I just don’t want them to be where there’s a case that it will affect my everyday life, or possibly ending my everyday bloody life, you know?”
Now with this tour of New Zealand it is called the 40th Anniversary Tour; so Kiwis can expect all the really big hits?
“Yeah, we’re going to try – it’s a tricky thing to pull off – but we’re going to try and pull off and capture as much of the last forty years as we can in an hour and a half. And at the same time, hopefully at least, at least … one new song, so it’s kinda retrospect with one eye on the future.
The hardest thing about putting it together is what you leave out, not what you put in you know? So we invariably start out with a list of about forty songs and stage time only allows us to play half of these so then you got to get rid of them and then it does get down to ‘Well we can’t not play that one, cause they’ll kill us’ [laughs] and then before you know it it’s then like, “Well now we’ve got no room for the new stuff!’ and well we want to play some of the new stuff because at least it keeps us fresh from our point of view and I think it’s also from an audiences point of view you know we’ve had lots of people write and say like you just did ‘So have you guys made another record, it’s not going to be another ten damn years is it before the next one?’ [laughs]
So you kinda want to play at least one new song so that they go ‘Oh, well at least they got off of their arse and have written something! [mutual laughter] But yeah it’s trying to get all that into an hour and a half is the tricky part you know.”
Yes I can imagine, you’re not always going to make every fan happy. There will always be a song not played that a fan was dying to hear… Here’s an interesting one for you; what three songs from your career would you recommend to be played to someone who had never heard of Stiff Little Fingers?
“Oh god … that is tricky, we’re right back to what I was just saying about what do you leave out you know? Well I guess the obvious starting point would be ‘Alternative Ulster’ because it’s the most fearless song from the early part of the career, even though it is often branded as one of the Irish songs and it does have reference to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the army but in general it’s just basically a standard bored teenager’s song. So I would imagine that would be one.
If I’m looking at maybe the mid-point of the career … uh I don’t know. Our song ‘Bits of Kids’ I really like on the Now Then… record, just again because it was very much a personal thing. At the time I was sharing a flat in London with our manager and his girlfriend who was a school teacher and she used to come home with these heartbreaking stories of what they would refer to as ‘latchkey kids’ , which is basically where both the parents would have to go out and work just so that they could make the rent payment and stuff and these kids basically had to fend for themselves and sometimes the jobs that they had to take on were not the most savoury jobs in the world … and ultimately I always really loved the tune on that.
If you’ve got to come right up to date as in pick something off the last album, again probably ‘My Dark Places’ which is a song I wrote about dealing with the depression that hit me in my early fifties and that I still have to deal with occasionally today. Again because when I wrote the song I didn’t really want to put it on the record because I thought ‘Who on earth wants to hear a fifty year old man moan on about being depressed’ but subsequently I found that after I put it on the album a lot of others had gone through the same thing, it almost seems to be like a rite of passage once you get to a certain stage in your life. All these doubts and fears seem to surface and they can really take quite a grip on you.
So those would be the three I would imagine … but if you ask me tomorrow you’ll get a different three! [mutual laughter]
So lastly any message for your New Zealand fans?
“Yeah I mean we’re absolutely delighted to be coming back I mean we’ve only been a few times and every time over has been incredibly welcoming and we’re very much looking forward to getting back. I think the last time we were across it was just in the aftermath of an earthquake down in Christchurch so the town was very much getting rebuilt, so hopefully you won’t be doing anything quite that dramatic before we get there again this time.
But yeah we’re very much looking forward to coming back and thanks for remembering who we are after all this time!” [laughs]