Project Description
Interview with
JAKE BURNS
from
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS
Interviewer – Colin Reid
.
.
“They still dish out those timeless classics with a fire and brimstone that makes “Alternative Ulster”, “Barbed Wire Love” and “Suspect Device” send a surge of adrenaline around the room.” Louder Than War
“Stiff Little Fingers are unmissable!” The Rockpit
“We don’t play a lot of love songs” Jake Burns
“The lads banged out classics track after track…an arsenal of tracks from over four decades bombarded the Belfast crowd who were in fine voice and reciprocated in kind.” Rock n Load
“How lucky we are to still have them after 40 years. The whole area in front of the stage was filled with smiling, dancing, sweating fans having the absolute best time. There are few live acts that deliver more than Belfast’s finest. A brilliant night is guaranteed.” Outline online
.
.
AMNplify : Hi Jake. It is Colin from AMNplify in Australia here, how are you going?
Jake : Hi Colin I’m great thanks.
AMNplify : Thanks for taking the time to speak to us today.
Jake : It’s absolutely my pleasure thank you.
AMNplify : The current tour is a 40 years of “Inflammable Material” retrospective. How is that going? Is it fun to play it in its entirety?
Jake : Its fun! Actually, it is more fun than I’d expected, yeah. First of all, I had to re-learn the damn thing. There are certain songs the are always in our set list, you know that we couldn’t do an SLF show and not play Suspect Device or Alternative Ulster but some of the slightly more obsure tracks they are interesting. Colin, we actually did this before in the UK on the 30th anniversary of the album and when our manager said we should do it now we were like ‘we did just did that’ and he was like ‘you did that 10 years ago!’ so it was like ‘ok’ and we’d never took it outside if the UK so we we are taking it around the world this time and its bizarre because when we did it ten years ago I had exactly the same road block with a song called “Rough Trade”
AMNplify : The one about the record business?
Jake : Yeah, that’s the one. So ten years ago when we did it first time I had to dig the album out of my record collection and put it on and sit down and go through it track by track with a guitar and try and work out what the heck the chords were! I got to the middle 8 section and I couldn’t for the life of me work it out. I had to phone Ian our guitar player and say ‘have you heard these songs yet?’ and he’s like ‘yeah, yeah’ so I’m like ‘brilliant what are chords to the middle section of Rough Trade’ and he says ‘well you wrote it’ but I’ve no idea what I was doing and ten years later the same thing happened and he’s like ‘you’ve got to be kidding me right?’ but its like a real mental road block for that one son!
It really is a lot of fun to play those songs and to see the affection, not just the affection but the fact that they still mean a lot to people and that was really gratifying that they got people fired up. When people say to me ‘you must be sick of playing this old stuff’ and I’m like ‘well actually no because those songs were written from the point of view of the fire in the belly that youth brings and because the songs still mean as much to the audience – even though they are getting as old and grey as we are – and by the end of it they look like they’re ready to storm the castle walls and I’ll be damned if we aren’t going with them!
AMNplify : It is funny you stay that about the audience because I saw SLF, not last year but the tour before, and when I looked around at the audience there are all these big guys screaming the lyrics. They’re passionate and they’re with you every lyric and they’re belting it out louder than the band! I’m like I’ve never seen an audience respond to any band the way that they did to you guys here. It was like pure joy on people’s faces as they were screaming these lyrics back at you, it was an incredible thing to watch.
Jake : It happens pretty much everywhere we go and it never ceases to amaze us. We’re convinced that one day we are going to go somewhere and get off a plane and turn up to find nobody there and we’ll just go to the bar and ‘ah it finally happened, its taken them 42 years but they finally caught us out’. I honestly think most artists are like this because for all the bluster and all the ego involved in the music business when you talk most artists on their own everyone is terrified that they are going to wake up one morning and people are going to go ‘you? Nah you’ve had your 5 minutes, go away!’ and I’ll be like’ well it took ‘em 42 years but they finally realised we are rubbish oh well that was fun!’
.
.
AMNplify : Well I don’t think that is going to happen.
Jake : well believe me we don’t wont it to either.
AMNplify : It is good to know it wasn;t just the Adelaide crowd that had that reaction, that you are getting it all around the world and that really cool to hear.
Jake : There are some places that take a bit of time to get warmed up but generally they get there you know? There are some places were you walk on and they are with you from the first chord which is great and it is hard to say which you prefer because in some ways when you have to win an audience over you’re ‘hey we did well tonight because they weren’t that keen’. When it is a wet Wednesday in some place in Kansas or something and you know they’ve come out midweek and they want to enjoy themselves but they’ve had to drive, they’re wet, they’ve got one eye on the clock, they know they’ve got to get up in the morning for work and they’re thinking ‘these guys better be worth it you know?’ so when you win those audiences over you think hey that was a good night’s work, we sent them home happy.
AMNplify : Going to back to “Inflammable Material” you said you wrote it with the fire in the belly and lyrically I guess it was very shaped by your environment growing up in Northern Ireland at the time.
Jake : yes
AMNplify : Do you think that the songs still have relevance today? Are you hopeful for the future of Northern Ireland?
Jake : Actually I am. Well actually I was Colin until some idiot decided that a thing called Brexit was a good idea. But yes, so much has happened and I guess I can only speak for Belfast, which was my home town the place that I know best and where I still have a lot of family and friends. The city itself has changed so much and for the better over the last 40 odd years. If you stop and think about it that is more than an entire generation that has grown up not knowing the troubles so that’s got to be a good thing and I don’t think anyone wants to go back to those days if they can avoid it but of course politics being what they are and the whole Brexit thing is sort of meaning that Ireland will be in Europe and that the UK will not and that means that there is going to have to be a boarder somewhere which at the moment doesn’t really exist and before you know it someone is going to come up with the idea of why don’t we have a united Ireland wouldn’t we be better off and it’ll be here we go again….It is too close to stirring up a lot of ghosts, ghosts and spectres that I think people would rather deal with in their own time rather than have in forced upon them by Brexit which this may well do.
.
.
AMNplify : The band has been out to Australia maybe 3 times in the last 4 years which is really great for us here. What do you enjoy the most about it here? Is there a favourite venue or a story you could share?
Jake : The very first time we came across was just mind blowing because we didn’t expect anyone to know who the heck we were and we only played Sydney and did we even go outside of that? Maybe a couple of shows. Anyway we had no concept of what to expect at all and it was mind blowing that people were interested and knew the words to the songs. That always amazes me. I wrote those songs in the bedroom at my parent’s house and to find myself going to the other side of the world and walking into a room to find a thousand people singing the words back at me is like ‘wow I didn’t see that coming!’
I’m sure you’re sick of hearing this from everyone how comes across but it’s true; the things that I really love about Australia and this is the same for anywhere where I feel I fit in is the fact that the people are approachable and in particular there are no airs and graces. I’ve never been one for pride or ego or stuff like that and the fact that everyone has their feet on the ground and you don’t get above your station is very important to me. That is the sort of stuff that I really love about going over there you know? One moment you’ll be standing at the bar having someone tell you how great you are and the next minute they’ll be ripping the piss out of you and that’s great you know? And it’s always done with a smile and that’s the other cool thing you know? There is very little in the way of malice that I’ve ever encountered whenever I have been across there you know? People are incredibly welcoming and really down to earth which is great.
AMNplify : You mentioned America earlier are you still living in Chicago?
Jake : Yeah I’ve been living here for 15 years now actually whilst I’m talking to you I’m looking out the window at rush hour traffic going past in the sleet and the snow and the cold and I’m thinking remind me again why I live in Chicago Our guitar player lives in Los Angeles in the sun, why am I here in the rain and snow?
AMNplify : Does that make song writing hard if you are all in different cities or even countries or are you the pure songwriter and they are just working arrangements around you?
Jake : It is one of those things where, and this is the same for everybody, the internet has been both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse in so much because nobody buys records anymore but it has been a blessing in that it has allowed us to all live wherever we wanted to. Plus there have been improvements in leaps and bounds in home recording technology that have occurred. I can put together a demo at home that sounds like a finished band, upload it to the rest of the band and get there feedback within minutes. It is actually much quicker than when we all live in the same country and I had to mail cassettes to everybody and it would take over a week to hear anything back about what people thought of it. The difficulty is that we can’t all just get together on a Saturday morning in a rehearsal room and kick it around a bit and see what happens to the song. People can play around with it at home but it means we just need to get together that bit earlier and rehearse that bit longer before we go out on tour. That way we have an extra couple of days so we can say how we do this or how about when we get to that section we try this plus everyone has learnt the bare bones of the song so you’ve cut out a day’s work there.
.
.
AMNplify : I guess you learn a lot about a sing when the four of your all play it together for the first time?
Jake : Yeah that is it. The other thing about the internet is that it has freed us up from the schedule of a record label where we need a record every 2 or 3 years or whatever. We can take all the time we want and make sure that the songs are actually worthy of being on a record which was never the case before except possibly the first album because otherwise you are under time constraints and like you said before we getting the chance to play them live before we record them We’re going to be playing 3 new songs when we are in Australia and when you get to play them in front of an audience is when you get to know them. About the only time that we do a post mortem after a gig is when is when there is newer stuff and we can go right that bit worked and that bit didn’t we can loose that bit or we can take it up a bit and extend that bit and the actual arrangement of the song comes to life when you see the audiences reaction to it you know?
AMNplify : Do you think that living in America has influenced your song writing? Has it changed what you are writing about?
Jake : I don’t think so because basically I’ve always had a narrow focus even though it encompasses a range of subjects. My focus is that if there is something that offends my sense of justice then I can write a song about it. I mean I really wish that I could write love songs and write songs that are about the sorts of things that I do because people who can do that really are sort of geniuses to me but I cant. Every time I try it, to be honest with you, I end up sounding like a 16 year old nerd who has just read his first book of love poetry and it is just awful, absolutely dreadful so I think ‘I’m not going to stand on a stage and sing that, I just cant’. I do angry much better! Hopefully my wife doesn’t think of me as angry all the time!
AMNplify : I’m trying to imagine you walking onto stage and saying “I’m just gonna do a new angry and shouty love song” and the audience will be like “what the?”
Jake : Exactly! Not going to happen!
AMNplify : Staying with the American theme I read somewhere that you play in a sort of Chicago punk super group. Super group is probably not the right word but you have people like Joe Principe the bass player from Rise Against and others. Can you tell us something about that?
Jake : It is a loose collective and basically it was an initiative of a couple of bartender friends of ours. There is a young lady by the name of Katie Auguston who as part of putting herself through college was at night was working in the bar but in the day was doing shifts at the local children’s hospital and in Chicago in the poorer areas a lot of the kids injuries are from gunshot wounds simply because the areas in which they grow up in are subject to those sorts of strive and their just innocent kids caught in the cross fire. So it was coming up to Christmas and she is trying to cheer the kids up and that and asking what are you doing for Christmas and what is Santa going to bring you and all that and these kids are like what the hell are you talking about woman? We’re not getting anything. And that extended to we don’t even have a warm winter coat. So she spoke to he bartender friends and the first thought was to have a collection jar on the bar and then a couple of the guys that she was working with used to be in bands and were like screw that lets put on a show right here. Its just grown from that. They’d been doing it for 2 or 3 years before I moved here and I just happened to become a local in that bar. Of all the gin joints in all the world it happened to be that bar. So it didn’t take much talking from Katie to convince me to get me to do it. We needed a name for the band and just like you did then they started calling it the “Punk Rock Allstars” which is like don’t be stupid..
AMNplify : That’s a terrible name!
Jake : Exactly and I believe we ended up calling ourselves the “Nefarious Fat Cats” because at the time the banking crisis was going on and our bass player read this article in the newspaper that was calling out the managers and the CEOs of these banks and was calling them nefarious fat cats.
.
.
AMNplify : A much better name. You’ve been such an influence on a generation of US punk bands I’m thinking bands like Pennywise, Rancid, Green Day etc and there is that great scene in the Hi-Fidelity movie where they are in the record shop and they play Inflammable Material in the shop and people wow is this the new Green Day record. It is just fantastic. How does it feel to have been such an influence and did you ever get a chance to play with these people or is there someone you never did play with but wish you could?
Jake : We actually got to do The Soundwave festival in Australia with Green Day a few years back and ended up playing 6 or 7 shows with them but because of the scheduling of the day we never actually got to see them play but we did meet Trey the drummer once. Ian our guitar player and Trey just got drunk and went off to play golf together so we never got that chance to do anything beyond that. But yes look it is always very, very flattering when a musician says that you have influenced them especially when they turn out to be a good band. The opposite is also true and there are a couple of bands who have said stuff like ‘we wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for SLF’ and I’m like don’t blame me mate! In the main bands who have said we’ve influenced have turned out to be bands that I’ve liked people like the bands you’ve mention plus the likes of Bad Religion have been very complimentary about us and that is great. Then there are bands where I can’t even hear any of us in, bands like U2 for example, who have been really complimentary too. I saw an interview with The Edge and he said ‘all my guitar style came Stiff Little Fingers and everything that I do is in there’ and I was like well I’m damned if I can hear it! So yeah it is very, very flattering.
AMNplify : I know that you are a big Newcastle United supporter
Jake : I am, sadly. This was all going so well, why’d you have to bring that up!
AMNplify :I wondered that being in the States you wouldn’t get to see them play all that much now, so do you do like a Stuart Pearce in reverse? When he used to play for Notts Forrest he used to be looking at gig guides and workout where was the nearest punk band was playing so he could drive there after the Forrest game to go and see the gig. Do you do that in reverse and plan SLF gigs around where Newcastle are playing?
Jake : kinda yeah I do! To be honest I get to see them more now than when I used to have a Newcastle season ticket at St James’ Park simply because when I had one I saw the home games that I could get to unless we were away on tour but I rarely went to an away game but here in the States every game is on TV so I’ve seen nearly game. I’m seeing much more of them now than I used to. Im not saying that in a happy way We’ve rode our luck a lot this week injury time winner against Chelsea and scoring 2 in injury time to get a draw at Everton. I’m like, you’re kidding me aren’t you? So anyways tomorrow we play Oxford Utd in the cup and there’s a banana skin waiting to happen for us. A few years ago they beat us 3-0 in a cup game and I can see it happening again! Anyone counting chickens should stop right away.
AMNplify : One thing I really wanted to talk to you about is that fact that you’ve been quiet open about mental health and depression and the song “Not Going Back” that is a song that I and I’m sure many others can really relate to. It was the first time that I’ve ever seen all the things that sometimes I feel or experience all captured and articulated, written down in a song. When I play it, I find it really helpful for me personally and I was wondering if it is cathartic thing for you? Is performing it empowering for you?
Jake : That’s sort of why I wrote it. I never really meant for us to record it. I actually didn’t think that it was good enough to be an SLF song. It wasn’t like I was being precious about it and trying to keep it to myself or anything it was written more as a memory aid you know? Because, as you know yourself, if you suffer from any form of depression – particularly the really bad bouts when you don’t want to get out of bed or talk to anybody – it is difficult to realise that it will actually lift unless of course you are in a really, really bad place then 9 times out of 10 it will lift and you will feel better and I would occasionally lose sight of that and that was one of the reasons that I wrote the song to remind myself of the old line “this to will pass” you know? So that was what it was for it was to gee myself up more than anything and it was actually Ali our bass player who was very keen that we record it. I said ‘who wants to listen to me moan on about me being depressed’ and he said ‘do you think you’re the only guy whose depressed these days?’ He was right and I’m really glad that we did because there have been a lot of people who have said that the song has helped them and that’s great, if it has helped I’m really pleased about that. On the other hand, I’m always wary that I don’t want to become seen as the poster boy for depression you know? So its like I’m happy to talk about it and I will always introduce the song on stage and I always make the point that talking about it really helps. Because bottling it up is what generally leads to the crucially bad decisions that people make. So if you talk something out and I know that you may not be able to talk it out completely but most of the time it just actually articulates how you feel then I think it really helps. So yes, it has been cathartic for me and that’s because it was deliberately written to be cathartic for me so I’m glad that it has that effect for other people too.
AMNplify : Yeah it has
Jake : Thank you
AMNplify : last question Jake. You talked earlier about debuting some new material earlier. Is there going ot be a new album anytime some? I know that there have been lots of releases since the last album but they are all compilations or live albums.
Jake : Oh I know, we really don’t have any control over that and it seems like there is another one out every 10 minutes and I’m like you’re kidding aren’t you? It is hard to keep up with them and fans keep writing to us and asking is this a bootleg? Is it real release? If it’s a bootleg them I’m not going to buy it and I’m like I don’t know mate I honest don’t know anymore there are so many of them.
I know we are behind schedule but yes the plan is to record a new album and we are behind because I’m a lazy bugga! There is no point lying about and also I can’t write when we are on tour and again going back to the double edged sword of the internet and nobody buying records anymore you have to tour a lot more than you used to just simply to keep body and soul together you know so it takes a lot longer for me to write an album now-days than it used to and also we are a lot fussier now than we used to be and there is a lot of stuff that I’ve written that I think nah, it’s just not good enough so I’m probably being to self-critical but even a song like “My Dark Places” is a perfect example of that in that I wouldn’t have recorded it but it has turned out to be one of the more popular songs we’ve released in years. Anyway another very long, long answer to a short question yes we are hoping to record another album and I’d like to think that we’ll be in a position to record it earlier next year and get it out next year and that it the time schedule that I am setting myself – get the writing finished this year and look to be in the studio somewhere at the start of next year. Now I’ve said it out loud I’ll have to stick to it!
AMNplify : You’ve said it, you’ve got to do it!
Thanks so much for your time to chat to us today Jake, I’ll really enjoyed it and can’t wait to see you in Adelaide next month.
Jake : Likewise absolutely my pleasure, all the best now take care!
Follow STIFF LITTLE FINGERS
WEBSITE | FACEBOOK
.
.
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS
41 YEARS OF INFLAMMABLE MATERIAL
Australian and NZ Tour
FEB 2020
With Sold Out shows on their last Australian & New Zealand Tour, SLF return in February to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of their seminal debut album – Inflammable Materia thanks to DRW Entertainment and Metropolis Touring.
On Feb 2nd 1979 STIFF LITTLE FINGERS unleashed their groundbreaking debut album upon a confused musical world barely ready for the incendiary onslaught of passion and politics that positioned SLF right at the forefront of the punk movement.
Formed in Belfast, Northern Ireland, SLF wrote about their own lives growing up at the height of The Troubles. Preceded by the single “Suspect Device” which John Peel played every night, “Inflammable Material” burst into the UK Top 20 – the first ever debut album to do so on an independent label.
This was an album of anger and frustration, full of lyrics melding the personal and political, music that combines the punk energy with infectious hooks, and a delivery that rings of honesty and commitment.
A STIFF LITTLE FINGERS live show continues to be a special event of energy and power and the band are more in demand than ever. Bad Religion and Rancid have both credited SLF as a major influence. As well as Inflammable Material classics “Suspect Device”, “Johnny Was”, “Alternative Ulster”, “Wasted Life”, “Barbed Wire Love” and “State Of Emergency”, fans can anticipate anthemic favourites such as “Gotta Gettaway”, “Tin Soldiers”, “At The Edge” and “Nobodys Hero”.
.
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS
Australian and NZ
February 2020 Tour Dates
Saturday 15th – Perth, Rosemount
Sunday 16th – Adelaide, The Gov
Thursday 20th – Melbourne, Croxton
Friday 21st – Sydney, Metro Theatre
Saturday 22nd – Brisbane, Tivoli
Tuesday 25th – Christchurch, The Foundry
Wednesday 26th – Wellington, San Fran
Thursday 27th – Auckland, Powerstation
Tickets
.
.
.
