STIFF LITTLE FINGERS | LIVE REVIEW
Great Hall, Cardiff University Students Union, Sat 9 Mar
It must be over 10 years since I last saw Stiff Little Fingers, the last time being as a rock-loving teenager in The Point in Cardiff Bay (there was even one Stuart Cable in the audience that night). A lot has changed since, but Stiff Little Fingers haven’t changed as much. Yet the relevance of much of their material, furiously political and fighting against division and hate, seems to have come back into vogue (if it ever really went out in the first place – that’s probably society’s collective amnesia).
Support act Eddie & The Hot Rods weren’t especially great, but they did the job, bashing out a set of enjoyable-enough pub rock. Jake Burns and co, meanwhile, started out fast and high-energy, with Law And Order, At The Edge, and Suspect Device kicking off proceedings. As with those three songs, the set overall leaned heavily on the first two albums, Inflammable Material (1979), and Nobody’s Heroes (1980), still to this day SLF’s best. The band remained tight and energetic throughout, but after the first three tracks they distinctly slipped into a slightly less hard-edged groove, one that I suppose is hard to brush off when touring as regularly as they do.
Still, during the crowd favourites (Wasted Life, Tin Soldiers and set closer Alternative Ulster) they fed off the audience energy and kicked it up a notch. Jake Burns’ between-song interjections were also welcome, reminding the crowd of the distinctly political nature of SLF’s music when the lyrics at a live gig often become muddy under the mix. Shoutouts to songs about police brutality, depression (bringing in Keith Flint’s recent passing), and women’s equality were all welcome, even if not all the crowd responded as they should.
But the Stiff Little Fingers I saw in the 00s were distinctly better. It’s not to do with them nor even age, but technology. While that gig was at the dawn of the smartphone era, much of the audience were still willing to go the distance, jumping around and enjoying themselves. Today, every third person in my vicinity spent significant time on their phones, recording or taking photos, and some even tried to get through the entire gig that way. It’s a detached and ever-frustrating experience (something I think bands react to as well), and this wasn’t even a worst-case scenario as gigs go. Perhaps the next step will be generating moshpits in which we deliberately knock phones out of people’s hands.
words FEDOR TOT photos JONATHAN HERRON