Doesn't seem a review should go in "Just Announced," so I thought this might serve when a show doesn't have its own thread.
Stiff Little Fingers
Washington Post, Feb 9, 2004
At Nation on Friday, Stiff Little Fingers recalled a time when punk bands used to make rock-and-roll seem so possible.
SLF goes back to a 1977 Clash concert seen by founding frontman Jake Burns in his native Belfast. Soon enough Burns and his buddies were imitating that band. And they still are. "I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for Joe Strummer," Burns announced to the crowd inside the crowded club. He then played "Strummerville," a tribute to the deceased punker off SLF's latest CD, "Guitar and Drum." That tune, like most of the quartet's sweaty and bouncy hour-long set, proved that growing artistically hasn't been high on Burns's to-do list over the years.
And why should it be? There will always be an audience for SLF's strongest suit: angry lyrics spewed over fast downstrokes of a bar chord on a guitar and the crack-crack-crack of a snare drum. SLF didn't invent it, but that's the sound that launched Green Day and so many other bands in American suburbs. "Nobody's Hero," an SLF archetype recorded in 1980, can still get a roomful of fists pumping, especially with Burns chanting a line that pretty much every punk rocker before and since has chanted: "Be what you are!"
"Just Fade Away" was SLF at its most Jam-like, and called attention to Bruce Foxton, the former bassist for the legendary Jam who joined the Fingers in the late 1980s. The still rousing "Fly the Flag" and "Alternative Ulster" came out of the Troubles that brewed in their homeland in Burns's youth, and brew to this day. During "Barbed Wire Love," another tune about making the best of an oppressive situation, a father and son along the rail on Nation's balcony pogoed together during the song and banged fists afterwards. Clearly, there was something in it for both.
-- Dave McKenna
