Other than The Clash, did anyone release a better first three studio albums than Stiff Little Fingers between 1979-1981?
I loved these Irish punks as soon as I heard them. They had the lot: anger, energy, musicianship, melody, and lyrics that made you think.
Their 1979 debut long-player Inflammable Material (pored over here) was my first punk album, and is still my favourite record, ever. It probably always will be.
1980’s Nobody’s Heroes (mentioned here) had a cleaner sound, but just as many tunes to appeal to your average teenage punk.
Bashy tunes, speak volumes
Hanx!, the live album released later in 1980 to introduce the band to the American market, showed us what they sounded like live.
(At 13 I wasn’t allowed to travel 15 miles to my nearest venue to see SLF live, so this would suffice, for now…)
So while I lapped up the latest sounds by the likes of The Clash, Angelic Upstarts, UK Subs, Cockney Rejects and The Jam, my sense of anticipation around a new SLF release was enormous.
Go For It came out on 17 April 1981, preceded by a new single, Just Fade Away, a month beforehand.
Far more melodic than anything previous, it was surely made for the charts, yet still had Jake Burns’ lyrical bite.
Written from the viewpoint of a bloke trying to tell his girlfriend he wants to finish with her, its pop veneer hides a superbly savage put down. “Do you want to know/Do I love you/The answer’s no/Is that straight enough for you?”
Just Fade Away took its place proudly alongside the excellent non-album single Back To Front in my record box, and it even had a great B-side. It was a live version of Doesn’t Make It Alright, which they’d ‘borrowed’ from label-mates The Specials.
Sadly, punk was falling out of fashion amid a wave of ska, synth-pop and Antmusic. It never did become the big chart hit that I (nor, I expect, the band) imagined, stalling at No 47.
Lost in music
I bought Go For It on a shopping trip to Newcastle with two school friends. Ste got The Exploited’s Punk’s Not Dead, while Adam got an Elvis record, for reasons I still don’t understand.
We went back to Adam’s house to play our new acquisitions. We punks thought Elvis was shit. Each other’s choice was ‘all right’ (he likes harder stuff than me – then and now). Adam thought the Exploited was ‘just noise’, and SLF at least had some melody.
Undeterred, I took Go For It home, placed it on my family stereo, put on my headphones, and turned up the volume. Over the coming days I lost myself in the record for hours, and soon knew every word.
I was hooked at once by opening track Roots, Radicals, Rockers and Reggae, SLF’s take on an old Bunny Livingston song.
With Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, he’d been one of the founders of The Wailers. It was thanks to SLF, The Clash and The Ruts that I developed what’s turned into a lifelong love of Jamaican music.
It was years before I learnt that the record label, Chrysalis, got the song’s name wrong (it’s Radics, not Radicals).
Rock to the reggae
Roots is often their live opener, and seems to get faster with the passing years. Next up is Just Fade Away, which remains a live staple to this day, followed by the title track, familiar to every fan as the intro music for SLF gigs.
An instrumental because they left it too late in recording to add any lyrics, the Fingers faithful made up their own. They go something like: “Duh, duh, duh, dududu-duh, duh duh duh, dudududu-duh…and so on.”
I never understood why it was in the middle of side one, rather than being the first track, but producers tend to know what they’re doing, and in this case Doug Bennett certainly did, as he’d been involved in the first album and helmed the second.
The Only One, a slow reggae song written by Henry Cluney, is all about feeling you’re alone, even if you’re not, and was perhaps symptomatic of how he was missing Belfast, the band having decamped to London.
Side one ends with one of the album’s best tracks, Hits And Misses, an examination of domestic abuse, with some of the band’s best lyrics. The chorus alone makes it one of my favourite SLF songs: “Hits and misses, I do, you will/Love and kisses, yours in hell.”
Kicking Up A Racket, about Henry’s love of making noise, kicks off side two, followed by another slower, reggae-inflected number, Safe As Houses. Set to a steady, skanking guitar riff, it’s about not settling for second best in life.
No playing safe
Jake Burns said it wasn’t played live for years as it was written in the wrong key for him to sing. Happily, he hits the high notes nowadays, and it’s been performed on recent tours.
It’s not everyone’s favourite, probably because it’s not a three-minute banger, but it contains one of Ali McMordie’s best bass lines, and drummer Jim Reilly shows versatility and subtlety you maybe wouldn’t expect from a punk rock drummer.
Gate 49, another Henry composition, is about the Heathrow Airport portal which leads back home to Belfast, presented as a rockabilly love song. Not the strongest song on the album, it’s still catchy, with a great wandering bassline – even if it does sound like The Stray Cats.
Silver Lining, the second single taken from Go For It, followed a month or so after the album, and was probably the one that started to divide the fanbase. Punk was heading firmly in the direction of how many studs were on your leather jacket and how high you could make your mohawk.
But amid a rapidly changing scene, Jake was writing songs that were more pop than punk, moving away from angrier, more political material. Silver Lining, featuring keyboards and brass, was intended as a nod to his love of Tamla Motown music, and it scraped into the Top 75, entering at No 72.
Chart woe
That same week saw Adam And The Ants’ Stand And Deliver at No 1, while Tenpole Tudor’s Swords Of A Thousand Men was No 6. There were other punk-y offerings from Toyah, The Undertones, Hazel O’ Connor and Siouxsie And The Banshees in the Top 40.
But when even the Dead Kennedys single Too Drunk To Fuck (with precisely zero airplay, understandably) charted higher, the disappointment must have been keenly felt in the Fingers camp. Silver Lining stayed in the charts just three weeks, peaking at No 68.
The album ends with a song which I think is one of Stiff Little Fingers’ very best, Piccadilly Circus; for me it’s certainly the standout track on Go For It.
Based on the true story of a friend who moved from Belfast to London, and ended up getting stabbed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time: “Idly looking in a hifi shop/Footsteps, a chuckle, and one hard slap.”
If that wasn’t powerful enough, the chorus rams home the message: “And they didn’t even see his face/See him stagger, watch him fall/They didn’t even see his eyes/Never knew him at all,” before the coda gives it to us straight: “Never knew him/Tried to kill him.”
Classic line-up
Go For It as an album fared much better chart-wise than its singles – a sign, perhaps, that Fingers’ audience was getting older? – reaching No 14 to give them their fourth Top 20 long player in a row.
Sadly, with hindsight the cracks were already starting to show, and this was the last album Fingers would record with what many regard as the classic line-up of Burns, Cluney, McMordie and Reilly.
By the time the next album, Now Then… emerged in September 1982, the writing was truly on the wall, and six months later it was all over.
A reunion followed a few years later, and it’s one which – personnel changes notwithstanding – has lasted 34 years and counting. Remarkably, Inflammable Material, Nobody’s Heroes and Go For It were released in the space of just over two years. So it’s perhaps no surprise that the band split by the time they reached their mid 20s. But what a rich legacy.
- Jake Burns and Ali McMordie from Stiff Little Fingers have just done an hour-long programme talking about the making of Go For It. Find it on YouTube. There’s also a new range of Go For It commemorative merch on the band’s website HERE.
