Garbage Days Revisited #37: Stiff Little Fingers - "Nobody's Heroes" (1980)

"And they said we played too loud/That we didn't play for their crowd/But we just told 'em wait and see..." - Stiff Little Fingers - Wait And See

It's one of the most frustrating things about punk rock in general that when you mention Ulster punk perennials Stiff Little Fingers, the general consensus seems to be that the first album is all you need. Pardon my French but that's utter bullshit. For me, SLF's lauded first album Inflammable Material is the sound of a band starting to nail their sound but it's what came afterwards that was really the sound of this group spreading its wings and coming up with its best material.

I think the reason for this is that Nobody's Heroes is the sound of SLF breaking out of their Belfast origins and writing songs about the world as a whole rather than their area of it. Look, I totally get why everybody loves Inflammable Material - it's the sound of the sheer desperation that I'm sure a lot of Northern Irish people felt in the midst of the horrific circumstances that what was essentially a 25 year civil war over there brought on. But at the same time I grew up in Bradford not Belfast and it's maybe not a surprise that the songs on Nobody's Heroes were the ones I could actually relate to rather than a glimpse into another terrifying world across the Irish Sea. Maybe not a surprise then that it was the album that broke the band commercially and saw them going from underground favourites to full on chart stars.

I still maintain that Nobody's Heroes has one of the best side ones of any album ever and I was amazed on listening to the album again for this article just how much they took me back to a certain time of my life - to my mid-twenties, playing in a toilet circuit punk band in Leeds, working a series of minimum wage brain cell killing jobs in factories, warehouses and offices, struggling to keep my head above water financially but spurred on by a borderline fanatical belief that rock 'n' roll would steer me through. I'd identified who my enemies in life were - firstly the New "Labour" politicians betraying everything their party stood for by asset stripping the NHS, sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and his hateful bigoted scumbags at the Sun and taking the country into an illegal war in Iraq with the oil-grabbing Republicans in the US, secondly the hollow-eyed legions of Strokes/Libertines/Arctic Monkeys/Franz Ferdinand clones who were getting all the publicity that my band wasn't while simply recycling what the flavour of that particular week in the NME was and thirdly all the people who I felt had been continually trying to break my spirit since I was a kid by telling me that I was useless, that my band was rubbish and that I wouldn't amount to anything. Yeah...it's fair to say I was a pretty angry young man back then and it's maybe not a surprise that Nobody's Heroes, along with the Pogues' Red Roses For Me, the Angelic Upstarts' Last Tango In Moscow, Sham 69's Tell Us The Truth and the Cockney Rejects' Greatest Hits Vol 2 were speaking to me a lot more than most contemporary music was by this point.

Gotta Getaway, re-recorded from its earlier indie single version, is a great opener, like Springsteen’s Born To Run in DM boots with Jake Burns snarling out the tale of realising that your ambitions of being someone are never gonna be realised in a small town that doesn't understand you. It seemed to sum up my frustrations with the Leeds scene at the time perfectly - "There's plenty of folk tell you what to do/But they don't speak the same language as you". That line of "I feel life passing me by" really did seem to be increasingly relevant with every year of my twenties that passed until eventually as I turned into my thirties, I finally made the break away from Leeds, moved to London, got in a band and put an EP out. And even though it only lasted a couple of years before real life kind of got in the way for all of us, I can still say we did that EP and played the 12 Bar and the Hope & Anchor, venues I'd only ever read about in hushed terms in the music papers before then. Oh sure, there's a part of me that often wonders why I didn't do it all five years earlier (to which the honest answer would be that I just wasn't organised enough at that point) but you know what, I got there in the end and even if that time was brief, I wouldn't change a thing about it.

Wait And See was another we gravitated to at the time, written by Jake Burns about SLF's original rhythm section Gordon Blair and Brian Faloon who'd left around the time of the first album before the group moved across to England (Blair would join fellow Ulster punks Rudi who were mainstays on the infamous Good Vibrations label and who I remember reading an interview with around this time when 25 odd years later they were still pissed off that SLF had got the breakthrough and they hadn't...and I thought I was bad at not letting go of grudges!). The song shows the group's Clash influence coming straight to the fore with the Complete Control style lyrics detailing the group's early days - as someone who was also in a struggling band going nowhere ("Just you and I wasting our time, playing and singing out of key") in the face of a scene they couldn't have fitted in less comfortably, it quickly became a favourite of me and my bandmates - little wonder that if the four of us were drinking around someone's house and this album went on the stereo that we'd bellow along to the outro and change the lyrics to "You're not good enough to be an art school band" or "You're not good enough to be a post-punk band"! To be fair, looking back now, that band was probably about 80% attitude and 20% actual talent (we were a bit like a Yorkshire Towers of London with nowhere near as much media savviness to be brutally honest) and it was probably as much our own laziness, unwarranted cockiness, confrontational attitude and over-reliance on booze, cheap hash and cheap speed that sunk us as much as any perceived hostility from the rest of the Leeds scene (to be honest, few of them probably knew, let alone cared, who we were). But it was a good time and that song will always remind me of it.

The ferocious anti-nationalism diatribe Fly The Flag follows and in an era where pound shop Enoch Powell wannabes like Nigel Farage and Robert Kilroy-Silk were starting to pick up votes in local elections, it definitely struck a chord with me although that climate sadly looks like absolute child's play compared to where we find ourselves fifteen years later. That line of "Give me a nation where people are free/Free to do and free to be/Free to screw you before you screw me" also seemed to sum up that hateful selfish "me me me" ideology that seemed to inform so much of our culture at the time (those horrible televised karaoke shows with Toadman Cowell etc) and which sadly has never really gone away since.

At The Edge, the group's biggest hit, was another I gravitated to and I think anyone who remembers being a teenager can relate to this one - as someone whose teenage years had been something of a trying experience coping with perpetually arguing and soon to divorce parents, bullying at school and a general preference for keeping myself to myself so as to just avoid the drain of getting into conflict with people (see the Manic Street Preachers GDR entry for more details), it was another one that really resonated with me ("Here's your room and here's your records/Here's your home and here you'll stay/Here's somewhere I don't believe in/Wish someone would take it all away"). Round things off with the the storming title track which gave the group a second Top 40 single and you've got a perfect first side - I remember reading that Jake copped a bit of criticism for coming across as arrogant in this one with lines like "I never wanted to be different/Didn't ask to be nobody's star". But that line "You think you're nobody/And I have all the fun/But no-one is a nobody/Everyone is someone" saves it for me - the message isn't about arrogance it's about getting up and being your own hero rather than relying on others to do it for you.

After all that, side two of the album unfortunately doesn't quite measure up, mainly because it just can't - seriously, anyone would have struggled to follow those first five songs. It's maybe telling that Nobody's Heroes would turn out to be SLF's commercial highpoint - they'd do another two albums before splitting but neither got anywhere the sales that one did. 1981's Go For It is a bit of a mixed bag but it includes the pop-punk classic Just Fade Away - when people talk about Green Day being SLF influenced, this is probably the song they mean I think - the sinister reggae of The Only One, the poppy Gate 49 and the slow building anger of Piccadilly Circus are all worth a listen as well. 1982's Now Then on the other hand sees them taking a much softer approach to their sound but still has a few great songs on it - my old band used to cover the opening song Falling Down which I remember being my girlfriend at the time's favourite SLF song and the acoustic led anger of Price Of Admission, Touch And Go and Welcome To The Whole Week are all good while their cover of Love Of The Common People would probably have given them a hit if only Paul Young hadn't scored a Top 5 with it at the same time!

SLF would split in 1983 with Jake Burns going on to form the Big Wheel (two great songs in She Grew Up and Race You To The Grave but you can probably safely skip the rest of their stuff) but reform in the late '80s with a line up of Burns, original guitarist Henry Cluney (who would leave a few years later and now has his own rival XSLF outfit), latter day drummer Dolphin Taylor (also formerly of the Tom Robinson Band) and ex-Jam bassist Bruce Foxton. They'd make their comeback with 1991's Flags And Emblems which got absolutely panned at the time but has at least three genuinely good songs on it in It's A Long Way To Paradise From Here, Beirut Moon and the seething Each Dollar A Bullet (which takes the themes from Inflammable Material and looks at them 12 years later - it's still one of my favourite SLF songs and sends a chill up my spine even to this day). They've continued since, releasing albums intermittently with bassist Ali McMordie (who was with the group for practically all of their original run) reuniting with Burns following Foxton's departure in the mid-noughties.

I saw SLF a good few times through the noughties (usually at my old stomping ground of Bradford Rio's) and they still used to pack a hell of a punch live at that point with Burns still a great frontman able to hold a crowd brilliantly. I still remember one of the scariest gigs I've ever been to was seeing them at Rio's the night England qualified for the World Cup by beating Northern Ireland - about halfway through it actually properly kicked off between the English and Ulster fans in the audience causing the band to leave the stage. When they came back, Jake actually managed to calm the crowd down by essentially saying "grow up, stop fighting or else" and there was no trouble for the rest of the gig - massive respect to him for that, I can think of a lot of bands who'd have done a runner at that point! They're also a massively influential band as well, I remember Ginger and CJ from the Wildhearts saying that SLF were the basis for a lot of their early material and it definitely shows when you listen closely.

It's been a few years since I last went to an SLF gig and I seem to remember I ended up leaving early on the night. It wasn't that the band were off form (they played well for the 40 odd minutes that I saw them) but I'd had an awful day at work and just wasn't feeling it especially being on my own in the crowd. Their last album to date was 2014's No Going Back which got plenty of press acclaim but I thought was...alright really but not brilliant. Hopefully a new one will follow soon enough. But regardless of all that, they're a band who have my eternal respect for that first half of Nobody's Heroes and if you compiled a playlist of their best songs I reckon you'd have something to rival pretty much any other band from that era. A great band who everyone should listen to in my opinion.