Hearing The Clash for the first time changed all that, however. ‘That was the link that pulled it all together,’ he admits. ‘As much as anyone could understand what Joe was singing about, he was writing about his life and the lives of people around him. Instead of all the classic filth and the fury, at least this guy was furious for some good reason. That triggered the change and made us take it seriously. We thought that if they had something to complain about growing up in West London, they’d want to try living in Belfast for a while.’

THE CLASH – White Riot on MUZU.

Highway Star – a Deep Purple reference – were gone and Stiff Little Fingers – named after a Vibrators track – were born. At least, unlike others, The Clash did try and play live in Belfast – although the rather un-punk problems of insurance led to the gig being pulled at the last minute. ‘With typical Belfast heavy handedness, the security forces turned up and there was some sort of mini riot,’ remembers Burns. ‘We stomped down to the Europa Hotel, where they were staying, and Joe and Paul did come out as far as the security gates to talk to people. It was a nice gesture but a lot of good it did; we wanted to see them play.’

It was the beginning of something: a realisation on all sides that they weren’t the only ones out there, that there was a punk -scene’ bubbling below Belfast’s less-than-shiny surface, where Rudi and The Outcasts were also starting to happen. ‘Up until The Clash thing, I really thought that the four of us and these guys were the only people who gave a damn about punk rock,’ Burns explains. ‘Then we came round the corner and there was a riot going on. Everybody probably felt the same until that night.’ The fledgling Stiff Little Fingers were still finding their way, however, staging covert gigs at the Glenmachen Hotel on the edge of town and struggling to find their lyrical voice. ‘When I heard The Clash, we wrote -State Of Emergency’, probably the first song that dealt with where we were from and what we were living through,’ Burns remembers. ‘By the same token, I was working as an accounts clerk in an engineering factory and because of that I wrote -Breakout’, which was basically our version of -Career Opportunities’.'

Perhaps the biggest stepping stone in the young SLF’s career, however, was meeting Gordon Ogilvie, an English journalist working for the Daily Express. Tipped off to the band by friend and fellow journo Colin McClelland, his first meeting with Burns was to move SLF in a significant new direction. ‘He heard something in it. When we talked, he realised that we were as keen to reflect our surroundings as he was. That was when he handed me the lyrics to -Suspect Device’,' Burns recalls, describing it as a ‘life defining moment’. ‘As soon as I saw those words, I knew where we were going. It was as if Gordon turned a key in a lock and the door flew open. On the back of that, I immediately wrote -Wasted Life’.'

This new, honest approach to writing about their experience was not without its problems: ‘Never did we assume that we’d have any trouble with the paramilitaries: we never thought we’d come on their radar. We were more concerned about people in the audience. There was this misconception that we were being masterminded by this svengali figure. Then there was the attitude that The Undertones took, which was -I have to deal with this shit every day, I don’t want to go out to be entertained and have to listen to it as well’. We were always conscious of that, plus the chances were that you were singing to someone in the audience who had suffered some personal loss or injury through this.’

With Ogilvie and McClelland taking charge of their management affairs, the next logical step was to make a record, with -Suspect Device’ the obvious choice. ‘Looking back, there’s no way we were ready but it was punk rock and you struck when the iron was hot and got on with it,’ Burns grins. ‘When you listen back to that first single now, it’s incredibly naive, it’s incredibly badly played and hardly produced at all, but that’s the charm of the thing. We recorded it in Downtown Radio’s jingle studio: Gordon and Colin put up the money and we fired it off to record companies all over the place and no-one was interested.’

One person who was interested, however, was John Peel, whose patronage was soon reflected by increased coverage in the UK press. Although SLF weren’t the only punk band in Belfast, it was another Peel-endorsed Northern Irish outfit who were starting to make headway.

‘We never really had a relationship with The Undertones to be honest,’ admits Burns. ‘Derry was 80 miles up the road and we never came across one another. The main source of the friction was that they thought singing about The Troubles was the wrong thing to do. That’s a perfectly valid point of view and I understood it at the time. I had friends who would say to me, ‘do you have to keep writing songs about here, for fuck’s sake?” From the very beginning, though, SLF weren’t without their humorous side: ‘We didn’t want to be labelled as a dour political band and start dealing in clichés. -Barbed Wire Love’ was designed to take the piss out of ourselves before anyone else did it.’ While Burns had always had his suspicions that punk was too onedimensional to make a real impact, he and the band pushed on to record their debut album Inflammable Material, virtually live and in 10 days. ‘It was certainly an exciting record but maybe we were too close to be objective about it,’ admits Burns. ‘I think we’ve made better sounding records since then but whether we ever made a better one is a moot point. Had we gone into a big studio with a producer who knew what he was doing, we may have ended up with a better sounding record but it wouldn’t have been so exciting.’

The album was to be the first full length release on Rough Trade, although the decision to go with the independent wasn’t a tough one. ‘To be honest, we had no other offers: there’s no point trying to guild the lily,’ Burns smiles. ‘When we did get the chance to move to a major, we snapped at it straight away, mainly from a security point of view. But when we first moved to Rough Trade, they were still packing singles into boxes in the back of a shop, much like we had been doing in Gordon’s flat in Belfast. It didn’t feel like we’d signed to a big record label. It was definitely the right place at the right time. I look back on those days with affection, though: they were incredibly honest. Once we’d paid for the record, we split everything 50-50.’

Various factors, not least the departure of drummer Falloon, delayed the release of the album until 1979, by when the first wave of punk had effectively blown itself out. In reflection of the changes afoot, the band headed out on their first major UK tour with the Tom Robinson Band. ‘His audience were probably a bit more middle class than the one we would have attracted on our own,’ notes Burns. ‘We were always going to pull a working class audience, but once we were put in front of the more college style crowd that Tom was attracting, they realised that we were a bit more than a -1-2-3-4, there’s no money on the dole, God I’m so bored’ punk rock band and that there was an intelligence to what we were doing. That opened up an audience to us that we wouldn’t have had access to if we’d gone out on a package tour with Sham 69.’ For all Burns’ doubts, Inflammable Material became a big deal, drawing praise across the board and charting at number 14 in the UK, the first independent album to seriously dent the charts. Back home too, Stiff Little Fingers were making an impact, their heroes’ return to Belfast encapsulated in making the front cover of The Belfast Telegraph and a hometown show at the Ulster Hall.

‘OK, we didn’t fill it the first time round but eventually we did,’ laughs Burns. ‘It was nice because we were kind of expecting to get hammered in Belfast, which we did in certain quarters. There was stuff from people in other bands but they admitted later on they were jealous because we’d achieved something. You expect that and if the roles had been reversed and if I’d been to see Rudi headline the Ulster Hall, I’d have been a bit green around the gills. That’s all been resolved as we’ve got older.’

For a snapshot of a moment in time, Inflammable Material was perfect but Burns knew instantly that it could never be repeated. ‘I’m probably the harshest critic of the second album [Nobody's Heroes, Chrysalis, 1980] because we didn’t move far enough, fast enough,’ he states. ‘Things were changing and there’s no way we could have reinvented ourselves as a ska band or turn into Joy Division, but I felt we had to become more professional and get a harder edge to what we were doing, which might sound strange, but I wanted to keep the anger but sound like those other bands I’d been comparing us to.’

Their debut, however, remains one of the classic punk albums. ‘When we started out, Gordon asked me what I wanted from the band. In those days, all I wanted was for John Peel to play one of our records and say, -and that was Stiff Little Fingers, of course’. The next thing was for the album to be a hit, which it was. Then he said, -now what do you want to do?’ And that was it… we had to keep looking forward…’

Stiff Little Fingers play Dublin Academy this Friday, May 22nd. This article first appeared in State Issue 1.