Description
Stiff Little Fingers – John Peel Sessions 1978 – Vinyl Record
“Alternative Ulster” opens this LP with the scrape and urgency of a band still working up its first album. Stiff Little Fingers recorded the two sessions represented here for John Peel in April and September 1978. The songs reached radio listeners before Inflammable Material appeared the following year, and the sessions let you hear the band at that earlier moment.
The Belfast setting is there in the way Jake Burns delivers “Wasted Life” and “Suspect Device.” The songs make their points through sharp, direct phrases that still have room for a melody. The band’s rhythm gives the words an extra push, with enough movement under the vocal to keep the anger from turning into a single unvarying shout.
“Johnny Was” takes the longest route through the set’s material. The band’s reading of the Bob Marley song puts an account of a killing into the same program as its own writing about life under pressure. Its extended arrangement gives the rhythm time to settle before the performance tightens again around Burns’s voice.
There is a wider emotional range in the nine songs than the speed first suggests. “Barbed Wire Love” puts humor to work in its images and vocal phrasing. “Law and Order” has a harder, more clipped delivery, and the jump from that song to “Barbed Wire Love” shows how naturally the band could shift its approach inside one session.
This 2026 vinyl edition brings the two early BBC sessions together on one record. The program makes sense as a companion to the first studio album. It contains the songs in radio-session performances, including “State of Emergency,” “White Noise” and the closing “Suspect Device.”
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
- 1 — Alternative Ulster
- 2 — Wasted Life
- 3 — Johnny Was
- 4 — State of Emergency
- 5 — White Noise
- 6 — No More of That
- 7 — Law and Order
- 8 — Barbed Wire Love
- 9 — Suspect Device
