9. Stiff Little FingersNobody’s Heroes
Do you know streaming service Rdio? One of the heads of Rdio loves Godflesh and got in touch and offered me a free subscription and I said, "Why not"? It’s afforded me the luxury of hearing loads of records I haven’t heard in years. I spent many a night going, "Wow, what can I remember from my youth I haven’t heard in years?" and this was one of them.
Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash – pop punk was a big thing for me that’s not well recognised in my music but I do have a love for it. I loved this Stiff Little Fingers album as a kid – I had it on taped cassette with U.K. Subs live on the other side. There was a mix of sort of easy mid-tempo punk rock and minor chords. There’s something sort of melancholy and sad about it and I was really drawn to it.
My partner is 11 years younger than me, in her early 30s, and she’s always liked the early Green Day records, as do I. Anyway, I played it to her and she was like, "Holy shit. There’d be no Green Day records without Stiff Little Fingers" and I said, "Tell me about it". I love ‘Basket Case’, it’s brilliant pop punk, and I mean Green Day go back a long way, they were playing in front of ten people in shithole pubs, so they are the real deal. Anyway, I hadn’t heard Nobody’s Heroes in years and was wondering: "Will this sound like shit after all these years?" but it has become one of my favourite albums again recently.
