Stiff Little Fingers made a triumphant return to Montreal (photos & review)

Stiff Little Fingers / The So So Glos
Cafe Campus
September 15, 2014

Northern Ireland’s Stiff Little Fingers returned with their crowd-funded No Going Back album earlier this year, and their subsequent tour brought them to Montreal for their first show here in decades. With New York upstarts The So So Glos in tow, Stiff Little Fingers delivered an incredible career-spanning set to an overjoyed crowd of aging punks and skinheads, who drunkenly sang along and danced throughout the band’s entire 90-minute set.

The new material from No Going Back fit in perfectly between classic cuts from earlier albums Inflammable Material and Go For It, with no mass exodus for the bar or bathrooms when a new song was dropped into the set. There is no other first wave punk band that plays with the passion and energy of Stiff Little Fingers, and the entire crowd seemed completely blown away by the band’s incendiary set.

Opening the night was The So So Glos, an eclectic punk band from NYC that brought to mind everything from 70’s style power-pop, to early millennial New York garage rock like The Strokes. While that sounds a bit ungainly, they managed to win over the early evening crowd with their finely-tuned pop hooks and out-there stage banter courtesy of frontman Alex Levine, who was somehow able to convince the middle-aged crowd to shout out “Punk is dead!” mere minutes before Stiff’s set would easily disprove that claim.

Check out photos of both sets below, courtesy of Jason Hughes (http://jasonhughesphoto.com/). You can also check out our podcast with Stiff Little Fingers frontman Jake Burns here.

Stiff Little Fingers

The So So Glos