Still Burning: Stiff Little Fingers

Stiff Little Fingers, one of the punk era's great cult bands, are being celebrated in an all-new DVD, entitled Still Burning With Incendiary.

The DVD, written and directed by Grammy award-winner and punk icon Don Letts, will be released by Fremantle Home Entertainment on 24 September. This new launch celebrates the band's 30th anniversary and charts the storied legacy of Northern Ireland's original punk heroes in a 90-minute tour de force of blistering punk noise, attitude and fervour.

Combining concert and archive footage with current interviews with the band and their peers, Letts has formed an engrossing, entertaining and enlightening documentary charting the progression of a band that easily combined a tight explosive punk sound with an astute political awareness. They weren't known as the Irish Clash' for nothing! Their influence has spread into today's modern rock culture, with key current punk bands like Rancid and Green Day regularly citing Stiff Little Fingers as essential to their musical inspiration.

This fly-on-the-wall DVD follows the band through their current incarnation whilst also delivering a detailed account of their history. The film packages the grimy, fiery aggression of Stiff Little Fingers into an hour and a half of visceral viewing pleasure, with special features to make any fan of the band or punk in general salivate at the mouth. The group's debut and landmark album Inflammable Material is performed live in full for the first time, and there are extended interviews with people as diverse as ex-England footballer Stuart Psycho' Pearce and Mike Peters of Welsh alt-rock band The Alarm.

An account of the band as detailed and realistic as this needs a director with the right cultural credentials. Few can explore the world of punk with the same level of authority as Don Letts.

From the Roxy, London's first punk club launched in 1976, Letts spun the latest reggae records, introducing the movement's spiky nihilists to the chilled vibe of the Caribbean, forever changing the entire punk soundscape.

Post-punk, Letts further etched his name into music history, joining Big Audio Dynamite with The Clash's Mick Jones before taking the next step in his career as a film and music video director, creating more than 300 videos for artists like Bob Marley and Elvis Costello.

Most recently Letts has created two critically lauded documentaries: Westway to the World, the riveting and Grammy-award winning 2000 documentary on The Clash; and Punk:Attitude, a learned and accomplished film of 2005 tracing the lineage of punk in rock history from the 1950s through to the modern day. He continues his legacy as a guru of punk with this latest release, a compact and intensely focused look at one of the great cult bands of the last thirty years.

Stiff Little Fingers are an integral part of the punk pantheon, whose influence continues to be felt through the lineage of modern rock making Still Burning a must-have cultural artefact for any self-respecting punk fan!

9:21am Thursday 13th September 2007

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