Brian Faloon
Kiosk speaks to Brian Faloon, original drummer for “Stiff Little Fingers”, about his early life, his love of music and his new musical project, “Radiqwal Dad”
Did you have any early memories of being attracted to the arts or music specifically?
Not particularly. Neither of my parents, none of my family, were musical in any real sense. We were listeners, mainly, to the radio. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that we had a gramophone player. We had one of those big bits of furniture which had a gramophone at one end and a radio in the middle, so no, there was nothing really, in terms of music, until secondary school, other than I was an interested and keen listener.
It wasn’t until I was probably around 15 or 16 when myself, Steve Graham and Jake Burns started kicking around at school. I started hitting things and it took off from there. This was around 1973 or 74.
If music or the arts wasn’t what you did, what were you encouraged to do?
Sport was a big part of my life. I played Rugby, my brother Colin, who was two years younger than me, played football. I played a bit of football as well in our local Boys Brigade League. That was the only reason half of us went into the Boys Brigade so we could play football on a Saturday. But my number one sport was, and is, Rugby. I played Rugby as soon as I went to Secondary School, so from around 13 or 14 years of age.
How did you move towards music and playing the drums?
My initial tuition was done on square biscuit tins with some vinyl sleeves strapped over the top with duct tape. It was not until much later that we managed to get access to anything which resembled a proper drum kit. That was at school, and we magicked some drums from the music room.
We rehearsed at school, in the assembly hall would you believe, and in Jake’s bedroom where he would practise his guitar using the Bert Weedon songbook. We went from there to listening to songs from what was going on at the time. We were just trying to pick things up, trying to figure out beats and chords.
Quite a primitive start then?
Like most working-class kids, we didn’t have the means to get the instrumentation to form a band, so it was very much “do it yourself”, until you got some proper gear. And proper gear meant a Woolworths guitar and a cheap amp and a really cheap drum kit. At around this time it seemed like a lot of young people were disenfranchised from the music industry perhaps even felt that way about society generally.
Would that be one of the reasons that you decide to form a band?
You would look at bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and they were like Premier League Teams. We were miles away from that. We would look at what we had access to and think that we were like a Sunday League outfit. Not even that good really. We were never in a position to do pretty much anything. It really was three of us mooching around, Jake, me and Steve, trying to pull something together, and we worked some summers and earned some money, and we progressed. I don’t think I actually bought a full, proper, drum kit until Stiff Little Fingers started, which was sometime later. Up until then if we had a gig, we might rent a drum kit from Harry Baird’s, or got a loan of one from our friends.
Did you have any musical influences?
All the big rock drummers, John Bonham, Ian Paice, Simon Kirke but probably Bonham was the key influence. What I was trying to do in my limited capacity was to use the whole kit to have an impact on the songs. “Johnny Was” on “Inflammable Material” might be the best example of that approach.
For a detailed account of the band, Stiff Little Fingers, and Brian Faloon’s role within it, see the link below Brian’s comments
“I think the book which Roland (Link) wrote was as comprehensive a book about Stiff Little Fingers as it gets. My role in it was in those formative years, up until the recording of “Inflammable Material” and the TRB (Tom Robinson Band) tour. At that point, I was already one foot out the door anyway so anything which happened beyond that is due to Jake, Henry and Ali, along with Jim Reilly, and their drive and commitment, and that line-up was the best, and certainly the most consistent, version of the band.
“Inflammable Material” was the springboard for that and the fact that 50 years on, the band is still going, with a dedicated following which keeps turning out to see the band, must say something not just about the capabilities of the band but the messages that the band sends out to people over all those years.”
Kicking up a Racket: The Story of “Stiff Little Fingers” 1977 – 1983 by Roland Link
