KEY POINTS:
Oh, the memories. A thousand noisy teenage parties came flooding back with the lyrics to a whole stash of Stiff Little Fingers tracks that hadn't been played in anger for decades.
Pre-gig we'd been gazing into pint glasses to recall as many hits as we could remember and
no one brought up their Special's cover Doesn't Make It All Right, but right from the opening bars it was all there again, as fresh as a spiky daisy and it draped a happy smile all over a sold-out Powerstation.
Punk ruled again.
The packed crowd may have looked a lot like the after-match party of an over-40s football tournament, but Jake Burns and co were canny with the vibe, after all they've been doing this for a fair while now.
So they had opened with Roots, Radicals, Rockers and Reggae for the true fans before dipping into some of their latter-day catalogue, including their somewhat ill-advised take on Love of the Common People.
We shuffled our feet and then clapped politely. Just the hits please Mr Burns. Even so, the energy and anticipation remained high and his nicely pitched and good-humoured back stories somehow made a punk gig feel like a family reunion.
Jake's already blown out the candles on his 50th cake, so the spit and snarl of his pissed-off youth has become more a celebration of endurance, but none of that mattered when he launched into their self-directed love song Barbed Wire Love.
"We'd never written a love song, so we pulled together every Stiff Little Fingers cliche we could think of and wrote one to ourselves ... "
Then he was roaring into the top-shelf stuff, mainstays like Wasted Days, Fly the Flag - dedicated to whoever created the monster banner hanging from the balcony - and Tin Soldiers, which arrived via an almost Buzzcocky extended intro, before their classic air-punching closer, Suspect Device. They even tossed in a touch of Vegas by introducing the band during the breakdown.
Then they were off. Then they were back. No messing about and straight into their epic take of Marley's Johnny Was. Another quick goodbye and they're back for an even more rousing take of their own anthem, Alternative Ulster. But just as we were predicting Gotta Getaway as the final kicker, the lights came up and everyone spilled out to swap superlatives. Yep, that was 90 minutes chocka with both kinds of music: punk and rock. More please.
