Stiffs ’78 went to America, but did America understand it?

The Stiffs went in to New York’s Bottom Line for a week and made everybody pay to see them. Everybody. Not just the odd fan and the many curious would-be fans, who knew that last year’s Stiff tour had produced such notable trans-Atlantic transfers as Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, and that the company had reared such a hot-house specimen as—well I think there’s something threatening about him—Ian Dury. But everybody. Clive Davis, arch-egotist of Arista, had to fork out his six dollars admission to see the acts he’d signed to his label but whose material he had, with the odd temperament that makes a record mogul, not seen fit to release.