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Stiff's Story

Orlando Weekly | March 27, 2007

You have to love any movie that refers to Elvis Costello as "D.P. Costello: Pub Rocker." A documentary on seminal punk-rock label Stiff, If It Ain't Stiff does a worthy job of capturing the early energy and pre-Pistols roots of London punk -- the emphasis in the Stiff scene was on pub rock. The doc also focuses on how integral Nick Lowe (more so than Costello) was to the label's early success. The edited footage is overlong; it gets all the way up to the Damned's first album, gloriously showing a clip of the video for "New Rose," within the first half-hour, then spends the next 60 minutes trying to pretend that what came afterward was worth documenting. Costello comes off as quite human, especially in his rivalry with labelmate Ian Dury. Best line: Jerry Casale of Devo calling the guys at Stiff "pigs in hippie clothes."

Tags: Ben Whalley, If It Ain’t Stiff It Ain’t Worth a F...: The Stiff Records Story

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