 |
| Somewhere around their peak... |
This chapter covers one of my favorite bands through the second half of high school. When someone told me the ‘keeper on my high school soccer team loved them as much as I did, I tried to bond with him, but he wasn’t having it. I took it well, honest. Both own-goals were totally unintentional…
The Hit
“A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’”
The “Spencer” in that quote refers Brenda Spencer, a troubled young woman who fired shots at the elementary school across the street from her house in January of ’79. A pair of Irish musicians named Bob Geldof and Garry Roberts caught wind of the story and decided to make a song out of it, and a statement. You can see Geldof very briefly explain in a 1981 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show (and do stick around for the banter at the end of it, because both men seem to get a kick out of needling each other). To wrap up Spencer’s story, it’s a sad one. She lived in squalor with a single dad who drank too much and what sound like some serious mental health issues. Suffice to say, her father wasn’t very supportive:
“Spencer later said, ‘I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun.’ Asked why he had done that, she answered, ‘I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.’”
The song was The Boomtown Rats' “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the only U.S. hit the band ever had. If you’ve ever heard Johnnie Fingers opening piano figures, you know it in an instant. It never occurred to me till that performance on Merv Griffin that the instrumentation doesn’t seem to go beyond what they had on stage: a piano, a swelling synth to fill in the sound and a timpani (or something similar) to give it a nice little boom. Still, it contains many touches of your average Rats song, most notably a knack for cutting to the bone of troubling subject-matter and the call-response in and around the chorus that…for lack of a better word, comes off like camp.
I never find a source that said how high “I Don’t Like Mondays” climbed up Billboard’s Hot 100 - though Wikipedia makes clear it stalled below the Top 10 - and I have no idea how long it stayed there. I do, however, remember coming back to that one sometime after hearing my first song by The Boomtown Rats, the radio edit of “Up All Night” that MTV played back in its early days (a lot, certainly the Geldof remembers). Suffice to say, I got the drift of The Boomtown Rats one big U.S. hit, even the lyrics aren’t entirely linear, far earlier than I figured out “Up All Night.” Sadly, “I Don’t Like Mondays” remains topical as the day he wrote it. From a 2020 interview with a site that was one called Hot Press:
"If I sing ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ it’s not about Brenda Spencer, but it can be about the massacre two weeks ago. The songs have survived in me, as an expression of a sentiment and an emotion. When I heard the opening cadences of ‘Mondays’ last night, nothing turned in me and went ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, this fucking thing again!’”
The Rest of the Story
Unlike a lot of bands, nearly all the members of The Boomtown Rats grew as friends in a Dublin suburb called Dun Laoghaire. The late 1970s weren’t the brightest of times anywhere in Ireland; there was The Troubles, though the worst of that took place in Northern Ireland as I understand, but unemployment was rampant all over. They all took crappy jobs and got on the dole when they couldn’t find one, but they also had the collective good fortune of having instruments and knowing how to play them. And so they formed a band in 1975.
The original line-up featured Geldof on vocals, Fingers on keyboard/piano, Roberts on lead guitar, and, to round up the rest of the line-up, Pete Briquette (bass), Simon Crowe (drums) and Gerry Cott (rhythm guitar). When they first started, they played as The Nightlife Thugs, a name Roberts hated so much that he threatened to quit if the rest of the band didn’t agree to change it. However long it took, they finally landed on The Boomtown Rats, the name of a gang of kids they borrowed from Woody Guthrie’s autobiography. They played gigs around Dublin for a year, where they had the advantage of being one of the few rock bands in Ireland. All that stage-work came in handy when they made the jump to London. Geldof, how clearly loves talking, sets the scene for how they came up in that Hot Press interview:
The Hit
“A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’”
The “Spencer” in that quote refers Brenda Spencer, a troubled young woman who fired shots at the elementary school across the street from her house in January of ’79. A pair of Irish musicians named Bob Geldof and Garry Roberts caught wind of the story and decided to make a song out of it, and a statement. You can see Geldof very briefly explain in a 1981 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show (and do stick around for the banter at the end of it, because both men seem to get a kick out of needling each other). To wrap up Spencer’s story, it’s a sad one. She lived in squalor with a single dad who drank too much and what sound like some serious mental health issues. Suffice to say, her father wasn’t very supportive:
“Spencer later said, ‘I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun.’ Asked why he had done that, she answered, ‘I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.’”
The song was The Boomtown Rats' “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the only U.S. hit the band ever had. If you’ve ever heard Johnnie Fingers opening piano figures, you know it in an instant. It never occurred to me till that performance on Merv Griffin that the instrumentation doesn’t seem to go beyond what they had on stage: a piano, a swelling synth to fill in the sound and a timpani (or something similar) to give it a nice little boom. Still, it contains many touches of your average Rats song, most notably a knack for cutting to the bone of troubling subject-matter and the call-response in and around the chorus that…for lack of a better word, comes off like camp.
I never find a source that said how high “I Don’t Like Mondays” climbed up Billboard’s Hot 100 - though Wikipedia makes clear it stalled below the Top 10 - and I have no idea how long it stayed there. I do, however, remember coming back to that one sometime after hearing my first song by The Boomtown Rats, the radio edit of “Up All Night” that MTV played back in its early days (a lot, certainly the Geldof remembers). Suffice to say, I got the drift of The Boomtown Rats one big U.S. hit, even the lyrics aren’t entirely linear, far earlier than I figured out “Up All Night.” Sadly, “I Don’t Like Mondays” remains topical as the day he wrote it. From a 2020 interview with a site that was one called Hot Press:
"If I sing ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ it’s not about Brenda Spencer, but it can be about the massacre two weeks ago. The songs have survived in me, as an expression of a sentiment and an emotion. When I heard the opening cadences of ‘Mondays’ last night, nothing turned in me and went ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, this fucking thing again!’”
The Rest of the Story
Unlike a lot of bands, nearly all the members of The Boomtown Rats grew as friends in a Dublin suburb called Dun Laoghaire. The late 1970s weren’t the brightest of times anywhere in Ireland; there was The Troubles, though the worst of that took place in Northern Ireland as I understand, but unemployment was rampant all over. They all took crappy jobs and got on the dole when they couldn’t find one, but they also had the collective good fortune of having instruments and knowing how to play them. And so they formed a band in 1975.
The original line-up featured Geldof on vocals, Fingers on keyboard/piano, Roberts on lead guitar, and, to round up the rest of the line-up, Pete Briquette (bass), Simon Crowe (drums) and Gerry Cott (rhythm guitar). When they first started, they played as The Nightlife Thugs, a name Roberts hated so much that he threatened to quit if the rest of the band didn’t agree to change it. However long it took, they finally landed on The Boomtown Rats, the name of a gang of kids they borrowed from Woody Guthrie’s autobiography. They played gigs around Dublin for a year, where they had the advantage of being one of the few rock bands in Ireland. All that stage-work came in handy when they made the jump to London. Geldof, how clearly loves talking, sets the scene for how they came up in that Hot Press interview:
 |
| And a little of the sensibility. |
“We can’t be a better rock n’ roll band than The Pistols we just can’t. We can’t be cooler than The Clash, we’re not cool. What the fuck? I hear Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces: this is wonderful – I’ll never be able to write songs as great as this. Because of Mutt Lange, I’d already begun writing with structure and melody. That’s how Tonic For The Troops happened. You arrive in London, you see these girls who are mad and wild and rebel – and not 1975 Catholic Ireland. They’re opinionated, they don’t give a fuck either, and they’re in your face. The theatre of the self is exploding everywhere and you write ‘She’s So Modern’ and Mutt says, “that’s a pop song”. That’s what happened.” [Ed. - The link in there takes you to their performance on Top of the Pops.]
For better or worse, it’s just the story of The Boomtown Rats going till they didn’t from there. The one big thing that bears noting: they did pretty damn well in the UK and for quite a few years. They landed their first hit with 1977’s “Lookin’ After No. 1,” and produced a steady string through 1985, including another song from their eponymous debut, “Mary of the 4th Form.” And, just to point it out, those two give you a better feel for The Boomtown Rats than “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The aforementioned Tonic for the Troops came next (1978) and dished out the singles, “Like Clockwork,” the blistering, “She’s So Modern,” and “Rat Trap,” a borderline Springsteen tune that became the first UK No. 1 by an Irish band (no, really), but also the first “new wave” No. 1 on the same (…new wave of what?).
With “I Don’t Like Mondays” as the lead single, 1979’s The Fine Art of Surfacing lifted the band as high as they’d go. I (literally) just stumbled on a quote that gets at what made The Boomtown Rats work for me. From the Wikipediaentry on the album:
“David Fricke of Rolling Stone highlighted the album's musical diversity, writing that ‘much of the Boomtown Rats' smarmy charm comes from an elusiveness that defies categorization because it draws from dozens of sources but embraces none.’”
The band released a couple more albums afterwards, one of them, 1985’s In the Long Grass, after their label rejected it. [Ed. - That one contains a song called “Dave” - it’s “Rain” in the States - which was a tribute to the band’s friend/sometime-saxophonist (see “Rat Trap”) “Doctor” Dave McHale, who suffered a nervous breakdown after his girlfriend was found dead next to a public toilet and a bag of heroin.] A couple came in between - e.g., Mondo Bongo (1980; lead single, “Banana Republic,” the band’s last UK Top 10) and V Deep (1982, and home to “Up All Night”) - but neither did well. The band’s U.S. label thought so little of V Deep that they pulled four songs and released them as an EP.
The band started to splinter after Mondo Bongo, with Cott leading the way and not quietly (he questioned his bandmates’ work ethic, accused them of playing “cod reggae,” all that on top of trying to ditch a birthday toast for Crowe). The camel’s back cracked under the weight of Geldof’s work with, first, Band Aid, then (more work) with Live Aid, the famous music festival put on to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. The show raised The Rats profile as high as it’d ever been, while also making the seams split open. With Geldof particularly hot, he landed a solo recording deal, but negotiated another Boomtown Rats album into the deal. His bandmates passed more or less collectively: Fingers and Crowe formed an act called Gung Ho and, with Cott already out, that left very little band to work with. The Boomtown Rats took their (first) final bow at another benefit they (or maybe just Geldof) organized - Self Aid, put on to raise funds for Irish unemployment - and closed out with an extended version of “Joey’s on the Street Again” (with a bridge long enough for Geldof to run all over the crowd), their first single, “Lookin’ After No. 1,” as the encore, and with Woody Guthrie’s “Greenback Dollar” in between. This was Geldof’s farewell from the stage:
“It's been a great ten years; rest in peace.”
About the Sampler
“I’d bin a song if I couldn’t do it. If I do ‘Lookin’ After No. 1’ it’s for the same reason I wrote it on the dole queue in Dún Laoghaire. I’ve still got that dole card where I wrote ‘The world owes me a living.’ If I sing ‘Rat Trap’, I’m not back in the abattoir in Ballsbridge, that slaughterhouse of dreams. When I do ‘Banana Republic’ it’s not about the Irish Republic which grew up, finally. It’s about the American Republic. And with ‘Someone’s Looking At You’ it’s not about what I was living through in 1975, it’s about Zuckerberg and your device literally recording you.”
That’s Geldof answering a question about how they mix old songs with new ones when they play - and, for the record, The Boomtown Rats reformed in 2013, if without Cott (still) and Fingers (who became a producer in Japan, fwiw). About half that goes to rejecting the premise - he plays what he but it also speaks to how excited he was about the remaining Rats’ latest album. As he said repeatedly, both in Hot Press (and a Guardian article I’m skipping) and to Salon, he wouldn’t have recorded 2020’s Citizens of Boomtown if he couldn’t get amped about the material. It was released on Friday the 13th and right before COVID, so, to give anyone who wants one I taste of the new material, I included three from that album, “Monster Monkeys,” the very chill and pretty “Passing Through” and a song that includes a few bars of hip hop, “KISS.”
Due to a little grasping after content/narrative, I slipped more songs into the history above than I usually do…and yet I was surprised by how many more I dredged up both from memory from a bundled collection on Spotify, Classic Album Selections: Six Albums 1977-1984…not a lot of effort in the title, yeah? To list the ones I haven’t already linked to above:
I pulled in “Blind Date,” “Nice N Neat,” and, an unusually guitar-led number I’d never heard before called “Close as You’ll Ever Be” as the rock selection. From the material that, I’m guessing Cott dubbed “cod reggae,” I chose “Living in an Island,” “House on Fire,” and to lump one in beyond the bounds of genre, “Mood Mambo.” I’ll close out with the…let’s call them quirky numbers, the ones that make The Boomtown Rats easier to pin down by era than sound: “The Elephants Graveyard,” a riff on toxic masculinity that has Hitler attempt to downplay his role in the Holocaust, and using his famous lover to do it, “(I Never Loved) Eva Braun,” and, finally, and this one’s a conceptual, really bleak favorite (somehow it punches harder than “Eva Braun”), the rare song I call flawless, “Diamond Smiles.”
Despite playing the albums I had to death (Fine Art, Mondo Bongo, Tonic for the Troops, and V Deep), I never read anything about The Boomtown Rats till last week. A few things surprised me - how much shit Geldof talks about Joe Strummer, for one, even if it sounds more musical than personal (though he gives a nice shout to Sandinista!) - but none quite as much as how consciously Geldof angled for fame. From the ever-quotable Hot Press piece:
“The thing is to get out of the conditions you live in, to stop being poor, to use fame as a platform, which I said in 1976, and, you know, if girls want to sleep with you because bizarrely you’re in a band now, and not slopping around fucking Walter’s in Dún Laoghaire, then get to number one. The Clash thing was Joe trying to get rid of his hippy past: he was a transitional figure, as were we. We transitioned from Dr Feelgood into the new thing. Lucky us, we did it in the obscurity of Ireland. We had been playing a year when we pitched up, so we were match fit. We could play, and we could play fast.”
I never occurred to me that these were the songs of a man who wanted to get the hell out of mid-70s Ireland, but there you go. I’m impressed they got as far as they did.
Till the next one…which takes a BIG step to the 1980s.
For better or worse, it’s just the story of The Boomtown Rats going till they didn’t from there. The one big thing that bears noting: they did pretty damn well in the UK and for quite a few years. They landed their first hit with 1977’s “Lookin’ After No. 1,” and produced a steady string through 1985, including another song from their eponymous debut, “Mary of the 4th Form.” And, just to point it out, those two give you a better feel for The Boomtown Rats than “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The aforementioned Tonic for the Troops came next (1978) and dished out the singles, “Like Clockwork,” the blistering, “She’s So Modern,” and “Rat Trap,” a borderline Springsteen tune that became the first UK No. 1 by an Irish band (no, really), but also the first “new wave” No. 1 on the same (…new wave of what?).
With “I Don’t Like Mondays” as the lead single, 1979’s The Fine Art of Surfacing lifted the band as high as they’d go. I (literally) just stumbled on a quote that gets at what made The Boomtown Rats work for me. From the Wikipediaentry on the album:
“David Fricke of Rolling Stone highlighted the album's musical diversity, writing that ‘much of the Boomtown Rats' smarmy charm comes from an elusiveness that defies categorization because it draws from dozens of sources but embraces none.’”
The band released a couple more albums afterwards, one of them, 1985’s In the Long Grass, after their label rejected it. [Ed. - That one contains a song called “Dave” - it’s “Rain” in the States - which was a tribute to the band’s friend/sometime-saxophonist (see “Rat Trap”) “Doctor” Dave McHale, who suffered a nervous breakdown after his girlfriend was found dead next to a public toilet and a bag of heroin.] A couple came in between - e.g., Mondo Bongo (1980; lead single, “Banana Republic,” the band’s last UK Top 10) and V Deep (1982, and home to “Up All Night”) - but neither did well. The band’s U.S. label thought so little of V Deep that they pulled four songs and released them as an EP.
The band started to splinter after Mondo Bongo, with Cott leading the way and not quietly (he questioned his bandmates’ work ethic, accused them of playing “cod reggae,” all that on top of trying to ditch a birthday toast for Crowe). The camel’s back cracked under the weight of Geldof’s work with, first, Band Aid, then (more work) with Live Aid, the famous music festival put on to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. The show raised The Rats profile as high as it’d ever been, while also making the seams split open. With Geldof particularly hot, he landed a solo recording deal, but negotiated another Boomtown Rats album into the deal. His bandmates passed more or less collectively: Fingers and Crowe formed an act called Gung Ho and, with Cott already out, that left very little band to work with. The Boomtown Rats took their (first) final bow at another benefit they (or maybe just Geldof) organized - Self Aid, put on to raise funds for Irish unemployment - and closed out with an extended version of “Joey’s on the Street Again” (with a bridge long enough for Geldof to run all over the crowd), their first single, “Lookin’ After No. 1,” as the encore, and with Woody Guthrie’s “Greenback Dollar” in between. This was Geldof’s farewell from the stage:
“It's been a great ten years; rest in peace.”
About the Sampler
“I’d bin a song if I couldn’t do it. If I do ‘Lookin’ After No. 1’ it’s for the same reason I wrote it on the dole queue in Dún Laoghaire. I’ve still got that dole card where I wrote ‘The world owes me a living.’ If I sing ‘Rat Trap’, I’m not back in the abattoir in Ballsbridge, that slaughterhouse of dreams. When I do ‘Banana Republic’ it’s not about the Irish Republic which grew up, finally. It’s about the American Republic. And with ‘Someone’s Looking At You’ it’s not about what I was living through in 1975, it’s about Zuckerberg and your device literally recording you.”
That’s Geldof answering a question about how they mix old songs with new ones when they play - and, for the record, The Boomtown Rats reformed in 2013, if without Cott (still) and Fingers (who became a producer in Japan, fwiw). About half that goes to rejecting the premise - he plays what he but it also speaks to how excited he was about the remaining Rats’ latest album. As he said repeatedly, both in Hot Press (and a Guardian article I’m skipping) and to Salon, he wouldn’t have recorded 2020’s Citizens of Boomtown if he couldn’t get amped about the material. It was released on Friday the 13th and right before COVID, so, to give anyone who wants one I taste of the new material, I included three from that album, “Monster Monkeys,” the very chill and pretty “Passing Through” and a song that includes a few bars of hip hop, “KISS.”
Due to a little grasping after content/narrative, I slipped more songs into the history above than I usually do…and yet I was surprised by how many more I dredged up both from memory from a bundled collection on Spotify, Classic Album Selections: Six Albums 1977-1984…not a lot of effort in the title, yeah? To list the ones I haven’t already linked to above:
I pulled in “Blind Date,” “Nice N Neat,” and, an unusually guitar-led number I’d never heard before called “Close as You’ll Ever Be” as the rock selection. From the material that, I’m guessing Cott dubbed “cod reggae,” I chose “Living in an Island,” “House on Fire,” and to lump one in beyond the bounds of genre, “Mood Mambo.” I’ll close out with the…let’s call them quirky numbers, the ones that make The Boomtown Rats easier to pin down by era than sound: “The Elephants Graveyard,” a riff on toxic masculinity that has Hitler attempt to downplay his role in the Holocaust, and using his famous lover to do it, “(I Never Loved) Eva Braun,” and, finally, and this one’s a conceptual, really bleak favorite (somehow it punches harder than “Eva Braun”), the rare song I call flawless, “Diamond Smiles.”
Despite playing the albums I had to death (Fine Art, Mondo Bongo, Tonic for the Troops, and V Deep), I never read anything about The Boomtown Rats till last week. A few things surprised me - how much shit Geldof talks about Joe Strummer, for one, even if it sounds more musical than personal (though he gives a nice shout to Sandinista!) - but none quite as much as how consciously Geldof angled for fame. From the ever-quotable Hot Press piece:
“The thing is to get out of the conditions you live in, to stop being poor, to use fame as a platform, which I said in 1976, and, you know, if girls want to sleep with you because bizarrely you’re in a band now, and not slopping around fucking Walter’s in Dún Laoghaire, then get to number one. The Clash thing was Joe trying to get rid of his hippy past: he was a transitional figure, as were we. We transitioned from Dr Feelgood into the new thing. Lucky us, we did it in the obscurity of Ireland. We had been playing a year when we pitched up, so we were match fit. We could play, and we could play fast.”
I never occurred to me that these were the songs of a man who wanted to get the hell out of mid-70s Ireland, but there you go. I’m impressed they got as far as they did.
Till the next one…which takes a BIG step to the 1980s.
No comments:
Post a Comment