A FAN’S NOTES

The Boomtown Rats: A Bittersweet Appreciation 

My memories of the mid-seventies seem to dwell on desperately dire times. The music press’s consensus back then was that no rock band should or could have a lifespan longer than a decade or so. Key members quit or die. Others have troubles with alcohol, drugs and criminal code statutes. The Faces were disintegrating. I reckoned it was just a matter of time before the Rolling Stones shattered into scree. So. I casually began to cast my eye around for a new favourite, ear to the ground. The experience was eerily similar to attending a coed college after five years in an all-boys Jesuit high school. Lots to contemplate.

Some bands looked too stupid to be taken seriously, hair and costumes. Others were a bit too bombastic and flamboyant. J. Geils Band was a potential successor, a great frontman and blues hearts in the right place. I was devastated when they cancelled a Montreal Forum date I’d bought tickets for. Maybe Love Stinks aside, their studio albums never quite lived up to their live reputation (Blow Your Face Out, Full House). Aerosmith almost contended with their three-album run of Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic and Rocks (their best), but at least half of each of those albums was Zeppelinesque sludge – which is all right to doze off to when you’re picking at your chipped black nail polish and too stoned to roll.

Social media Sunday, 13 July 2025: Facebook reminds me that it’s been forty-three years since Major League Baseball staged its annual all-star game in Montreal’s Stade Olympique. A good night out in the right field bleachers, almost touching heaven but blocked by a pre-fab cement overhang. Sunday also marked the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid, the mother of all telethons: two concerts on two continents to benefit a third one, cajoled and pulled together by Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, an Irish rock band.

Rock music has always twinned its premise. Simply put, cars, sex and getting wasted are good; war, poverty, racism and oppression are bad. Live Aid was the absolute pinnacle of rock’s inherent idealism and its somewhat insidious role as a positive force in popular culture. The satellite broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” writ massive. Alas, there’s only one direction from peak toppermost of the poppermost. Live Aid was the last signpost on rock music’s golden highway of hits. More personally, existing footage documents the demise of the Boomtown Rats. The timing was tragically right, they’d been at it for ten years (The survivors, including Geldof, have since reformed and are marking their fiftieth anniversary with a European tour).

There’s a bulletin board on the wall above my round writing table. It displays what you’d expect, ticket stubs, pocket team schedules and the metal badges I used to pin on my jean jacket. The largest item is a 10”x8” black and white Mercury-Polygram promo glossy of the Boomtown Rats circa 1978. They look like a rock band, dressed a little differently from you and me and with better haircuts, but nothing ridiculous. Unforced, perhaps even uncalculated, cool. And the Stones appeared to be done, what with Keith facing down an extended tour of the Canadian penal system. And the Rats had, in my case, pedantic cachet: a double-barreled proper noun name lifted from a legitimate source (Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory) and easily abbreviated into a form of shorthand. If you said “the Rats” to somebody who knew, they understood you weren’t referencing the Good Rats or the offspring of Rat Scabies.

My first encounter with Geldof was in the pages of Trouser Press. I’d read the rest of the magazine. All that was left was an interview with some guy I’d never heard of. But he looked cool. This Irish fellow proved articulate, opinionated and contrarian. Hilarious too. He dismissed Springsteen as a pale imitation of Van Morrison and Thin Lizzy, a rip-off artist. I was in the record store the following day to pick up A Tonic for the Troops and the Rats debut, the cover of which showed a shirtless Geldof on his knees in a dingy hallway, suffocating beneath a cellophane shroud.

The Rats hit at a particularly fertile time for rock music. If you bought a record by a new artist in the seventies, I’m thinking Television, Police, Cars, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Clash…acts not in your older siblings’ collections, you were guaranteed to hear something different. The Rats were no exception. Their songs were urban stories (“Rat Trap”), gritty fables (“Joey’s on the Streets Again”) and slices of teenage wildlife ("Kicks"). Modern girls and death. The lyrics were like clockwork: clever, witty, ironic. I was hooked; I saw my future without the Stones.

My second encounter with Geldof was in real time, the radio perennial of “first caller through.” The Rats were playing the Theatre St-Denis that night, touring in support of their brilliant third album The Fine Art of Surfacing. I had tickets, orange card with black ink. CHOM-FM was Montreal’s English-language hipster station even if it was already exhibiting the early stages of corporate uniformity disease. Geldof was on air, promoting the show. CHOM did not play Boomtown Rats music.

(CHOM did not play Lou Reed either. The deejay hosting Geldof had previously hosted Lou in the same time slot. He introduced “Charley’s Girl” as Charlie’s Angels and, well, you imagine how the rest of the session went.)

Surfacing’s pseudo-North American hit was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, a song attempting to make sense of the senseless, a high school shooting in San Diego, CA. It was controversial at the time because school shootings in the US were not yet part of the curriculum. If the Rats released “I Never Loved Eva Braun” today (Yeah, I conquered all those countries/They were weak and I was strong/A little too ambitious maybe/But I never loved Eva Braun), their taking the piss with Hitler would be far too subtle; the hand-wringing outrage too easy to imagine.

I asked Geldof about his first encounter with Springsteen. In an elevator, an awkward moment for an Irishman with a big mouth. “He said, ‘Are you the guy who’s been saying all those things about me?’ I just sort of… I couldn’t deny it.” The deejay figured it was time to cut me off. Geldof said, “No, don’t. Let him speak. This guy’s interesting.” I was more engaged than the media professional. I didn’t feel like a college kid, my school paper's record reviewer aspiring to a university undergraduate degree in English and Journalism. No, I felt I was bantering with an old friend. I telephoned real friends afterward and gushed like “Mary of the Fourth Form”: “I spoke to Bob Geldof!” It was going to be a great night! I was already high. Years later I was crushed whilst reading his 1986 memoir Is That It? – the bastard had omitted mention of our call; must’ve been an editorial decision, you know, page count, printers’ signatures and whatnot.

I somehow made it home from that show (I would see them again at the St-Denis on the Mondo Bongo tour) with the record company 10”x8” promo glossy intact, uncreased. I remain mystified as to how (and the how of its pristine state some forty years later). The Boomtown Rats were the real deal. They did not go on stage as curious bystanders. Geldof was a frenetic front man, not particularly graceful. A roadie unlocked his cage at curtain. His hands were always very busy, emphasizing lyrics with exaggerated gestures in the manner of an unskilled actor (although he would go on to star as Pink in The Wall film).

How was I to know they were on the standard ten-year rock band plan? Their fifth and sixth albums, V Deep and In the Long Grass, were spotty, indifferent contractual obligations but not without a few gems amid the exhausted dross. They were done by Live Aid, placeholder filler on a very long and busy day. I believe I have all or most of Geldof’s solo albums; hard to find, generally ignored, but very good. He or they will always sell their latest album in this country – provided I’m aware of it. The Boomtown Rats will get their Hot Rocks treatment come September when a double retrospective is due. I suspect I already have everything on it, but I’m all in anyway – you know, new cover art, thorough liner notes and the sequencing might be interesting, even revelatory.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are polishing their follow up to Hackney Diamonds. I don’t understand anything anymore. Not that I did then.

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