What everyone else thinks?

Jules · The biggest Geldof fan in the world, bar none!

What everyone else thinks?

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

Jules wrote:
Interesting thoughts. Should have done a spellcheck - poor show for the Telegraph.

Keep reading on, it's worth it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/live-music-reviews/10122617/Its-what-Bob-Geldof-did-brilliantly-before-he-found-fame.html

Not very surprising considering his band and his less illustrious schoolmates' band (what are they called? U2?) more or less were formed off of what they saw the Rats do and achieve.

In fact, he has perfectly summed up the Rats in one sentence...

"...in the late Seventies, The Boomtown Rats were the most interesting pop group in Britain, scoring hit after hit with sharp-witted, punk inflected, new wave tunes, chock full of bright ideas, crammed with sparky hooks, and delivered in attention-grabbing style."

And when you consider the other interesting groups that were around at the time, which was possibky the most interesting time in music, that is some compliment.

With all the spelling mistooks (sic)

The Boomrats Rats re-unite at the Isle of Wight Festival, the apparently inevitable return of another group that nobody has missed very much.

Some bands just dont date well. The sneery vocals, pushy productions and sharp-elbowed attitude of the Irish sextet are probably not the kind of thing to evoke dewy-eyed reminiscence. You dont hear their music on golden oldie radio or stirring hearts as nostalgic movie soundtracks. Young musicians dont cover their songs or covet rare vinyl of early albums. Retro-obsessed music magazines dont feature old black and whites of their gaunt faces and spiky haircuts on their covers, amid endless discussion of a legendary back catalogue. The Boomtown Rats have become a footnote in rock histor, primarily remembered for putting Sir Bob Geldof in the public eye. They were something the statesman, media mogul and charitable firebrand did before Live Aid.

Yet for a few years in the late Seventies, The Boomtown Rats were the most interesting pop group in Britain, scoring hit after hit with sharp-witted, punk inflected, new wave tunes, chock full of bright ideas, crammed with sparky hooks, and delivered in attention-grabbing style.

Between 1977 and 1980, the band had nine consecutive top 20 singles, including two extraordinary number ones. Rat Trap was a Springsteen-style, shape-shifting five-minute soap operatic epic about the crushing pressures of working class life. And I Dont Like Mondays is surely the only chart topping pop song about a school shooting, Johnny Fingers florid piano underpinning Geldofs audacious lyric about a schoolgirl sniper taking pot-shots at teachers and children, while the rest of the Rats provide a shrill questioning chorus of Tell me why?. Geldofs chilling answer was a quote from a telex report of an actual incident at Georgia State University.

The bold accompanying video was an early triumph of the pre-MTV era, casting the group as witnesses in an unfolding tragedy, strolling from set to set in a way that simultaneously embraced and mocked the artificiality of the medium. The Rats were one of the first bands to comprehend and harness the power of this new visual medium, presenting themselves with an eccentric comic exuberance, although shot through with the abrasive edge of Geldofs underlying anger.

There is something very shrill about The Rats run of hits, the aggressive selfishness of Lookin After No 1, the taut lechery of Mary of the Fourth Form, the shrieking satire of Shes So Modern. As they became fixtures of the charts, they tried to soften their sharp edges with thicker keyboard lines and Geldofs voice lower in the mix, but that underlying contrariness is still present in the snarling paranoia of Always Someone Looking at You, and bitter sentiments of their last top 10 hit, limp reggae satire Banana Republic.

This quality of aggressive, attention-demanding neediness came from Geldof, the archetypal rock star with a chip on his shoulder, and it was crucial to breaking out of an Irish music scene characterised by a sense of inferiority and inadequacy. Although Van Morrison was a legend, and Thin Lizzy had made some inroads, The Rats were the first Irish band to reach number one in the UK.

Like such fellow travellers as Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and The Stranglers, The Rats were musical misfits who suddenly found a niche in punk. They were essentially a high tempo pub rock RnB group but when The Sex Pistols upturned the established rock order in 1976, Geldof was already in his mid-twenties, one of a generation of experienced musicians well placed to give this new phenomenon some musical clout and pop slickness. His bar-tested band were super-sharp and Geldof emerged as an utterly compelling frontman, serious and ridiculous, and determined to take the world by storm. He became known as Bob The Gob for his outrageous stage patter and provocative interviews in music papers.

All of The Boomtown Rats play on the Band Aid single Do They Know its Christmas, but the world-changing success of Live Aid propelled their leader into a whole new area of politics and celebrity, and the group split the following year. The truth is, their pop moment was already long gone. Yet Geldof briefly made a great fist of being a rock star, using music as a classic mode of escape from crushing limitations. They may not be much celebrated now, but when The Boomtown Rats released their second album, A Tonic for the Troops, in 1978, it was greeted at all the hippest music papers as a pop masterpiece.

It contains the forgotten gem I Never Loved Eva Braun, perhaps the most audacious lyric in rock history. Delivered as a new wave Brechtian pastiche, Geldof sings in the character of Adolf Hitler, moaning about his place in history, Oh yeah, I conquered all those countries/ They were weak, I was strong/ A little too ambitious maybe/ But I never loved Eva Braun. It still makes me laugh when I hear it. Even then, Geldof addressed the world in ways that made you wonder if he was really allowed to say that. But at least I can say, without controversy, that I always loved The Boomtown Rats. I, for one, am glad that they are going to be heard again.

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

Neil McCormick wrote:
...when The Boomtown Rats released their second album, A Tonic for the Troops, in 1978, it was greeted at all the hippest music papers as a pop masterpiece.

Funny how that got forgotten.

Mark L · Loudmouth

Well written piece and rings true round this neck of the woods. I feel ATFTT is highly intelligent new wave music and TFAOS simply underscored their position as number one in Britain. At the time, there was none bigger and so for people in the Comments section of The Telegraph article to talk of 'awful' and so on, is not borne out by the sales and the general 'playground' feel at school which is a really useful barometer for 13 to 16 year olds. No-one could touch them from June '78 to March '80.