As they release a new Best Of anthology album, University of Limerick professor Eoin Devereux celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Irish music legends The Boomtown Rats.
In 1975, long before Sir Bob, Saint Bob, Band Aid, Live Aid, Live 8 or the worldwide hit I Don't Like Mondays, a group of very angry young men formed a band. Their first gig was in a small classroom in Kevin Street on Halloween Night, October 31st, 1975. They called themselves The Boomtown Rats, a name taken from Woody Guthrie’s dustbowl classic Bound for Glory. In the book the 11-year-old Woody - even then possessed with a vivid sense of right and wrong - broke away from his boyhood gang because they refused to allow the new kids in town to join their old established outfit. Woody created a new gang for the new kids who had blown in on the recent oil rush. He, nor they, wanted to be part of the "old gang". They were the new gang. In a pitched battle for playground supremacy the "captain" of the old guard hurled the deathless insult at Woody’s mob "…yer nothin’ but a bunch of Boomtown rats." The name suited Woody and it perfectly suited Bob Geldof and the rest of this new band’s clear and stated intent. The Rats really didn’t want anything to do with the "old gangs" either musically or nationally or politically or clerically. They were to be the New.
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Watch, via RTÉ Archives: The Boomtown Rats take the stage at Self Aid in 1985
Bob Geldof remembers those early days vividly: "Moran's Hotel, Talbot Street, served as the initial launching pad for The Boomtown Rats. Almost overnight and for the first time for any local band, queues stretched up and around the block of this predominantly hard working-class area of inner-city Dublin. We eschewed all the norms and stereotypical tropes of trying to please our audience. Instead, the Boomtown Rats goaded, challenged and compelled the crowd to react, wake up and do something!"
Although it may have seemed odd that the rage was coming from a bunch of kids from the sedate suburbs of Dun Laoghaire (and Ballyjamesduff, County Cavan), the rage was real and driven by the realization that 1970s Ireland with its growing levels of unemployment offered zero future to its young. It was this Ireland that the Boomtown Rats questioned and in so doing helped call a different country into being.
The Boomtown Rats sang of the street, of the dispossessed; their cacophony of sound mixed high-octane punk with classic 'R and B' licks. Their debut single Looking After No.1, was a blitzkrieg attack on the social, economic and political paralysis which prevailed in Irish society. Appearing on the Late Late Show in 1977, Bob Geldof railed against Church and State telling host Gay Byrne of the Rats' lofty ambitions. On that show and in their live performances the group played with a freneticism never seen or heard before in Ireland.
Looking back to those early years, Geldof summarizes the band's raison d'etre: "We were living in a "Gombeen" state of utter corruption and economic and societal stasis, and we needed to do something about it then or we would soon go under."
It would be wholly misguided and wrong to airbrush the significance of The Boomtown Rats out of Irish cultural, social and musical history. They played a hugely important role in the emergence of a wider counter-cultural movement which gave voice to otherwise ignored or silent voices.
Geldof's point is well made. Just like their contemporaries in New York (The Ramones) and London (The Sex Pistols), The Boomtown Rats were responding to desperate economic conditions, rising unemployment (18% in 1977) and a world that offered its youth no future. It’s no accident that the first line ever heard in a Boomtown Rats song was "This world owes me a living/I’ve waited on the Dole Queue too long." They took on Ireland and the world.
The Boomtown Rats were true to their manifesto. A quick succession of hits - Mary of The Fourth Form, She's So Modern and Like Clockwork - were soon followed by a song which told the story of a young everyday Dublin working-class couple named Billy and Judy. Geldof had written the song working in a slaughterhouse in Dublin. "It was the only job offered me" he recalled. Rat Trap reached number one in the UK Charts on November 15th, 1978. In doing so, the band signalled the death of disco by toppling John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John from the peak position they'd seemingly occupied forever that year.
The Boomtown Rats were the first ever Irish rock band to reach the pinnacle of the UK charts. Irish fans took a particular pride in the fact that Rat Trap's lyrics referenced local Dublin names like the Five Lamps and the Gasworks. On Top of The Pops, the Rats in a gesture of supreme rock 'n roll triumphalism (repeated years later in a separate context by the late Sinead O'Connor who was a huge Rats fan) ripped up posters of John Travolta and Olivia Newtown John. The band’s message was clear. The old order is gone. The Boomtown Rats are here. In doing so, they were following in the footsteps of other great Irish performers like Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy and Van Morrison, but were utterly different as well.
Geldof says of that time: "The Rats were, I believe the first band to come with the absolute belief that things had to change and that the only way that we could help to achieve that was through rock n' roll – the very language of change itself."
Something he would try again years later with Live Aid.
Watch: The Boomtown Rats perform I Don't Like Mondays on the Late Late Show
Although the Rats soon became a global act – most notably after the release of I Don't Like Mondays (reaching No.1 in 32 countries) their emergence and enormous success was strongly intertwined with a cultural revolution taking place in Ireland. With their visceral conviction, The Boomtown Rats paved the way for a further wave of Irish bands and the almost immediate development of an indigenous Irish rock music industry. Their provocative organisation of the 1976 Falling Asunder Tour; the fact that their records - at their insistence - were released in Ireland by a small local label - Mulligan Records - thus allowing the label to sign further "new" traditional and new rock bands, their many interviews with the brand new Hot Press magazine and their support for other Irish acts such as The Atrix, Protex, The Radiators From Space and The Vipers all evidenced the pivotal role they played in helping to develop an Irish music industry with a unique and highly differentiated point of view. But it was much more than that. Bob Geldof served as a role model for those who wished to speak out about the shoddiness and oppressive nature of Irish society and to use their music as an instrument of social change.
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We need your consent to load this Spotify contentWe use Spotify to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage PreferencesThe band's eponymous first album is an important document of 1970s Ireland. Its artwork suggests a cultural paralysis; many of its songs are populated by people who want to escape from the greyness and drudgery which threatens to smother them. Cultural oppression is also a theme in the band's later hit Banana Republic. Its lyrics take aim at the corruptive hegemony of Catholicism and Nationalism and the shoddy collaboration and compliance of the business elite. It is also worth remarking that other songs are strangely predictive of later technological developments and societal changes. I Don’t Like Mondays speaks of the "Silicon Chip inside her head" and a peculiar coming amorality; while Someone’s Looking At You written as a contemporary comment also imagines coming the dystopian online world where surveillance reigns supreme.
Watch: The Boomtown Rats perform Bananna Republic on the Late Late Show in 2021
The band's oppositional stance to the powers that be also gave rise to an interesting moment in Irish history. In February 1980, the Rats having sold their tickets were bizarrely and suddenly forbidden from playing at Leopardstown Racecourse. There followed a highly publicized stand-off between The Boomtown Rats and 'Official' Ireland. The Rats eventually won the day and played at Leixlip Castle. This was a pivotal moment not only for the band but, crucially, for the youth of Ireland. It was clear evidence that the old order had failed and that a seismic shift was already occurring of which The Boomtown Rats played no small part.
It would be wholly misguided and wrong to airbrush the significance of The Boomtown Rats out of Irish cultural, social and musical history. They played a hugely important role in the emergence of a wider counter-cultural movement which gave voice to otherwise ignored or silent voices. The band’s success internationally generated a new confidence amongst other vocal emerging Irish "conviction" artists like Sinead O’Connor and U2. Songs like Rat Trap, Joey’s On The Street Again, Looking After Number One and Banana Republic, amongst many, stand as powerful documents of a radically changing late twentieth century Ireland.
Fifty years later, Geldof stresses how it was The Boomtown Rats who "first called out the hopelessness, the sterility, the nullity, the sheer awfulness of what we were all enduring. The Rats, I think, helped steer us through all of that by singing the truth, by articulating the wrong, by calling out the names of the guilty, the incompetent and the abusers'… And they did so unerringly, bravely, angrily and thrillingly, with excoriating humour."
Watch: The Boomtown Rats perform Glam Trash Baby on The Tommy Tiernan Show in 2020
They achieved this first in Ireland, then the UK and then if that wasn’t quite enough, the world. 50 years later they are still at it – doing what they have always done best - touring and recording, playing songs that seem to have an even stronger resonance today. The band and many of their fans may be older, but the vast power of their songs remains undimmed.
This year, The Boomtown Rats are celebrating 50 years of powerful music, and marking the occasion with a new anthology album. They may pass down your way. If you get the chance, go and see one of Ireland's greatest bands. Literally legends.
The First 50 Years: Songs Of Boomtown Glory is released on September 19th
