It is difficult
to put into words
what The Boomtown Rats
meant to me as an aspiring
punk rocker and 16 year-old.
Attracted mostly to
music from across the big
pond, XTC, Elvis Costello,
and these guys, these guys
especially, gave voice to
every creative vibration
pulsating through my
little brain. Bob Geldof,
that gangly, Irish punk,
with his imprecise,
manic, snarling voice,
and rubbery stage presence,
was more articulate
and a better, more
serious writer
perhaps than any rock
star I had encountered
up to that moment,
and Jesus, this band was
tight and their arrangements
were impeccable. Spinning
A Tonic for the Troops now,
nearly every word comes
back and I sing along
from some magical muscle
memory and this music is
as fresh and vital as ever.
The Fine Art of Surfacing is
no less revelatory, my first
album by the band, so weird,
so wild, so morbidly joyful,
and in their most famous
song, “I Don’t Like Mondays,”
a hit tune about a 1979 school
shooting, deadly serious.
I’ve got five records by
The Boomtown Rats in my
collection, one missing title
safely downstairs with the CD
stacks, one of the few artists
for whom I bought the records,
then bought the CDs, then
bought the records again,
which, while kind of dumb,
speaks to my love of the band.
It has been a joy to see
them reunited recently, sad
that their keyboardist,
a vital presence on those early
albums, not with them, and
lately sad that one of their
guitar players and founding
members has shuffled off
this mortal coil, having kept
at the rock and roll almost
all the way to the end, it seems.
The Boomtown Rats have made
exactly zero bad albums*.
I will always love them,
and always look to Bob Geldof
as so much more than a rock
god, as he was the brains behind
Live Aid, he has been knighted,
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize,
played Pink in the film of The Wall,
and generally, although he’s been
through a number of nightmares
in his personal sphere, has kept his
wits completely about him
and continued to rock well into
his seventies.
Notes on the vinyl editions: A Tonic for the Troops, Columbia Records, 1979, used copy in good condition. The Fine Art of Surfacing, Columbia Records, 1979, used copy in pretty poor condition, no skips, just noisy (my cd sounds better). V Deep, Polygram Records, 1982, my original copy (not sure why I kept it and not my original copies of the first two records here. Maybe I had already purchased CD versions of the other records). In The Long Grass, Columbia Records, 1984, my original copy. Citizens of Boomtown, BMG Records, 2020, original copy.
In case you’re just joining me: I am listening to (almost) every record in my collection in alphabetical order and writing a poem-like-thing in response to each artist represented there. It appears that my collection in the letter B is pretty vast! I will “be” here for a while! Bonus points for guessing what’s in the rest of my B’s!
*This is not entirely true. The last album they made, after the reunion, in 2020, Citizens of Boomtown, is comparatively a bad album. It lacks the sophistication, the pop charm, the brilliant keyboard work, the melody. It’s a bone-headed rock album with some kind of dumb dance numbers mixed in. There are two, maybe three good songs on this record. I don’t know what they were thinking, but this is a regression, maybe a deliberate one, to a way more simpler, far less accomplished Boomtown Rats. If they make another record, I hope they disabuse themselves of that nonsense.
michael jarmer 