In my youth the Boomtown Rats were new, disconcerting and delightful. The era was punk, a flag of convenience to which many bands resorted, but the Rats had a musical hinterland that included high-octane rhythm and blues and the early Bowie and Bolan tracks Bob Geldof had heard in the basement coffee-bar of Murray’s record shop in Dún Laoghaire, an oasis the sands of time have long removed.
In Simon Crowe they had a tremendous drummer, and they had a powerful sense of the visual. Early promotional materials were imaginative and attention-grabbing. The piano player wore pyjamas on stage, an act of the most unprecedented sartorial insurrectionism.
The bassist, Pete Briquette, looked disturbing on a good day and actually quite frightening on a bad. Never in the brief history of Irish rock and roll had a group featured a bass player named after a bale-based smokeless fuel. Where would the anarchy end?
Crucially, however, there was something more in the mix. The alchemical ingredient was Geldof’s writing. It was literate and smart, had zest, wit and attack but also a sort of nuance. This 360-page book includes his published and some unpublished song lyrics, for the Rats but also for his solo projects, along with brief but fascinating essays by Geldof on the background and context of their composition, and facsimiles of various scribbles and drafts from his notebooks down the years.
There are lyrics scrawled in old diaries, on hotel notepaper, on the back of tour itineraries. Every Rats fan or student of song-writing will relish this handsome and often very revealing book.
Without knowing they were writing a soundtrack, they wrote and delivered one, surely the grail of all pop musicians
One of the great myths is that a rock band needs only three chords and the truth. What’s needed is three chords and a writer. On the debut album, songs like Joey’s On The Streets Again, Close As You’ll Ever Be and Neon Heart displayed a facility for clever storytelling, deft characterisation and gritty lyricism.
A verse of their first single Looking After Number One inverted a quote from John Donne. I Can Make It If You Can was reflective and careful, the work of a writer with a real feeling for words, the weft and sway of a rhythm.
A keen reader of Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Yeats, he had a notion of language as performance. There was more to this outfit than urban dissatisfaction, catchy tunes and unwise trousers.
The first album was the most Irish record they would make. For all its bluesy chord sequences and mouthy braggadocio, its snake-hipped, slinky-limbed, hand-on-hip rage, its pop-eyed, turbocharged, in-your-face arrogance, this was, as it remains, the most powerful document imaginable of what it was like to be young and sceptical in the Ireland of that era, a country in which self-esteem was illegal. Without knowing they were writing a soundtrack, they wrote and delivered one, surely the grail of all pop musicians.
Their follow-up and their finest album, A Tonic For The Troops, is more of a London record, highly cognisant of fashion and zeitgeist. The brash cover, shimmering Kinks-like guitars and punchy vocals announced an outfit making its play for the big time, which soon arrived.
The collection offered drop-dead classics that are still part of the Rat’s live repertoire, such as I Never Loved Eva Braun, Like Clockwork and the greatest Irish short story of its era, Rat Trap, their first UK number one. “It’s only eight o’clock but you’re already bored,” sang Geldof, in a phrase so complete an encapsulation of 1970s Dún Laoghaire that it might have appeared on the town crest.
Further albums and hits followed, including I Don’t Like Mondays and that beautiful, sad song Diamond Smiles. MTV arrived. The charts were changing. New Romantics appeared, in flouncy shirts and buccaneer baggies. You were never going to see Pete Briquette in a pirate suit (thankfully). The Rats began to sunder; then they split.
The band did find themselves, if not quite speaking for a generation, articulating the stances of a demographic
Geldof’s friend, the late Philip Lynott, used to refer to Thin Lizzy fans as “supporters”, never a usage borrowed by the Rats but the band did find themselves, if not quite speaking for a generation, articulating the stances of a demographic.
These things can be overstated (though they weren’t, by the Rats) and retrospection can alter perspective, suggesting patterns that weren’t evident back then, but it is undeniable that Geldof became frontman for more than a band.
A Venn diagram of what happened would show the Rats’ anger for change in the same closed curve as that of their fans. The band’s 1981 single Banana Republic was a scalding indictment of an Ireland whose achievements in posturing hypocrisy so far outdid its achievements in morality.
“Forty shades of green, yeah. Sixty shades of red. Heroes going cheap these days. Price; A bullet in the head . . . Everywhere I go now, everywhere I see, the black and blue uniforms, police and priests.” It was not easy to write and say such things in Ireland at the time.
The quibbles? As with all collections of lyrics, you sometimes miss the music and the voice, the particular intonation of a Geldof performance. You miss it in the way that, while reading the brilliant lyrics of Rat Trap, you miss the soaring saxophone riff that was to become an integral element of the song. It’s an issue Geldof himself writes about in the book’s vivid introduction, in which he refers to published lyrics as “acrimonious divorcees separated by print from their musical partners”.
Then, there is the question of organisation. The book is arranged alphabetically by song title, which seems an odd way to have gone about things. Yes, it results in interesting adjacencies. Blind Date (1978) comes between The Bitter End (1982) and Blow Hateful Wind (2011).
But alphabetising any list of artworks, while useful in some ways, skews observance of the artist’s evolution. A more visible sense of a writer’s development might have resulted from a chronological or thematic approach. Then again, chronology brings its own stodginess and is its own distorting lens. Most writers are working in circles, not unbroken lines.
Caveats aside, the book is to be celebrated as overdue, the most complete picture of this remarkable songwriter’s restless intelligence and achievement that we are likely to have.
Were the Boomtown Rats the most important Irish band ever? Of course not. They were far more important than that. This compelling and attractively produced collection is testament to the main reason why.
Joseph O’Connor is McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. His most recent novel, Shadowplay, was named Irish Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize
