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Bob Geldof - The Years Of The Rat

In the first part of a major interview conducted at last year’s Music Show in the RDS, BOB GELDOF talks candidly about life as an illegal immigrant in Canada, how the Boomtown Rats took on official Ireland and then went on to duke it out with the Pistols and The Clash, and what triggered his involvement in Live Aid. Plus, a look back at Bob and the Rats on the cover of Hot Press.

Niall Stokes, 09 Feb 2011

Eyeless…

Yeah Eyeless… fucking gormless (laughs). And I wanted to bring back the definite article into rock ‘n’ roll and so it had to start with ‘The’ and I thought like The Rolling Stones, you’ve got to be able to shorten it, so Garry wanted to call it Traction, like there was something wrong with his back, but then again he liked The Doobie Brothers, and there were all these dreadful names, y’know, so I came up with The Nightlife Thugs ‘cause it was suggestive of things and then you could call it The Thugs, and we were playing very fast, for no reason I can think of other than… we wanted to play these songs fast, just ‘cause, y’know… The Nightlife Thugs sounded right but it actually sounded a bit pony and a bit embarrassing because clearly we weren’t thugs, y’know, these nice polite boys from Glasthule and Glenageary.

Hence the change!

Kevin Street, Halloween night 1975. 30 people in the class. I’m mortified, I’ve a cap, scarf and coat on and it’s not coming off and I’ve got my back to the audience. Cott starts off with ‘Down By The Jetty’ first thing and he fucks up the opening riff, it’s just (hums opening riff) but he does something else and we just stare at him. And he just looks at us and keeps on going, so we had to make up a song, and so that was the first song we did. After an hour or so we took a break, and I’d written The Nightlife Thugs on the blackboard and I was thinking, this is just such a shite name, and I’d been reading Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory and I was at a part where Woody was 11 or something and his Dad was an oil man and they had moved to Oklahoma, and wherever the oil men went that became a boomtown, and Woody tried to join the local kids in their gang and they wouldn’t let him in, so he started his own gang and he called them The Boomtown Rats, and I just underscored that on the page in my book and I just thought ‘That’s great’ And that was it. So I just rubbed it off and wrote ‘The Boomtown Rats’ and the others just looked at me and were like “Whatever!”



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