Of Banana Republics

The Boomtown Rats are undoubtedly the most important band ever to emerge from - or get out of - Ireland. They've had more front covers, appeared on more radio and TV shows and most importantly sold more records than any Irish group or artist has ever done.
The Boomtown Rats are also Bob Geldof, Gerry Cott, Gary Roberts, Johnny Fingers, Pete Briquette and Simon Crowe. So why interview the last two when you could be talking to Mr Boomtown himself - Geldof, Modest Bob, Mr Mouth or whatever NME calls him this week?
Because once we had all gotten used to having the Rats around and Geldof had had his say here there and everywhere, it became very clear that The Boomtown Rats are, have always been, and will be for the foreseeable future (despite what Weekend Spotlight might say) very much a group, albeit of six talented and individual people. The rest of the Rats play a considerable part. They should have their say.

I met Pete and Simon at the Rats' office in London, a few rooms in an unobtrusive building on a sidestreet a few yards from where everyone 'a hustle an' a bustle' through the West End shops. The building itself is a claustrophobic complex of stairs, doorways, offices and cubby holes, until you get to the top, where Rats manager Fachtna O'Kelly has the whole floor to himself, six or eight hundred square feet of airy loft with only one desk and a few chairs in it, and a pile of gold discs stacked on the floor beside his desk.
I arrive at the appointed time to find Pete waiting for me although Simon has yet to show. He arrives inside a few minutes, and pausing only to stow his helmet, shows the way downstairs, where we find a temporarily vacant office. At the outset, I'm not particularly sure of the ground to be covered - the original intention was to indulge in a retrospective piece, but since then I've had a chance to listen to some of the forthcoming album, Mondo Bongo, and of course the single of the moment 'Banana Republic'. It seems the most logical place to kick off proceedings, since apart from being the band's latest record, the song itself also seems to refer directly to the somewhat ill-starred events of last February/March in Dublin, when the band had to spend two weeks in Dublin before being able to play a concert - and in the meantime were subjected to a series of attacks in the courts and in the press. So how directly does it refer to that episode then?
While Pete feels that it isn't a direct reply, he adds that it explains that part of the world a little bit further!
"I think we felt like that since we left the place," Simon comments, "and probably while we were there too. A lot of other people feel that way too. Some of the things in the song are unique to Ireland, but I reckon most people feel like that about their home once they've moved out. They come back and say 'It's nice to be back, but I'm not gonna stay'."
Pete: "It's much harder to come back to Ireland after staying away for a couple of years because you get a more objective view of what it's like."
You certainly must get a more objective view when Dublin becomes the only place in the world you can't do a gig, within reason, on your own terms. Simon reflects, "We did feel very bitter about it, and very hurt, because we were virtually rejected. And I think we proved our point eventually, but it cost us a lot of time and an awful lot of money. There are a lot of bands who might go to their home town, but wouldn't hang around to make the same point.
"It cost us a lot of money, that fortnight in Ireland, but it became a matter of principle."
If it became a matter of principle to the Rats that they play a concert in Dublin, it seemed to be equally a matter of principle to others that they not be allowed to play. While there was no 'conspiracy' at work, certainly a tacit line-up of the Establishment was in evidence, even down to the time-honoured pressure-release valve of inviting the band onto the Late Late to give vent to their feelings.
"It was very strange - everybody we confronted with it was sympathetic, but there seemed to be this tacit resentment of the band. It may be just an Irish thing. We get the impression with some Irish people that they're watching for the next single to fail. But we don't have anything to prove any more. I think we've succeeded. But we view our audience in Ireland like nowhere else in the world." Despite which, the Irish media have never been particularly sympathetic to the band.
"Exactly. We had this idea of Irish people standing round in pubs saying Aw, Jasus, this next one's going to come a cropper, I know what's wrong with it. We're just not interested any more, we're not even gonna fight back in the press. We don't feel that we have to prove ourselves any more, and I think that's reflected in the way we produce our music.
"This single is totally different to the other eight, and each one of those was different to the others. If we'd wanted to really come on as a formula-type band and make an awful lot of money very, very fast - there are countless examples like Dire Straits, who stay around for two or three albums.
"We want to be around for a while - if we'd produced another 'I Don t Like Mondays' or another 'Rat Trap' or whatever, we could have done that, but we don't need to."
Pete: "We'd get bored if we produced another 'I Don t Like Mondays' - I'd be bored stiff, I wouldn't want to do that. We have to go on to something else all the time, and I suppose that's why every single has been totally different."
Simon insists that the band have consciously taken risks. "Which makes it much more exciting. There is the possibility that it'll be a monster or that it'll fail. It's a totally unknown quantity. We thought that with every single we brought out so far. You crap yourself when you see the reviews coming in, and wonder what it's going to do next week."

But that's a response which is based on success. There's always the down escalator when you're up there. But there were those who assumed in the beginning that the Rats wouldn't last, that various individuals in the group weren't serious about what they were doing. At what stage did they finally decide that they were engaged in a long term project? Simon dates it to when they signed to Ensign.
"We'd decided before that, obviously, that we were going to have to go at it or else we wouldn't have done the tapes and all that early on."
Pete: "I remember that at the time one of the main motivations was not that we thought we were any good but that we thought everybody else was so dreadful. Any of the bands that came over about that time ('75, '76) we went to see them, like Eddie and The Hot Rods, and we thought 'if they can do it, we can do it better!'"
But at that stage they gave the impression of a band who'd go the whole way. They now seem to have lost some of that sense of urgency. Simon argues that the difference in attitude is both natural and superficial.
"I think we're still just as hungry in the essential ways that make a band successful, if you'll excuse the word."
Pete: "If the band stiffed now I'd regard it as a failure."
The Rats have set a standard for and been an inspiration to the Irish scene, something which has had pros and cons. How does Simon see that?
"I suppose it's very flattering to think that people respect you, and I suppose that's what everybody wants. I suppose that when you are in a successful position you influence other people who are trying to do the same thing."
But there's another side to the coin, as Pete points out.
"It s true that we ve influenced an awful lot of bands, although some of them may deny that and slag us. We're the first Irish band to come out of Ireland as an Irish band and make it on the international scene. These bands may slag us and say 'We're not going to do it like the Boomtown Rats - we're not going to do it this way'."
Simon: "You can pick up a Hot Press and see the latest Dublin band doing an interview and saying 'we're not going to do it like the Boomtown Rats at all - we're going to be super big and we're going to do it supercool and be bigger and better!'
"It'd be nice to see another band doing it. U2 are doing well at the moment, but I don't know how big they're going to get. An awful lot of it comes down to the management side of things too, it's not just writing the appropriate songs at the appropriate time, it's the brains behind it too. But if you don't have good songs, forget it. You don't necessarily have to play amazingly well none of us regard ourselves as 'musicians' and probably never will."
Although there has been a dramatic development of the band's mixed abilities since the early days.
"It's natural, after being in a band for five years. Considering none of us had played around before, and therefore we started from nothing it would happen like that. It's unconscious, I suppose, when people play together for a long time, you just get to know each other musically. Some of the songs for the new album we had to pull apart completely and restructure very rigidly and each person had a part, but for quite a lot of the album it was just 'ad lib', almost. It was a lot more relaxed than the last album.
"Obviously some songs are difficult, you've heard another song that sounds a bit like it, or somebody just comes in with an idea that doesn't appeal to you, you may find it hard to pick up on. But I think the good ones are always very easy and very fast."
'The Fine Art Of Surfacing' which I didn't like a lot, seemed to me to be somewhat overdressed, as if a lot of work was done on overdubs and arrangements. Whereas what I've heard of the new album seems to be a lot more direct.
"I think you have to go through that sort of thing and the fact that you don't particularly like it . . . well, I don't think it's as good as Tonic For The Troops either, but a lot of people do obviously. I personally agree with you - at the time I felt it was a little bit overproduced. But I think it's good to do that sort of thing, to actually sit down and structure the whole thing very rigidly and think about everything that goes into it. Whereas this time we went in with a different producer and his way of working was totally different to Lange's. [Tony] Visconti's method is like 'Record the backing tracks and enjoy yourselves', much more relaxed whereas Lange was into structuring the whole thing, and the difference between Surfacing and the present one is quite evident. I think the fact that each of our albums are different to one another is good, whether they're all liked equally well doesn't really matter. We enjoy doing them."
Pete: "Quite a lot of the tracks we just went in and played them once or twice. If we didn't get them done on those takes we'd just leave them and go on to something else and come in the next evening and get them within two takes, and practically have everything done on them at that stage, except for one or two small things."
I remember reading that at the time of the first album that Lange somewhat dominated proceedings in that he could show the band how to play a particular piece no matter what the instrument. The impression created was that he could be overbearing. Simon elaborates on his relationship with the Rats.
"In the first album, Lange tried to put a lot of things in and in some cases we used them. But if we didn't think they were good we'd throw them out. It actually got to the stage on the second album where we had all the songs done, and Lange would put stuff over the top. He rearranged the format of a few songs, but we usually stuck to what we were playing.
"The exception to that was 'Rat Trap', which he worked on a lot. We did that song in the studio without ever having played it live. When we went to Holland, none of us knew that song. We hadn't even routined it and we worked it out with him in the studio - so the guy is good at what he does, obviously. His past was one of working with session-players in South Africa and doing cover versions. He could imitate anybody, and therefore had a very wide vocabulary from which to draw. He had plenty of ideas, he'd say, 'We can do this song fifty different ways', whereas we'd come in having played around Ireland for a year and we'd played in these songs ourselves and that was the way we did them. We didn't hear them or see them any other way. Most of them ended up that way too."

While the Rats have been relatively quiet for the past year on the recording front, there's still been a lot of hard work. Following on the wide-ranging success of 'I Don't Like Mondays', they undertook an extensive world tour which took them through the States, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
Their album sales skyrocketed as a result. The Fine Art Of Surfacing was a gold album in Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Greece, and Simon recounts, it went double platinum in Canada. 'I Don t Like Mondays' was a gold single in Ireland - when I point out that that means sales of over 35,000 copies, Pete is impressed!
"Wow! I'll bet the showbands don't do that well," he jokes.
But so far America hasn't fallen for the Rats. I figure it's a situation that must rankle.
"On the last World Tour, we did much better there than we thought we would," Pete argues. I think the main reason was that we were believing what we were reading about America, that we weren't popular there. But when we played there the last time it was packed houses everywhere! Our album didn't actually go that high in the charts and I suppose people reckon it from that. It didn t go Top Fifty, it went to about eighty or so, hung around there a while and then went back down, so in those terms I suppose we haven't broken that big. But as far as playing concerts and audience response go, the States has been almost as good as England. But it's such a big place that that kind of thing can vary from area to area. But I'm personally happy with the way things are going for us there, and I'm sure we'll do well the next time around. It's a very big place, and you can sell an awful lot of records in the States. It's the biggest market in the world, so it's very important to us."
They're not despondent either because they feel the reason for the States resistance is obvious. Simon elaborates.
"The main thing against us was obviously that the Yanks didn t go for 'I Don t Like Mondays', because they realised it was about them. As Geldof says, 'they don t like having their dirty washing waved in their faces'. The system over there is very corrupt, like the way you get radio airplay is different. The jocks were told not to play 'Mondays', because of its content, and therefore it didn't get played."
But live, Pete emphasises again, things were a hell of a lot more positive.
"Billboard (the American record business trade paper) has a Top Fifty gig chart, and while we were on tour there we were number one in the chart, because it was 100% in most gigs, so I think that's a fair enough indication."
So what happens with America if they don't actually crack it and make it big there?
Simon: "Make it enormous? So what? The stage further for us there is to be like one of the American supergroups, I suppose. That sort of success doesn't bother us terribly. It certainly doesn't bother me that much anyway. We're doing well, I consider, and I enjoy what we're doing because it's varied and interesting. There again it comes back to the same thing, if we wanted to do the formula thing - like The Police, you know, they definitely have a sound, you know what their next single is going to sound like."
Pete: "I quite like The Police, but if I m going to play a Police album I just pick any of them, it doesn t matter a shit which one I pick because they're all the fuckin' same anyway. So I'll just pick a Police album and put it on for a while. It's just like Muzak to me. It's good Muazk, though."
Simon: "Yeah, they're good guys and they play very, very well but they don't seem to have taken it on a stage further since 'Roxanne', the first biggie."
Pete: "But there's no need for them to, they're making plenty of money out of that as it is, they may as well squeeze it for all they can."
Simon: "Yeah, and coming back to the American thing if we'd wanted to hammer it home we could have done that."
Pete: "Yeah, I don't like Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and then weekends - we could have got another four hit singles out of that."
Simon: "And the Americans would have assassinated every one of us!"
Pete: "'I don t like Ayatollah', that would have been a gem, it would have cracked the States, or it would have cracked Iraq anyway!"
Simon: "When we were over there the last time I turned on the radio and it was really funny, all this Ayatollah thing was going on, and this country song came on with words like, "God bless Chevrolet, Harley-Davidson and RCA/They ain't bad but at least they can say/It's made in the USA." They're hedging, at the moment, on this world crisis."
Pete: "That Iran thing - I left the band too at one stage, 'cos I was emigrating to Iran. I had my visa and everything, but I never actually went. I'm glad now! I wanted to get out of Ireland anyway, whether it was with The Boomtown Rats or otherwise, because I was in a nine-to-five situation and I wasn't going to get out of that, so I applied for this job in Iran because it was much better money. But I had to guarantee to stay two or three years. It was contract work. But I'm glad I didn't go."
The way things are going, when things settle down there, maybe they'll get to tackle the Ayatollah on his home ground by playing there. 'Banana Republic' - number one in Iran, anybody?

As the band develops, the tendency for Geldof to dominate proceedings diminishes. The result is that the others are seeing their songs being recorded more frequently.
"It's a natural evolution," Pete explains. "I was writing songs all along - it's just that I never wrote anything that was any good up to now and I might never write anything again that's any good! There wasn't any songs by anyone other than Bob on the first album, but we had 'Clockwork' on the second one, and Fingers had 'She s So Modern' and then 'Sleep' on the third, and then Gerry has 'Man At The Top' on the B-side of the new single, and Simon has one on the new album, 'This Is My Room'.
Simon also sings one of the songs on the new LP.
"Yeah. Bob just asked me if I wanted to have a go at it. It's called 'Fall Down'. There's another song with just keyboards backing, and it and the one I did are very underproduced. Visconti played recorder on 'Fall Down'. He brought along these beautiful big recorders, one massive bass thing, and played a solo in the middle of it."
Pete: "I played a big acoustic South American bass, only it's guitar shaped!"
Simon: "It's just a very simple song and it's very short. Some of the songs are like that and there's no reason to make them longer. Everybody strives for this three-and-a-half minute song, but these are only one-and-a-half or two minutes long. You remember the Beatles White Album, you know the way they just throw little things in all the time. In fact there's a reference to it at the end of 'Go Man Go'. It doesn't have to be geared for radio play. But 'Banana Republic' was chopped around there's an album version and a single version. The album version has a much longer intro, it gives more time to get into the first bit before it changes tempo."