Young soul rebels

Those who know Bob Geldof only as the loquacious and dishevelled bloke who organised Live 8, got Pink Floyd to reform, was the main motivating force behind Band Aid and Live Aid and who spends much of his waking hours attempting to remind politicians just how shameful their performance has been vis-a-vis by the poor and oppressed of the world, can have little sense of the impact he – and the band he fronted – made when he and his newly-fledged band The Boomtown Rats first emerged into the grey light of 1970s Ireland.

Back then, we had one television station, one radio station, and no rock magazine. The country was still in thrall to the Catholic Church, and virtually any kind of artistic endeavour outside the conservative and the safe was not merely seen as unwelcome but was regarded as a threat to public morality.
What passed for ethics was often mere compliance with traditional values that stifled and strangled.
We had yet to discover the rampant corruption gene that had so many infected Irish politicians. Neither had we speciifically identified the secret and shameful proclivities of numerous among our priests and “Christian” brothers (though some of us felt it in our bones) – and we had no idea what it would be like to live in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society where divorce would be a right and you might regularly meet black and brown people, as well as freckled ones, in your local.
While other performers primarily use their art as a means of escaping from the world, and we needed that back then too, the Rats were about something different. Geldof, and others like him, have used music to enable us to face back into the reality of the world we have created for each other and, if we are not too ashamed of what we see, to do something to change the dynamic – and even the detail – of what is reflected back at us.
So Geldof pressed himself onto the national stage, grabbed the microphone, and proclaimed aloud lots of the things that many of us had been thinking, but hadn’t yet found a way of saying.
When he did his famous rant on the Late Late Show back in 1978, you could feel the silent cheers echoing throughout the land. Watching the show, I envied his courage, and admired his sheer gall. Sure, we’d had Irish musical heroes before, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy and Horslips included, but they had merely recruited the troops for which Geldof and his Rats would be the tonic. The speed of the Rats’ ascension would act as a pointer to other bands in Ireland: it doesn’t have to take forever. It can be done. And quickly.
But there were interesting and different strands to the Rats’ attack. They had a powerful sense of marketing nous too, and an aggression about the way in which they pursued success – thus it was amid talk of frozen rats being delivered to the band’s enemies and stunts like a promo banner being unfurled during an All-Ireland final in Croke Park, that Ireland entered a new era.
While Geldof proclaimed that the band’s aim was merely to entertain, there was a sense in which they energised and galvanised Ireland’s rock community like never before.
“Sure I want to be a star,” he insisted. “I want to get rich and laid. The only philosophy we espouse is that of the individual. All we’re saying is be yourself.” Whatever about the attention-grabbing polemics, one thing that we can say for sure is that over the last 30 years, Bob Geldof has always been himself – and, in turn, he has empowered countless others to do likewise.
The Boomtown Rats had come together as The Nightlife Thugs in the middle of 1975 in the Dun Laoghaire kitchen of part-time photographer Garry Roberts.
Roberts was to be one guitar player of two – Gerry Cott was the second – in the Rats’ line-up, Geldof was the vocalist and the outfit was completed by Johnny Fingers on keyboards, Pete Briquette on bass and Simon Crowe on drums.
Soon they were hawking their uncouth talents around Dublin suburbs, becoming The Boomtown Rats after Geldof came upon the phrase in Woody Guthrie’s book Bound For Glory.
The first gig they played under the new name was a memorable one for Geldof, as he achieved the “getting laid” bit of his philosophy. During the interval of a gig in a college a young woman approached him. “She told me she wanted to fuck me, and she did. It was my first pop fuck”, he gleefully told me.
With unappetising ads for Rentokil rat poison playing on a make-shift backstage screen, out front Geldof and the human Rats were soon driving crowds into a frenzy with their quirky mix of r’n’b and white reggae, and a batch of original songs that often spoke eloquently and angrily of the society that had spawned them. Thanks to Geldof’s understanding of publicity, they were quickly earning a “lock up your daughters” reputation, abetted by the outrage of feminists, who objected to a Rats’ poster photo of legs clad in fishnet stockings.
Unfortunately, for the perspective of those who objected, the legs were actually Geldof’s.
Their campaign was waged with excellent effect. They demanded to be seen in London – and created enough of a buzz that A&R scouts were queueing up to see them. There was the hint of a bidding war and by October ‘76 they were signed to Ensign Records. They moved to London, lock, stock and two smoking barrels and were soon working on their first album and single as well as building their profile and following though a series of tours, including a support slot with Tom Petty.
In August ’77, the first single ‘Looking After Number 1’ raced up the charts in Ireland and the UK and was quickly followed by ‘Mary Of The Fourth Form’ and the eponymously-named first album achieving a similar feat.
The Capital Radio Awards named the band Most Promising Group and the album as the best of the year. The Rats were out of the trap.
They were prolific hit makers during what was a remarkable run at the top in the UK and Ireland. Between ‘77 and ‘84 they would rack up 14 hit singles, including No.1s with ‘Rat Trap’ and ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. And they would record six studio albums that stand the test of time very well, before Bob embarked on his own successful solo adventures.