I Don't Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats
The companion to Sunday Bloody Sunday in Partridgean bathetic misunderstanding, this was the second and last UK Number 1 for the Boomtown Rats, after Rat Trap. It's the song with which they're most associated and was Number 1 for 4 weeks.
Like with 1978, the Number 1s in 1979 are an impressive bunch - YMCA, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Heart of Glass, Tragedy, I Will Survive, Bright Eyes, Sunday Girl, Ring My Bell, Are Friends Electric, IDL Mondays, We Don't Talk Anymore, Cars, Message in a Bottle, Video Killed the Radio Star, then, breaking the run, One Day at a Time by Lena Martell, When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman, Walking on the Moon, Another Brick in the Wall.
There are, conservatively, eight classic singles in that list. Is I Don't Like Mondays one of them?
If you'd asked me when I was 16, I'd have said yes, definitely. I loved this song for a year or so, probably second only to Going Underground. I was starting to get into new wave/indie, and I didn't yet know what, within those categories, was cool.
I found out this wasn't, so I dropped it.
Geldof is a very strange cultural figure, isn't he? Weirdly, he's got me thinking about Nick Cave. I've never thought about that before. Gosh ... i heard a phrase last week ... chaos conservatives. That's them.
Having said that, until the last week or two, Cave has never had the left turn on him like it turned on Geldof in the 90s. In the NME, they gave him no inch. I remember a review of some charity gig he was involved with and it went something like "and the, god help us, Geldof appears, still convinced he wrote at least one classic song, and launches into the tired intro to I Don't Like Mondays and everyone heads to the bar", which was pretty scathing really.
I remember a couple of interviews with him where he was painted as well, quite overbearing, but as times have moved on, the celebrity interviews where the interviewer tells us "this famous person is not nice" seem fairly bullshit to me. Being rude to an interviewer really is not a definite indicator of anything. It may, possibly, be a sign someone's not nice, or it may just be that the interviewer, whose questions are by definition annoying and interfering, crosses a line you can't bear. If I was ever famous, there is absolutely no way at some point an interviewer wouldn't do a hit job saying I was dismissive and unfriendly.
Bit of a tangent, sorry, Anyway, Geldof became a celebrity. His songs have been pretty much entirely forgotten. He wants to right that, he reformed the Rats, he did a documentary. but still, the songs haven't really been critically reassessed yet. Maybe it's too late for that.
But, after all that, let me say, I think this is a great song. Or a great Number 1. whatever. A really very weird Number 1. In sound, in subject matter. I hadn't heard it much for 20 odd years, and I started listening to it again last year, and I thought, gosh, well done.
Maybe, in this day and age, the subject matter is seen as even more exploitative than it was at the time, maybe it's seen as a fatuous treatment of tragedy. But it's catchy and it's a bit beautiful.
Having said all that, and this may have already happened, i'm not hip as i used to be, but it really strikes me as a very likely candidate for a Running Up that Hill-style explosion with the TikTok kids.
Anyway, it was a Number 1 on my 1st birthday, which was not a Monday.
Huh, I didn't realise you had stopped listening to this so early on - I've listened to it fairly consistently since you first recommended it and always find it to be a delightful song, but it's certainly also true that it is a fatuous exploitation of a horrific incident.
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