'We were a rejection of the cosy de Valera consensus of Church and State' - Bob Geldof relives his Boomtown Rats days with Brian Boyd
'But try telling that to young people these days . ." Bob Geldof is talking about meeting new Irish rock stars The Thrills at an awards ceremony. "They're all from just down the road from where I grew up in Blackrock, and they were asking me all these questions about The Boomtown Rats and how we had 'upset' Irish society. They were going: 'Is this story true?, is that story true?' and I kept saying 'Yes' and they couldn't believe it. It's only now in Ireland that people like The Thrills can be just a normal band but go back to when we formed in 1975 - we were denounced from church pulpits and had questions asked about us in the Dáil."
The release of a critically acclaimed solo album two years ago, Sex, Age and Death - a raw and moody record that had Geldof chronicling all the well-known trauma in his private life, renewed interest in his "old" band, The Boomtown Rats.
"I was getting all these lifetime achievement awards and stuff like that and it was actually people who deal in music who started to go looking for all the original Rats stuff. There had been an album called Loudmouth, which was a collection of some Rats songs and some of my solo songs, but there had never been a Boomtown Rats greatest hits, so what I decided to do was to get people who were into the band to vote on the Internet to decide which songs should make it on the album. It's been strange going back to that time with the album because of all the powerful memories - songs I wrote out at Seapoint, songs I wrote in a flat in Clyde Road, gigs we did in Morans on Talbot Street . . ."
The band: Geldof (vocals), Johnnie Fingers (keyboards), Gerry Cott (guitar), Garry Roberts (guitar), Pete Briquette (bass) and Simon Crowe (drums) formed in Dún Laoghaire as the Nightlife Thugs but soon became The Boomtown Rats, after the name of a street gang in Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory.
"Our first musical principle was 'f--k all that diddly-eyedly stuff'. We were into bands like The Kinks, The Who and The Stones. But you have to remember how abysmal the live music scene was back in 1975 when we tried getting our first gigs. It seemed like there was only country 'n' western or jazz-rock fusion. There was no rock radio, no rock television in the country, people could talk the talk but couldn't walk the walk. In those days we were influenced by people like Wilko Johnson, that r'n'b-based rock'n'roll sound but soon got caught up in punk and new wave."
From the start the band had a dramatic and provocative air about them - this in the middle of 1970s monochrome Ireland. "I remember our first promotional poster. It was just this sexy pair of legs wearing high heels, we expected feminists to complain about it, calling it sexist and when they did, I simply pointed out that they were in fact my legs. It was just to provoke. Similarly, at the beginning of our gigs we used to show a promotional film from Rentokil with loads of rats running around."
Their first eponymously titled album, released in 1977, was a revelation. Here was an Irish band doing full-on garage/punk rock with snappy lyrics smeared with irreverence and disdain.
"It is of cardinal importance that The Boomtown Rats were Irish," says Geldof. "At the time you had Van Morrison doing his Yeats, mystic/Celtic thing, you had Phil Lynott, a black man from Crumlin, singing about Roisin Dubh and having a hit record with an old Irish folk tune and you had a Corkman, Rory Gallagher, doing this US delta blues. But we were most definitely a Dublin suburban band. And punk was a very metropolitan thing, look at The Pistols, The Clash, The Stranglers - we always got on best with The Pistols because Johnny Rotten was a Paddy - and we really saw ourselves as being part of the modern world. In fact, Bono once described us as being 'the first of the moderns', which is essentially correct. But the way we felt about ourselves wasn't reflected in the country.
"What I grew up in was this cosy de Valera consensus of Church and State. And The Boomtown Rats' coming into being was a rejection of that consensus. I do believe we were among the first to post these Lutheran ideas on the church door. We were saying back then: 'this is no longer going to be where's it at'. And I think our songs grasped at an understanding of that, certainly Banana Republic did.
"I look at the tribunals taking place now and I hope they are the end process of what we helped to begin - that could be our legacy. And all this bollocks about the Celtic tiger - I'll tell you who the real tigers are, it's the men and women who came to Britain in the 1950s and kept the country afloat sending money back home. You see them now in London, no social insurance, no pensions - these helpless, deracinated people. We've abandoned them and it's wrong. They sent back their wages to us. These are the people who gave us Morrissey and The Smiths, who gave us Johnny Rotten, Elvis Costello, Oasis."
The more he thinks back, the more impassioned he gets. "1970s Ireland and we were trying to be a punk rock band but what did you have?" At the time, government ministers were accused of conspiring to import arms. "You had crime in the Church. And this wink, nudge, good ol' Charlie attitude, even when they were knocking down the city and chewing up the green belt. I felt they wanted to neutralise my voice, but I was like: 'No, I won't shut up'. All the time".
With hit singles and albums pouring in, Geldof was invited on to the Late Late Show in what was to become one of the most memorable Irish TV moments. "At the time, and for the first time in the country's history, 50 per cent of the country's population was under the age of 25. I had gone to Blackrock College and I thought the future was mine, I thought the world owes me a living, but all there was was mass unemployment. The system had failed me. There was no future. I knew the import of the Late Late Show as a forum so when I was invited on, I thought: 'Now is my vengeance'.
"I was ruthless. I talked about the government, the Church, and all the country's ills. I had my dad in my sights. I knew he was watching it down in the boat club. The audience were booing me and everything and the next day at Glasthule church, my father was there and the priest said in his sermon: 'Now we're going to say a prayer for that poor demented soul who was on the Late Late Show last night and his father is with us today. It must be terrible for him'. I learnt later that RTÉ wiped the tape but I know somebody, somewhere has an audio of it."
It was this very sense of irascibility that made its way into The Boomtown Rats' records, along with an alignment with a "modern world" that had no correspondence in the country they came from. The second Rats album, Tonic For The Troops, was a massive seller and the huge singles, Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays (from The Fine Art Of Surfacing) made them the biggest Irish rock band of their generation.
Although by now based in the UK, Geldof kept returning to the country for inspiration and Banana Republic, a song on their fourth album, Mondo Bongo, crystallised his feelings.
"It was a song about the 'purple and the pinstripe' [Church and government] who ran the country. There was a letter issued by the Archbishop of Galway about the song and questions were raised in the Dáil. I didn't care, I just saw that all these c--ts were complicit in the Church-State tie-up."
Mondo Bongo (1981) and its follow-up, V Deep (1982), were commercial disappointments. "I think after Tonic for the Troops we started to slip away. The Mondo Bongo album was too out there and with V Deep, there was all this record company stuff happening."
There was to be another Boomtown Rats album - their last - and it is the great lost Irish album, easily their finest work. Called In The Long Grass it was recorded under trying circumstances. "We only had £30,000 to make the album and we made it inDennis Bovell's [a well-known reggae artist] studio in Southwark where the equipment didn't work. Things were so bad I used the £30,000 and invested in the money markets to see if could raise more of a budget for the album. It is our best work, we had 1,000 musical ideas but there was this perception that our time had been and gone.
"At the time I was working on a song called It's My World, the first line of which was: 'It's my world and there's no need to be afraid'. Then, one day, I sat down to watch the news and there was this report from Ethiopia about the famine . . ." It's My World became Do They Know It's Christmas and Band Aid soon led to Live Aid.
"Even though In The Long Grass was our best album, we just couldn't promote it after Band Aid. It all seemed so tiny compared to the enormity of the famine. I couldn't be asking people for money and then saying: 'by the way, we've a new album in the shops'. So, it sort of got buried. After 10 years together, we decided to break up. I think everybody knows what's happened to me since then, but as for the others, Johnnie Fingers lives in Japan where he works on record production; Simon Crowe works in an architect's office and has a band; Garry Roberts is now selling insurance; Pete Briquette is in my band and Gerry Cott, I'm not sure where he is but he is doing very well, and he has come to a few of my gigs".
With the release of the greatest hits and all six Rats albums re-released in a few months' time, will the band re-form for live shows? Geldof is having none of it, first because there is a problem with Simon Crowe who blabbed to the tabloids about some salacious on-tour antics - breaking the rock band omerta of "what goes on tour, stays on tour" and second, because he's no longer that punk rock 21-year-old.
"The Boomtown Rats' songs are mine, so I will be doing them live with my band, but we are never going to reform as the Rats. I just can't see myself up there doing She's So Modern - I've no intention of reliving people's youth for them . . ."
The Best of The Boomtown Rats is on the Eagle label and the six original albums will be reissued over the coming months. Bob Geldof plays The Elmwood Hall, Belfast (as part of The Belfast Arts Festival), November 1st, and Vicar Street, Dublin, November 2nd