I can make it if you can off bestof 2004 cd

Mike menzies · V Deep

I can make it if you can off bestof 2004 cd

Mark L · Loudmouth

Not sure, sorry. Sounds 77/78 though

manatthetop · In the Long Grass

Well that's Gerry Cott doing the lead So has to be as mark pointed out 77/78. They didn't really sing this song much so nice to have it live. Great song I think

Jules · The biggest Geldof fan in the world, bar none!

One of my favourites.

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

It was recorded at this gig at the Music Machine

http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/boomtown_rats_vs_skrewdriver.htm

Was in Classic Rock Magazine from 2004, see below

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

The Boomtown Rats had more chart hits than most of their newwave contemporaries. Classic Rock talks to Bob Geldof about punk, pop, politics and perseverance. Pest control: Hugh Fielder

SUPPOSE I DIDNT THINK THE SONGS WERE worth it, but now I can see that we were good. When I was listening to it all for the first time in a long while I just thought: Cool band. Bob Geldof is mulling over why The Boomtown Rats have not been revived and revered as frequently as their new-wave contemporaries such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam or Elvis Costello. After all, the Rats scored as many hits as them during the late 70s, including a couple of No. 1s something The Jam, for example, didnt manage to achieve until the next decade.
Part of that is down to Geldof who, one way or another, hasnt dwelt much on nostalgia since then. Hes scarcely had the time, poor saint. The truth is, I prefer the music I do now. All this he gestures towards some Rats album artwork on the table in front of us seems like a long time ago and another band. But I was in that band and I wrote those songs. And to my dismay, ha-ha, a lot of them still work. After youve written them they just go out there, and some of them have survived and now theyre part of the whole thing.
I mean, he continues, you can hear I Dont Like Mondays any day of the week on a radio station somewhere. I was in India not long ago and went down to Mysore for the day, and as we walked past this wedding party there was a karaoke version of ...Mondays going on. Isnt that amazing? he laughs, leaning back into the sofa in the small, Dickensian room in this Soho club (no, not that kind of club). As ever, Geldof is distinctively dishevelled, in a light, wrinkled suit (no shirt, naturally) and with trademark unkempt hair now with added elegant grey.
Then a while later I was watching The West Wing , he adds, when somebody told the president thered been a school shooting and he says: Christ, I dont like Mondays. His aide goes: What? And he says: You, know, like the record. And that record was banned in America! And then the Tori Amos version comes on. You kinda go: ****!
If you werent around at the time, ...Mondays might be one of the few Boomtown Rats tracks youd recognise. Its also one of their least typical songs. In fact Geldof only rated it as a B-side when they recorded it. But the string of hits the Rats chalked up in the two years before ...Mondays topped the charts in the summer of 1979 Looking After No. 1, Mary Of The 4th Form, Shes So Modern, Like Clockwork and the first British new wave No. 1, Rat Trap were brash, witty, acerbic and catchy; everything the new wave was supposed to be.
To the punks, however, the Rats were not part of the revolution when they arrived in London from Dublin in the spring of 1977, just as it was all beginning to kick off.
We were viewed with deep suspicion by the London punk scene, Geldof says. To the music press, we werent punks and we werent pub rockers. Which could have been understandable. So what the **** were we? We were Paddys who seemed to have sprung up, fully formed, out of nothing. Of course, that nothing was the year wed spent slogging it back in Ireland learning how to play. We were part of the attitude thing but we were taking the piss out of all the attitudes.
It didnt help that Geldof, who had earlier written reviews for the NME , declared he was out to get rich and get laid, which was definitely not part of the punk orthodoxy being preached by the music press. The gossip columns were soon laden with Rat attacks. Any excuse would do like riding in
a limousine, for example.
Hello? If a limousine pulls up outside my house alongside a Volkswagen then Im going to get in the limousine. I may never get in one again. The choice of car is not a political act, Geldof exclaims with a look of incredulity. And that was the confusion at the core of what the punk bands were about.
It struck me, as I said at the time, as illogical that The Clash could reduce the worlds problems to deciding whether to appear on Top Of The Pops or not, Geldof explains. They were supposed to be this highly politicised band, and it was ridiculous. It wasnt about that at all. It was about getting inside and changing things. And you know, thats what I did, he shrugs, without needing to elaborate.
I think The Clash became The Clash with London Calling, he acknowledges. Thats when the promise became real. But before that I didnt really have much time for them. I called them the new waves Bay City Rollers. Their first gig was in a room full of journalists, their clothes were made for them with silly slogans stitched on neatly, they were the sons of diplomats, they lived in Regents Park and they wanted to be Mick and Keith while dissing the Stones. I mean, doesnt anybody else see this? The Jam dont escape Geldofs wrath, either: Their principles were so mainstream. It was: Hey, the Labour Party. How radical! And the level of political realism was so hand-me-down, like, quote, the working classes, unquote. It was all so naff. At a Belgian rock festival an exchange of taunts between the two bands Whats it like playing in Bobs backing band? Better than making a living doing bad Pete Townshend impersonations nearly ended in fisticuffs.
There were a number of random acts of punk violence during the summer of 1977, and Geldof got his at a notorious gig at the Music Machine in Camden at the end of June, just a week after Sex Pistol Paul Cook had been beaten up in the street by a bunch of thugs. A member of Skrewdriver, a support band with dubious neofascist connections, walked on stage during the Rats set and punched Geldof in the face, knocking him out. He recovered and sang Looking After No 1 with blood running down his face, naturally making the most of the line, I dont want to be like you . The following week the NME ran a picture of a bloodied Geldof with the headline, Now The Violence Has To Stop. A bit rich considering the part theyd played in inciting it, Geldof remarks sarcastically.

-- Edited by ArrGee on Friday 15th of January 2016 08:34:27 PM

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

However, that gig now takes on a slightly rosier hue for him, as the live version of I Can Make It If You Can on the recent best of compilation was recorded at the show. Ive got a lot of tapes lying around, and one of them was a sixteen-track from the Music Machine. I was surprised by the quality of it. We got someone to do a rough mix and it sounded really great. Pete Briquette [Boomtown bassist, and the only Rat Geldof is still working with in his solo band] preferred it to the album version. And that tape is the only Rats thing I have in my car. It even includes the song where I got whacked. The Music Machine incident didnt stop the Geldof gob, and it didnt stop the music press sniping either. When Geldof strode on stage at Londons Lyceum on Good Friday 1978 carrying a cross, while a voice boomed over the PA: This is my beloved son in whom I am well pissed off, the papers construed it as some kind of messianic gesture rather than the ironic piss-take that it was.
If The Damned had done that the press would have loved it, he laughs. They just couldnt stand me, and I can see why. The fact is that the London punk bands were effectively a metropolitan conceit. There were no punks in Dublin. There werent any in Derbyshire or Cornwall, either. Which is why the Rats toured the provinces and built up their own following, just as they had pioneered their own touring circuit back in Ireland when they were barred from the showband circuit that effectively controlled all the local ballrooms.
So when Looking After No. 1 came out, all the punters in Carlisle and Wolverhampton went out and bought it, because that was all they knew about punk, he offers. The papers were yelling: Theyre not punk! and we were agreeing with them. So then they were saying: So why do you look like punks? And we were saying: We dont. Were wearing the clothes everybodys wearing.
It was all utter ****e. The only true originals, I thought, were The Sex Pistols, who had a mad wit about them. We got friendly with them Johnny Rotten because he was a Paddy (Editors note: Rotten is of Irish parentage but it is not certain whether he was born in Ireland or England as his birth certificate was lost) , and Steve Jones and Paul Cook because I was in The Greedy Bastards with them and Phil Lynott. We did that because none of us ever saw any cash. So we used to play the Electric Ballroom and places like that. T HE FACT WAS THAT THE BOOMTOWN RATS WERE renegades in England just as they had been in Ireland, after Geldof had cajoled five other guys guitarists Gerry Cott and Garry Roberts, keyboard player Johnnie Fingers (the one who always wore pyjamas), bassist Pete Briquette and drummer Simon Crowe into forming a band.
Ireland in 1975 was similar to Britain in the 50s, Geldof explains. We were middle-class kids who felt no connection with this closed, silent society. Our culture was Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie. And suddenly there was this black Dubliner Phil Lynott saying, Im really Irish and writing stuff like Roisin Dubh (Black Rose) and having his first hit with Thin Lizzy with Whiskey In The Jar. And he went on to write the greatest lads song of all, The Boys Are Back In Town.
If the Rats beginnings have a certain resemblance to fictional band The Commitments, thats because author Roddy Doyle was part of the same Dublin crowd. Everything with intent. That was the idea, Geldof says. What do we all have in common? What should we all have in common? We had the same reaction that the pub rockers did: go back and play great music again. Because music had become so overblown. Something had to drag it back.
From the start, Geldof knew the importance of being noticed. I wanted to put up posters, just with the name, no information, he recalls. So I cut out a picture of a man walking, from the waist down. His hand was hanging down and it was carrying a severed head. There was blood dripping down on the cobblestones and he was walking towards an empty manhole cover. And the poster just said: The Boomtown Rats. The next one was even more successful. There was just a pair of legs clad in rubber stockings and stilettos very Lou Reed Transformer era. And it said, very stylishly: The Boomtown Rats. I knew that the feminists would come out with their felt-tip pens and write sexist on it. Which they did. Two weeks later I announced that they were my legs. Which they were. We also got hold of a Rentokil promotional film, and wed project it on to the wall behind us at gigs, with all these shots of rats gnawing away at the food inside your fridge.
So we already had that rebellious thing when we first arrived in London. And that was in the first seminal wave of punk albums by The Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell. And when we started getting reviews and stuff they said we were trying to copy these bands. But Id written those songs a year ago in Dublin. Looking After No. 1, Mary Of The 4th Form, and Joeys On The Street Again are all about people I knew.
No wonder Rolling Stone magazine dubbed The Boomtown Rats Dublins E. Street Stones when the bands self-titled debut album came out in September 1977. They were lucky enough to be produced by fast-rising but still relatively unknown Mutt Lange. He wrestled our sprawling R&B riffs into pop songs, Geldof says. And very successfully, too. We had two big hits off the album. But it was gruelling and embarrassing for us when we recorded it, having all our inadequacies pointed out by somebody who knew where he was at. The second album is all we learned from him. I wasnt aware of it, but I had obviously been paying close attention to what hed been saying to us about how to construct hooks and stuff. And the music changed from the R&B of Mary Of The 4th Form to the power pop of Shes So Modern. By now the band were living in a house in Chessington, and Geldof describes their second album, Tonic For The Troops, as Paddy in London for the first time, surrounded by the scene. And Shes So Modern is about the girls on the scene Julie Burchill, Magenta Devine, Mariella Frostrup, Paula Yates. Its a snapshot of all of them. And I crammed the song with hooks so that it just had to be a hit.
One of those modern girls was to change Bob Geldofs life forever. Paula Yates first met Geldof at the end of 1977, and before long the small but perfectly formed platinum blonde and the gangly, scruffy pop star were a celebrity couple.

-- Edited by ArrGee on Friday 15th of January 2016 08:34:51 PM

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

From an inauspicious beginning she tried to give him a blow job in the limo; he thought she was a slag; she thought he expected it the
relationship blossomed into one of the great rocknroll love affairs (to judge from Geldofs 1986 autobiography Is That It? ), despite the worst attentions of the media and the initial disapproval of the other Rats.
Paulas previous form as the daughter of Jess Yates (or so she thought then), presenter of Yorkshire TVs religious programme Stars On Sunday , was manna from heaven for the press. She had also posed nude for Playboy . And when she became a co-presenter with Jools Holland of The Tube TVs best music show since The Old Grey Whistle Test Fleet Street couldnt believe its luck.
But this did not cramp Geldofs style as the Rats ripped their way through 1978, which was without doubt their year. Id been contemptuous of the alternative system and the establishment, but I was using both, he explains. We were the first new wave band to be played by the BBC with Looking After No. 1, and the first new wave band on Top Of The Pops . So obviously we were selling out as far as the press were concerned.
Out of that came Like Clockwork, with the lyric, I m not out on a limb, Im thinking in a straight line . That became the breakthrough Top 10 hit. And then youve got the whole street saga of Rat Trap. Rat Trap was a notable triumph, not just for the Rats but for the new wave, beating off no fewer than three Olivia Newton-John/John Travolta songs from the Grease movie to hit the top spot. The Rats second album, Tonic For The Troops, went Top 10 and spent 10 months in the chart. All over the UK audiences did the Rat as the band toured.
The band cracked Europe, too, although not before the continent had a damn good go at cracking them. The first night in Stockholm, drummer Simon Crowe was cut by a flying glass. The culprit was beaten up by the road crew. He turned out to be a Hells Angel, and returned with his mates for a pitched battle. After an on-stage altercation with police in Finland, Geldof who says he was provoked into a fight was arrested back at the hotel and spent the night in the cells. Another fight broke out at the press conference the next day.
The only blot on the bands progress report was their failure to crack America. Which could have been due in part to the bands promotions guy sending out a dead rat with the first single. Or the band trashing the record company bosss office when he refused to release them.
Things did not improve with new label Columbia, however. The company arbitrarily decided to call them The Boomers. And then Geldof achieved a double whammy of calling the entire radio promotion team a bunch of bastards at their annual convention, and then, at a gig in San Diego, humiliating the most influential radio programmers in America by asking the audience what they thought of their programmes. Airplay was always a problem after that.
It was at that San Diego gig that Geldof and keyboard player Johnnie Fingers played I Dont Like Mondays for the first time, an acoustic version. A few weeks earlier, at a radio station, Geldof was gazing idly at a ticker-tape machine when it sprang into life with a story that 13-year-old Brenda Spencer was sitting at her bedroom window with a gun, shooting people at her school across the street. A journalist had phoned her up and asked why she was doing it. Something to do. I dont like Mondays, she had replied. Geldof started writing the song in the cab back to the hotel while the drama was still unfolding.
When I Dont Like Mondays was released in America, Brendas parents threatened legal action, claiming the song exploited their tragedy, even though she was not named and no identifying details were mentioned. But Columbia panicked and withdrew the record after just one week.
That was really it for us in America, Geldof observes. After that we fell into that limbo state from which there is no return. We became a cult band.
The only compensation for the Rats was that they got to play a gig at the famous Fredericks lingerie store in Hollywood, complete with Playboy models.
The massive success of ...Mondays around the rest of the world meant that there was little danger of the Rats remaining a cult band outside America. Their third album, The Fine Art Of Surfacing, yielded two more hits: the bouncy Diamond Smiles and the smiling menace of Someones Looking At You Attempts to play a homecoming gig in Ireland in 1979 were repeatedly thwarted by refusals and injunctions including an attempt to hire the vast tent in which the Pope had conducted mass in Dublin. They eventually managed to stage a show at Leixlip Castle.
It was a hurried, somewhat chaotic event Johnnie Fingers fell through the stage when he started jumping up and down and not surprisingly the press seized on the violence between various street gangs to berate the band one more time: 30 HURT IN RAT-TRAP TERROR screamed the Irish Independent .
Their headlining appearance at the Loch Lomond Festival was more peaceable, although several of the stunts the band had planned backfired: the helicopters hired to hover over the stage and illuminate the bands entrance turned up half an hour early; the pipe band brought in to enliven the performance of I Never Loved Eva Braun got carried away, and almost hijacked the show with a version of Scotland The Brave.
The extravagant noughts & crosses stage set they took around the world the only time we used outside people to make a set, because it was too big for us to do ourselves, says Bob was also expensive and ate up most of the touring proceeds.

-- Edited by ArrGee on Friday 15th of January 2016 08:35:22 PM

ArrGee · Back To Boomtown

When it came to their fourth album, Mondo Bongo, they decided it was time for a change. Previously the songs were more or less finished by the time we got to the studio. This time we went in with general ideas and then tried to work the songs out, Geldof explains.
The band switched producers from Mutt Lange to Tony Visconti who had worked on some of David Bowie and Marc Bolans best albums and decided to record the album in the agreeable location of the island of Ibiza. But the problem was that if youre not careful you can confuse experimentation with selfindulgence, and we almost did, Geldof admits.
As a result, Mondo Bongo was a somewhat cut-and-paste album literally so with Mood Mambo. But it produced the last big hit from the Rats, Banana Republic, a coruscating attack on Irish hypocrisy set to a reggae beat, condemning the dreadful silence that speaks volumes and wickedly adapting Junior Murvins Police And Thieves lyric to police and priests . Banana Republic unleashed Geldofs frustrations with Ireland and, needless to say, it caused a furore among the hypocrites. Bishops wrote letters about it, the Irish Times wrote an editorial about it, the Irish Parliament debated us. And we were banned from playing in Ireland, he recalls. The new Ireland was being born around then; we were just hammering at the door saying that it should come now.
But perhaps the Mondo Bongo albums most affecting track was the simple, unadorned Fall Down, a song of Geldofs loneliness and longing for Paula. Ironically its the only Rats track Bob didnt sing. I got Simon [Crowe, drummer] to sing it because hes got such a beautiful choirboy voice, and it worked perfectly for such a despairing song.
E VEN AS THE RATS SET OUT ON ANOTHER WORLD TOUR IN 1981, the British musical landscape was changing as the pop scene embraced the likes of The Human League and Adam & The Ants. Geldof was temporarily cast as a film star as he took on the role of Pink in Alan Parkers movie version of Pink Floyds The Wall. Which enabled the music press to cast him and the Rats as boring old farts. Arguably he squandered his movie career by turning down a major role in Flashdance , although he certainly doesnt see it that way. And he did get to enjoy a romp between the sheets with Alison Steadman on the set of Number One .
After four action-packed years the Rats were starting to lose momentum and members. Guitarist Gerry Cott decided to leave before the band embarked on the next album, reducing them to a quintet (the title of the March 1982 album, V Deep, came from a Japanese sex manual rather than their reduced line-up).
Intellectually I knew our moment had passed. Thats the way it should be in pop, Geldof reasons. But I believed that Never In A Million Years [from V Deep] was a stonking, ****-off hit, and I hoped there was some kind of democratic equilibrium going on so that if you came up with a great song then it would get in the charts. But, no. To be fair, Geldof wasnt the only one who thought the Spector-esque Never In A Million Years was a big hit. Everyone he played it to agreed. The sound was huge and the choruses were big. But it was totally ignored. If your time has been and gone and youre considered also-rans, youve got no chance. That was when I thought, Were in deep ****. There were also problems with the record company. Our manager, whod been my mate since the very beginning, had gone through a serious coke problem. Hed told the record company that I hated them and wouldnt speak to them. And that obviously alienated them. So there was this gulf of misunderstanding. And when I took over the management of the group and arrived with the new record they didnt give a ****. I was saying: Whats the problem? And they were saying: Youre the bastard who hates us. And Im going: No. Who told you that? There was one more throw of the dice: I thought the last album, In The Long Grass [released in December 1984], was our best. I dont say that out of perversity, I think it was perhaps out of adversity. But nobody was really interested in us by that stage, so relatively few people have heard it. It was a nightmare to do, but I thought it was good. I phoned Mutt Lange and said: Look, were in the ****, can you mix a couple of tracks for us? He thought Drag Me Down and Dave were big hits. So I was very up, because he of all people should know.
Drag Me Down just made the Top 30, and I was sure Dave would do better, Geldof says. Thats when we went around the country trying to buy it into the charts. I gave each of the band a couple of hundred quid. We went as far as trains could take us but it didnt get into the charts, and radio stations wouldnt play it either. It was probably completely wrong for the time, but having said that it was the most requested track when we polled the fan club about the track listing for the compilation.
And then I was sitting at home, wondering what to do next, when these pictures of Ethiopia came on the television... And that, as they say, is another story. The Geldof-prompted Band Aid single Do They Know Its Christmas?, hurriedly put together in three weeks, came out at the same time as In The Long Grass.
Obviously I couldnt go on television and talk about Africa and Band Aid and then say: And by the way, the Rats have a new album out. And likewise I couldnt talk with journalists about the new album without talking about the massive phenomenon that Band Aid was becoming. But the band behaved with such grace. Not once did they moan: Whats going to happen with our record? We had to postpone a whole tour until I could legitimately go back and be a Rat.
Not for much longer, though. By then people werent seeing Bob as a Rat any more. Would it have made any difference? he ponders. The answer is no. It wasnt Live Aid that killed the Rats. The Rats had had it. Not creatively, though. I was talking with a guy from the Irish Times recently whos a long-time fan of ours, and he said In The Long Grass was the great Irish album that got away.
Effectively, the Rats were finished by the time they played Live Aid on July 13, 1985, but their final show was nearly a year later, appropriately at Dublins Self Aid Festival. Geldofs favourite gig came much earlier on in the Rats career, however. We played this school gymnasium at 4.15 in the afternoon with The Ramones and The Talking Heads to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. How ****ing amazing is that? What was the headmaster thinking of? There were The Ramones, jacking up in the changing room before going out to play their set. And the kids didnt know any of us. They were booing The Talking Heads. And the teachers didnt really get it either, they preferred Genesis. It would be like putting The Hives, The White Stripes and The Strokes on there today... Or rather, three years ago.
The coolest thing about being in the Rats, Geldof concludes, was that we were one of about ten bands who did actually change things. Thats great.

Mark L · Loudmouth

Interesting stuff, thanks. They tried to hype DMD into the charts but 50, not 30 Bob, was the chart outcome.

Break a leg.