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Most young people with access to BBC television turn it on at 7.20pm to watch this weeks edition of Top of the Pops and the countdown to the number one record.
For the last seven weeks, Olivia Newton John and John Travolta have topped the charts with Summer Nights, a song about innocent teenage love from this years hit movie musical Grease. But today they are knocked off the number one spot by quite a different song. It is the first New Wave number one and the first ever by an Irish band. It is Rat Trap by Dublins Boomtown Rats.
Before they start, members of the Rats turn to the camera, tear up pictures of John Travolta and yawn. Then they break into Rat Trap.
The Boomtown Rats first gig was in Bolton Street Institute of Technology in 1976. They were led by Bob Geldof, from Dún Laoghaire. After attending the well-heeled private school Blackrock College, the unconventional Geldof worked for a time in an abattoir that backed onto the Grand Canal. He then went to Canada where he worked for a progressive newspaper before returning to Dublin in early 1975.
After failing to raise money to set up a new publication called Buy and Sell, he sold spyholes for doors to people in the new suburbs in the west of the city. Then he got involved with a new band called Nightlife Thugs. While they were finding their way, bashing out tunes, they were offered the gig at Bolton Street.
At the break in the middle of that first gig, Geldof decided a name change was needed. Nightlife Thugs was rubbed off the board beside the stage and The Boomtown Rats written in its stead at the time Geldof had been reading Woody Guthries biography Bound for Glory which featured a gang of children called the Boomtown Rats.
The Rats quickly became the most popular band in the city.
They are not just known for their lyrics and music but also for laughs they invite the audience on stage to Do the Rat enthusiasm, bravado and a lead singer in Geldof with a big mouth and big head at one gig Geldof is God was emblazoned on his T-shirt. At another he told the audience they were going to make him rich. And he was right.
The Rats moved to England and in February last year signed with the Ensign record label for £700,000. It is the biggest record deal in the history of pop music. After successful singles including Looking After Number One, Like Clockwork and Shes so Modern they released Rat Trap.
It is the most unlikely of hits.
It could hardly be further from Greases sweet teenage dreams of 1950s Middle America. Rat Trap tells a tale from the darker side of Dublin nightlife based on Geldofs experiences at the Grand Canal meat factory. It features Dublin landmarks such as the Five Lamps, at the top of Amiens Street, the gasometer along the Liffey, an Italian café, flats and the meat factory. It is a story of poverty, street fights, urban blight, boredom, fighting parents and Billy and Judy who do not have the sweet teenage dreams of Danny and Sandy from Grease but have been caught in a rat trap from which there is no escape.
-- Edited by ArrGee on Tuesday 15th of November 2016 08:49:15 PM
