The Boomtown Rats

Mondo Bongo
Sleeve notes for the 2005 re-release

by Philip Chevron - The Pogues

"Somewhere up town late last night around 9 o'clock........."

Dublin, 1976: In the teeming basement of Moran's Hotel, Eddie and the Hot Rods, pub-rockers reclassified punkers by virtue of their youth and the then sketchily drawn battle-lines, were in the frenetic home-straight of their set and going down a storm. A familiar wiry figure bounded over to where I was standing.

"We're better than them", said Bob Geldof, "my lot and your lot."

It was generous of him to include "my lot", as The Radiators (from Space) were still 24 hours away from our first gig, supporting, as it happens, Eddie and the Hot Rods. But Bob and I already shared the view that such details could be sketched in later – you either knew what you were doing or you didn't, you either had the passion or not. Plus, he was campaigning for my vote here: he wanted it to be unanimous.

"I'd stay at home today / But the world said Go man Go"

What clinched it was the roar of the crowd. Shockingly, the only thing that seemed to qualify the lads onstage for louder acclaim than The Boomtown Rats was the trek from Essex and some supportive words from the NME. However risible it might seem three decades later, such was the state of the national inferiority complex in 1976 that a UK band was just automatically considered better than a homegrown one.

The Irish music scene, such as it was, was little help. Most bands and pundits were busy tugging their forelocks to Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers – proper music. Yes, The Rats and The Radiators initially relied heavily on covers also (in their case a strange brew of Dr Feelgood and Bob Marley) but there was a sense in which we were using this music as the raw material for something distinctly native in character. What takes "Banana Republic" beyond pastiche and into the realm of poignant testament is the fact that it has in its DNA a version of Marley's "Get Up Stand Up" forged in a sweaty Dublin cellar gig.

"Under their thumb / Kicked and beaten like an angry rabid dog"

Dublin was, like Van Morrison's Belfast and the Beatles' Liverpool, a Port City, a trading post for cultural reference points and imported records. But it also had a complex Anglo-Irish tradition which had made it better suited to its role in the vanguard of a literary and theatrical upheaval than as a centre of musical revolution. Certainly, American Blues music had an impact in Dublin in the 60s but, Rory Gallagher aside, it never really left the clubs.

Paradoxically, the more urban Irish you were, the more keenly alienated you were likely to feel from even your own suffocating musical heritage, inextricably bound up as it was with the Catholic Nationalism of the State and its idealised vision of Ireland. All musical reference points, therefore, had to undergo an unusually lengthy period of scrutiny. By the mid-70s, Horslips and Thin Lizzy had slayed most of those particular dragons. Combining old Irish airs with Marvel Comics, stack heels and riffing guitars, they set in motion the process by which Irish folk music would temporarily be reclaimed by the people for the people, before its present long slow death as the bland soundtrack to Ireland on the Pig's Back.

"I know that tune / it begs too many questions......"

With Horslips, a new energy was unleashed. Held in contempt by both the trad and rock intelligentsia, the rest of us were inspired to thrash our bedroom guitars with renewed vigour. There was a sense that a dam was about to burst, and I remain firmly of the belief that, even if The Ramones and The Sex Pistols had not torn up CBGS and the 100 Club, something very like punk rock would still have happened in Dublin. You need only look as far as the kinetic charge which occurred around that time in film-making, theatre, literary and visual arts to see that Dublin was, belatedly but decisively, fulfilling its obligations as a Port City. The Boomtown Rats played a huge part in that, by demanding attention, by refusing to take no for an answer, by picking fights with dullness and by dramatising the itchy angst of their Rat Trap of a town. And then, just as Ireland was genuinely warming to them, they did what hundreds of Irish bands did before and since. They buggered off.

"Glad to see the place again / It's a pity nothing's changed".

By Summer 1979 when, two No 1 singles better off, the Rats triumphant return to Ireland was blighted by bureaucratic opposition, the "septic isle" must have seemed more hopeless than ever. Contrast that with the euphoria of the near-contemporaneous visit of the new Pope – "young people of Ireland, I love you!" – and only the terminally optimistic would have predicted that, within a decade, Ireland would begin to cast herself adrift irrevocably from the bondage of Catholicism.

"These are danger days / What sort of day is this?"

So, Mondo Bongo is the most interesting Boomtown Rats record because it recognises a world the Rats had conquered, gone around and which Geldof in all of these songs sees is on the brink of change. It is an album that now seems to be set on the eve of modern history, just before the collapse of multiple Berlin Walls. The Banana Republic will implode, the World map must lose yet "Another Piece of Red", Florida's "Elephant's Graveyard" – "Disneyland under martial law" – will play a central role in the election of an American President. Not least, mortal pop stars, rather than infallible pontiffs, will make the most telling contributions towards alleviating third world poverty.

From the outset, the restless Africana of "Mondo Bongo" itself implies unfinished business, as though the aggressive spirit of the Beat Poets had been interrupted, not terminated, by hard drugs and Free Love. From now on, the world would be met head on, not by idealism but on its own harsh terms.

Philip Chevron, The Pogues