The Boomtown Rats

V DEEP
by John Walsh

In 1982, it was razor-blade time for rock fans. All the intelligent, toxic energy of punk had been burned away like the brandy off a plum pudding.

What remained was a pudding indeed – a stodgy mélange of toothless ex-punkery, gypsy retro-folk and a platoon of nouveau-glam nobodies whose talent apparently lay in raiding the wardrobe of some provincial am-dram troupe. Some eons after his days with The Damned, Captain Sensible appeared on Top of the Pops singing the execrable “Happy Talk” from South Pacific.

The only music you might cross the road to hear came from The Jam and the rude-boy ska-pop of Madness. Elsewhere, Adam Ant sang “Goody-Two-Shoes” with a white stripe across the bridge of his nose, while Phil Oakey of Human League intoned “Don’t You Want Me” in a voice as flat and annoying as his bias-cut hair.

Everywhere you looked it was novelty singles (“Pass The Dutchie”), crappy sentimentality (“Ebony and Ivory”) and power ballads (“Save Your Love” by Renee and Renato spent five weeks at Number One). How we – the generation upon whom punk burst like a lanced boil just after we left university – how we gazed at the swaying figure of Boy George in his rag-doll hair and clothes, asking (foolishly in the circumstances) if we
really wanted to hurt him, and thought, Jesus - what’s happened to us?

Thank God, then, for The Boomtown Rats, the one link with the past for whom you never had to apologise or feel regret or sympathy. Of course, they were never real, card-carrying punks. They were musicians, for one thing – thirty-three-chord wonders. Their songs were nimble-footed, full of key changes, cross-rhythms, sudden choruses, ticky-tocky robotics and epic, string-orchestra endings. They must have borrowed their effects from a hundred sources, but all you could say for sure was that they sounded like the Stones with a music Ph D.

V Deep was their fifth album, and the second produced by the great Tony
Visconti. It came out in 1982. The title was a source of some bafflement.
Did it mean, self-consciously, Very Deep? Was it a Roman V that meant they were simply 5 albums in? Was it an allusion to venereal disease? Or did it refer to their new status as a quintet (Gerry Cott had left after the release of Mondo Bongo)? * With his departure came a characteristic new sound for the band – a wave of synthesisers and brass, a lot of inscrutable poppings and tinklings and experimental what-have-yous.

It was so far removed from their trademark shoot-‘em-up rock histrionics that CBS in America elected not to release it. It’s a shame because, with the benefit of hindsight we can now see that the electronic wash is in fact the least interesting thing about this lost masterpiece.

V Deep is a riot of eclecticism, an Echoland of a dozen disparate styles, as if Geldof and the band were too alarmed or (frankly) too bored by the post-punk fallout to stay with any one idiom for long. I remember the first listen-through – how I registered with amazement that the Rats were dabbling, successively, in David Bowie mood-scapes, salsa, reggae, ska and –gasp – cool jazz. Most of all, it had an epic quality – presumably Visconti’s contribution, a sonic treatment so lushly romantic it rivalled his cousin Luchino’s feats on the silver screen.

In the early ‘80s playground of decadence that was the New Romantics movement, this was the real thing – music of genuinely debased and sour post-romance.

Geldof’s lyrics are full of detachment and loathing for the dull, brittle acquisitiveness of the early Thatcher years,

“A thousand well-known faces/ passed across that stupid screen…He watched those faces come and go/ Up close/ He saw the strain/ And he watches it all/ Yes he watches it all”.

There’s some angry flashes against the regiment of women too – for being hard to comprehend, for being too dumb, for being too desirable. “Astonish me, dear, with a new point of view” he sneers on “Talking In Code”, the song of V Deep which most resembles the early Rats combination of nimble melody and call-and-response vocals. On “Skin to Skin”, his most Bowie-ish composition, the mood turns feral, all-consuming:

“I wanna crush your mouth… I wanna bruise your lips… I wanna scratch your flesh... I wanna tear the bones off”,

although the song is in fact a subtle meditation on sex, post-coital gloom and the fragility of relationships once “the beast” has been sated and, as it were, put to bed. The album’s strangest song is Geldof’s single foray into “chicken jazz” called A Little Death - not apparently an allusion to le petit mort as the French call the orgasm, but an image of heroin addiction. Geldof gives it a wholly authentic cocktail-hour swing (complete with fingersnaps in the style of the other BG, Buddy Greco); remarkably, it works just fine.

Geldof’s voice is a thing of wonder, from its sexy labial mutter down among the bass notes to the high eldritch shriek of rebellion (“I spit in your eye”) on “Never in a Million Years”. Here he lets it loose, turning it into a soft, cooing, seductive instrument that fights the chilliness of the subject: “If you can’t stand the heat/ You just turn up the gas.”

The moodiness of “A Storm Breaks” and “Up All Night”, with Geldof’s voice buried in the subaqual abyss, threatens to turn the album into a movie soundtrack, but “House of Fire” and “Charmed Lives”, the two singles released off V Deep, are both jaunty, upbeat celebrations, driven by the horns of Spike Edney (later to join Dexy’s Midnight Runner and , remarkably, Queen). The latter song, though, contains another bilious little bulletin from the life of a bored rock star, for whom everything is a little boring, your only priorities are how to wear your hair (not something you expect to preoccupy
Geldof) and whom to visit – what Larkin called “the life with a hole in it”, when everything is just okay-ish, and the news from elsewhere doesn’t mean anything because you’re immune to bad luck. An idea he returns to in ‘Up All Night’. ‘They know they’re alive/When they start to feel pain’

It doesn’t take a genius to see this recital of detachment and demotivation as heralding both the end of the band (the next album, In the Long Grass, would be their last; they finally split in 1986) and also the genesis of Band Aid and Live Aid.

You can hear Geldof practically ticking with frustration and impatience, wanting to get on and do something, achieve some success beyond songs, sex and money, connect with the real world where “the news” happens. The whole Saint Bob saga is pregnant in this powerful record. It’s just a shame that, to get to that next stage, the band had to burn out first. V Deep reveals them, if not at their finest hour, at least at their most hectically creative.

* In fact V Deep refers to a Japanese style of shagging, guaranteed to generate female orgasm. 5 Deep (thrusts), 6 Shallow ones. Repeat as necessary.