The Boomtown Rats - Mondo Bongo Tour - USA

Bongo Fury in Boomtown

Frank Sinatra Not Linked
by Dave DiMartino

"I thought the last album, where we thought we did something musically in a different direction, stood up." says Boomtown Rats Johnny Fingers. He's talking about Mondo Bongo, his band's newest album. "We were really kind of proud of it, you know?. It was recorded in a different situation than the other albums. So I thought the British press, the NME would be a little more favourable to us on a musical basis. But it just came out as the same old thing, you know? The hatred they have for Bob.

"After a year and a half of getting that continually-you just turn off."

Johnny Fingers, the "second" Boomtown Rat, the one who's not Bob Geldof, the one who always wears pyjamas, says these things with a little malice in his voice. The hatred they have for Bob should sound foolish-especially to a journalist's ears; instead, as he mentions such things matter-of-factly in the back of the Rats' tour bus, it's clear that sour grapes aren't making him say such things, nor any rampant paranoia.

Sure, Johnny Fingers would rather be talking about other things-especially in America, where the Rats don't have an image, let alone a negative one- but the sense of betrayal and hurt the band has been feeling for over a year now is a little too obvious to not talk about.

"It's past the stage where you can do anything about it," Fingers is saying. "We don't give them any tickets to our gigs, or any records or promotional stuff-and if they want to write about the band, it's their own thing. I suppose they have to, in a way, and that really makes them annoyed as well."

On a very foggy, wet night, The Boomtown Rats and accompanying Creem writer have ended up in Dekalb, Illinois, a place where corn somehow plays a vital role in the economy and no one-least of all the shamed Yank scribe-can explain exactly why they know this.

What a contrast: the night before spent in Chicago's architect's nightmare the Aragon Ballroom; tonight at Northern Illinois University, your standard College Town, USA, and a stage the size of the bus we're travelling in. The Rats have hit the states for a third time, this jaunt promoting Mondo Bongo - a passable album on their part, but nothing particularly exceptional.

This tour seems the first that isn't a novelty; "There's nothing I can do to convince people to come and see us if they don't want to now," head Rat Geldof told a radio interviewer in Chicago the day before. There was no small hint of irony in his voice when he later told the interviewing DJ that if he really wanted to help the Rats he'd get his station to add the record to its playlist. And even less when the jock told Geldof to take it up with his boss, he wanted to keep his job.

American radio has never been especially kind to The Rats. Their biggest hit, 'I Don't Like Mondays," never scored hugely in the States the way it did worldwide, that due mainly to the "sensitive topic" it was supposedly based on - Brenda Spencer's schoolday massacre of '70, shooting her fellow teens and explaining her motive with the phrase the Rats yanked for their song title.

"Rat Trap," from Tonic for the Troops, had earlier paved the way for U.S airplay with its Springsteen/Thin Lizzy working class lyric - but Geldof's introduction of the tune in New York ("Springsteen couldn't write a song half as good as this") didn't exactly light a fire under the streets of BROOOOOCE - fan radio bigwigs. Mondo Bongo's biggie, "Banana Republic" again scored heavily in the international market - particularly in the UK - but, in radio parlance, hasn't "happened" in the States, and the CBS powers-that-be have since pulled "Up All Night" for a follow-up.

If it happens it happens, but Geldof isn't expecting much. "Will they play us on FM?" he asks rhetorically. "No. because the formats have now changed to AC/DC and Judas Priest. When FM has gone to that, and AM is playing the Top 20, what's left for us? We don't have a niche to fit into.

And so the Rats take to the roads, playing gigs in Chicago and small ones in college towns. Both shows I see are virtually the same; each audience enjoys the gig, enjoys Geldof, and enjoys the chorus to "I Don't Like Mondays" as if it was some sort of anthem.

"I Consider singles the highest form of pop art," Geldof remarks later "and potentially the most subversive. All the great singles, things like 'Help' and 'Satisfaction,' they've all said something, they're never like 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Love In My Tummy,' they're the great singles, I'm not saying we've had any great singles, but I think 'Mondays' will be remembered by people when they're 60, they'll hear the song and it might evoke some memory of 1979."

What's most telling about Geldof's remark, though, is his rapid insertion that he's not saying the Rats have any "great singles" - a remarkable admission from the man the British press have termed "Modest Bob." A turnabout that, to my ears, seems like a working defence mechanism: don't be too brash, Bob, or they'll hang you for it. Geldof - himself once a rock journalist in the mid-70's - is now on the defensive. A startling change.

Of all the Rats, Bob Geldof is actually the last one I meet. After the Aragon gig. I'd been introduced in the dressing room to guitarist Gerry Cott (who looks vaguely like Paul Weller wearing sunglasses, though I'm sure he doesn't like to hear it) and pyjama-man Johnny Fingers. Realizing any actual interviewing wouldn't take place 'til the bus ride tomorrow, I'd inadvertently gotten sloshed during the gig and then contended myself with asking Fingers obnoxious questions: Is your real name last name Fingers? Don't you feel like a dope wearing pyjamas all the time? The entirely affable Fingers had answered all questions cheerily, even offering a Rats T-shirt someone had just handed him. Geldof, sitting in a couch nearby, had been speaking with a UPI reporter and I didn't approach him.

Next day, though, sharing orange juice on the bus with the band, I managed to pay respects to every Rat but Geldof, who stayed in the rear of the bus while the others came forward. He emerged once, a Chicago TV guide in his hand, pointing out a Tomorrow show listing that promised an appearance by "British punk rocker" Iggy Pop. He apparently found it quite hilarious.

Hours later, on the post-gig trip back to Chicago, we finally spoke. Or, more accurately, he spoke. Geldof is the lazy rock journalist's dream; ask one question and you needn't ask another for 20 minutes.

Innocently, I ask Geldof for his side of this Rats/NME controversy.

"There's no side to it," says he. "They've just been writing personal, vitriolic attacks. Largely against me, but also including other people in the band. And we don't have a defence against it, short of what we do. And what we do - because it's the Rats- they deem to be trivial and trite, It's gotten to the point that if we brought out Sgt. Pepper's they'd still say it was shit. Precisely because it's us.

"So you have no means of defence, when you can't reply to them - because even if you write a letter with a serious intent, they'll just put a one-liner at the end that'll destroy that intent and trivialize it. What you're dealing with is a form of newspaper fascism; you can't reply in any way whatsoever. And violence in the printed media is the same to me as actually hitting someone in the face.

"I seriously think that, it's... not a combined attack, but I'd say 98 percent of the writers at NME personally hate us. I think they would like to see us destroyed - I don't think that is to strong a word. I do actually think it's newspaper fascism, they're using the same tactics that other people once used to destroy other people. We don't have a response short of attacking people on stage, which I think is pathetic and puny - 'cause what do you get to, 3,000 people a night? And it seems petty.

"What could we do? If we were to reply in kind, what we'd actually do would be to make this long diatribe against the NME on the back of one of our records, or at the end of an A-side, this huge little speech-and of course we'd be immediately condemned as being fascist for doing something like that.

"But that's our medium, and that's the medium we should reply in. So we don't do that and we wouldn't. So we don't have a response, we just have to sit and hang in there. We'll never evade them.

"They way I see it is; if the come to a gig, they're going to give us a bad review, if they get a record they're going to give us a bad review. So why give them a record, why suffer the pain of getting a bad review? If they want us to give them free tickets, I mean what Devine right says they have to have the free ticket?

"If they want to come, we're not going to stop them - because we're not Nazis. But if we have to buy the paper the to read our bad reviews, they should have to buy the tickets to give us the bad reviews.

"And that is a pathetic and small thing - but it's gotten to the point where I don't want them to talk about us, I don't want them to review us, I don't want them to acknowledge our presence. I want them to ignore us.

To be continued...

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