The Boomtown Rats: My part in their rise!

If it can be said that Bob Geldof only discovered himself as The Boomtown Rats were travelling towards new-wave superstardom in Ireland, the UK and beyond, then I can safely claim to have known Sir Bob before he did.

In the mid-’70s it was my wont to write songs, purely for my own amusement, with a mate called Kieran Fitzpatrick, a designer of some repute who later did some provocative work for the Rats. We used to meet in my house in Bray, Co Wicklow, every Tuesday evening. He would record the songs on his tape machine, meticulously log the tracks and design cod-covers, and then we’d retire for a cup of tea and a biscuit. We were not exactly pushing the envelope.

Into this maelstrom of suburban sophistication there appeared one night a gangling youth of unkempt mien just back from Canada, allegedly a reviewer of films while there, but now more likely to write for NME. I was impressed, not least because in pre-Hot Press Ireland NME was hugely important, far removed from the lame self-parody it is now.
For several weeks Geldof joined us, chipped in ideas for songs, sang along a lot, and even took the lead vocal on the Everly Brothers’ ‘Ebony Eyes’, a rare cover, handling the spoken middle section with impressive gravitas. He occasionally poured scorn on some of my lyrics, especially a section in a song called ‘Blue Twice Over’ about a (purely imaginary) visit to a “lady downtown”. I’ll be over it soon.

Before long his restlessness began to show. Inspired by the vast sums he had seen made from a similar venture in Canada, he had Kieran design the blueprint for a new “Buy and Sell” type magazine. Then he tried to convince us to form a country-rock band together, Kieran being a big fan of the genre. When we showed little interest in such foolishness he exhibited mild umbrage. The next we heard from him he had a band called The Boomtown Rats, and we attended several of the Rats early gigs as well as the odd rehearsal. In fact I still possess an early cassette bootleg with ‘Little Queenie’, ‘Born To Burn’ and ‘Do The Rat’, among others. The latter track, a then rare Rats original, convinced myself and Kieran that the band urgently needed our input in the song department, and, inspired by the subversive nature of their gameplan, we wrote the bones of a song called ‘Don’t Tell Your Mother (You Danced With A Boomtown Rat)’. Geldof added some dots and commas and we then met the band before a gig in the Dug Inn in Bray to teach them how to play it. Sadly, it didn’t come together, Geldof took to writing his own songs, I went back to CBS Records and Kieran went back to his drawing board!

Later, when the Rats started making a big noise in Ireland I tried to get my employers at CBS UK to sign them, but they declined, just as they had done previously with Horslips, Chris de Burgh, Rory Gallagher and, later, were infamously to do with U2.