Bob Geldof, speaking to Niall Stokes in 2010, as part of the Music Show in the RDS:

I thought ['I Don't Like Mondays'] was a B-side. I was just talking to Ossie Kilkenny there about why I wrote it. I wrote it ‘cause Dave Robinson had just given me Elvis Costello’s new album Armed Forces and I thought, this is great – if we’re to survive we’ve got to move away from two-guitar classic rock and start really being serious songwriters. My favourite track was ‘Oliver’s Army’.

I had just bought a guitar in New York on a promotional trip and I was learning ‘Oliver’s Army’ – and I was just trying to work it out myself and the band called and made me just do any song at all on three chords...

(plays rough version of first verse of ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’)

…but then I thought, 'That sounds too much like ‘Oliver’s Army',' so I made it reggae….

(plays same but in a cod-reggae version)

…and I thought it was a B-side cos I thought that sounded shite, and then the record guys heard it and they said, “That’s your next No. 1, but not in that crap reggae thing."

But I absolutely thought it was a B-side, really thought it was, and then it just went straight in. And I was a bit frightened by that to be honest with you, it got out of control. It was just huge and I remember going onstage at the Liverpool Empire, which is about 5,000 people, just screaming. And I thought, “Here I am, where The Beatles were, literally on that stage with just screaming.”

And I got fed up and about halfway through the song I said, “Shut the fuck up!”

I mean, I looked like crap, so what are they screaming at anyway? Then I thought it was [Johnnie] Fingers but he looked like shite as well... so it couldn’t be anyone in the band. So it was just stupid.