On the afternoon of July 13, 1985, the Boomtown Rats were on stage as part of Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, playing I Don’t Like Mondays. A song about the tragic mass shooting, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer fired on staff and pupils at San Diego’s Grover Cleveland Elementary School on January 29, 1979, it’s hardly an obvious shoo-in for Live Aid’s famine relief fundraiser. Fortunate, then, that the event’s instigator, Bob Geldof, who’s also the Rats’ frontman, had a plan.
When the band reached the line in the song that runs: ‘And the lesson today is how to die’, they stopped suddenly. They paused for 20 seconds of pointed silence, during which 72,000 in the audience at Wembley and a further 1.9 billion watching on TV/via satellite recompute the line’s meaning. For that day, at least, it seems it’s about famine in Ethiopia, about needless death of a different kind. Neatly done. “I’ve just realised today is the best day of my life,” an elated Geldof told the Live Aid crowd.
But in January 1979, while doing US promo interviews with The Boomtown Rats, he felt less fulfilled. Thanks to their UK No.1 single Rat Trap, the band’s second album, A Tonic For The Troops, had reached No.8 there, yet the US was still an uphill struggle for them.
Article continues below“The Americans just didn’t get us,” Geldof told this writer in 2005. “We couldn’t explain ourselves to them, and because it was pre-MTV they hadn’t seen any Boomtown Rats videos. The world was a much bigger place back then, and we were sometimes poles apart. In California especially, I was noticing this alienating mindlessness that Brett Easton Ellis wrote about so brilliantly in his [1985] novel Less Than Zero.”
Songs for the band’s third LP, October 1979’s The Fine Art Of Surfacing, were already percolating as they sat for countless interviews with American DJs. Geldof was taking it all in, his lyrics sometimes drawing inspiration from aspects of an American culture and mindset that jarred with him. Soon came Nothing Happened Today, which critiqued mundane consumerism, and Having My Picture Taken, a pop at pre-selfie-stick narcissism.
“Our US trip seemed like an exercise in futility,” Geldof said. “And into this void of hopelessness and lack of understanding came this perfect amoral act”, he added, flagging up the school shooting that inspired I Don’t Like Mondays. “The song is about amorality – that’s what immediately struck me when I wrote the lyric. You don’t have to have a reason to live, so you certainly therefore don’t need a reason to die. It’s ‘I don’t like Mondays, I don’t like the taste of that water’, and – bang!”
In 2007, talking on BBC Radio 6 Music, Geldof said he’d learned of Brenda Spencer’s heinous act – two adults were killed, eight schoolchildren and a police officer were injured – in real time. Indeed, the couplet in Mondays which runs: ‘The Telex machine is kept so clean, and it types to a waiting world’, references him reading the breaking story as it spooled out beside him via Telex at Georgia State University’s campus radio station WRAS.
“Another bizarre aspect of the story was the journalist [from San Diego newspaper The Union-Tribune] phoning Spencer as she’s still leaning out of the window at her house,” Geldof told me. “She’s got the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, and when they ask why she did it she says: ‘I don’t like Mondays – will that do you?’ [Spencer’s actual response was: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”].
“It was the perfect senseless act… So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it,” Geldof told Smash Hits in October 1979. “It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”
The Boomtown Rats frontman turned I Don’t Like Mondays around quickly, and it was out as a single in the UK that July. For many years, the song was credited just to Geldof, but in 2019, Rats keyboard player Johnnie Fingers finally received a co-writing credit and some kind of financial settlement – long overdue, really, given that his memorable piano accompaniment forms the song’s backbone. The track also benefited from a string arrangement by Dublin-born Fiachra Trench.
Gerry Cott appears to play at least some drums on Mondays, but he and the other Rats’ contributions are otherwise limited to backing vocals and hand-claps in the song’s call-and-response chorus. That’s certainly how things play out in the song’s accompanying, David Mallet-directed promo video, in which the Rats appear alongside sometimes possessed-looking schoolchildren. One of Geldof and Mallet’s inspirations, they recalled, was the 1960 sci-fi film Village Of The Damned.
The song’s subject matter was, of course, controversial. “Only six weeks after the song’s release did the Daily Mirror find the father of [Brenda Spencer], who railed against it,” Geldof recalled. Indeed, Spencer’s family tried to prevent I Don’t Like Mondays being released as a single in the US, but were unsuccessful.
The song topped the UK chart for four weeks in the summer of 1979, and in 1980 won Geldof an Ivor Novello award for Best Pop Song. Tori Amos recorded a hushed, typically idiosyncratic version for her 2001 covers album Strange Little Girls.
I Don’t Like Mondays has become part of our cultural fabric. But when Geldof talked to me about it in 2005, he was careful to distance himself from the young woman whose horrendous crimes played a part in its gestation.
“Brenda Spencer subsequently wrote to me and said she was glad she did it,” Geldof explained. “Glad she did it because my song made her famous, apparently. Except it fucking didn’t. It didn’t mention Brenda Spencer. I wasn’t interested in her, she’s a fucking idiot. I was interested in the event, not the person.”
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