Year of the Rat

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The “I Don’t Like Mondays” Australian band The Boomtown Rats recently released their new single “Trash Glam Baby”, taken from their forthcoming Citizens Of Boomtown album (their first new album in 36 years).

Songwriter Bob Geldof tells us about the secret origin of the song: “Back then I’d written a song about the amazons I’d encountered making the scene in the late 1970s: ‘She’s So Modern’ was a hit. [“She’s so 20th century/She’s so 1970s”]. A millennium and 2 decades later down at the S-bend of the Kings Road, that squiggle that becomes the Worlds End and where those girls would inhabit Lloyd Johnson’s and Vivienne Westwood’s shops, the glam has gone and moved east. But Vivienne is still there. Now opposite and beside her shop Sex there are 3 decent charity shops. I go there to check out cool shirts etc. On a Saturday in 2017 there was a glorious kid of around 16/17 talking to her friend behind the counter. She was fabulous. Like a bastard hybrid of The New York Dolls and early Roxy Music. A sequined tramp. A living glitter ball. They were moaning about it being Saturday and nothing to do and no money to do it with. The usual anthem of the bored weekend. She didn’t look consciously “retro” or anything, she looked wonderful and beautiful in that damned youth way. She wasn’t beautiful (but she was), a pleasant, normal girl from the blocks down the road, who intuitively understood the theatre of the self, which that peculiar part of the world has always engendered since….oh since the bohemians of the late 19th century through to the 60s and the Stones, the 70s and The Pistols, the 80s and Durans/Anthony Price shop and then – like the rest of the 90s – not much. But here she was again, doing that unique thing English teens uniquely do, a grumpy, normal English teenager being extraordinary, looking the bollox. She should be a song. Here she is. She’s so 21st century….”

As with a new album release, the group is out on tour: