The Boomtown Rats “The Fine Art of Surfacing” released on this date, October 9th, 1979. This original LP contains two hidden tracks in the runoff grooves: Side 1 creepy laughing over piano dabbling with the lyrics “that’s not funny, I’m not laughing” and Side 2 the spoken “That concludes episode 3. We will return…” The album reached #7 on the UK charts with three hit singles. Sadly, the most famous of these, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (#1 for 4 weeks in the UK and #73 in the US), is even more relevant today. The song refers to the January 1979 shooting spree at an elementary school in San Diego by 16 year old Brenda Ann Spencer. Bob Geldof was inspired to write it after reading that a reporter asked Spencer why she carried out the shooting and she answered: “I don’t like Mondays.”

I never really listened to the Boomtown Rats back in their first iteration from 1977-1985 (they reformed in 2013 minus keyboardist Johnnie Fingers and guitarist Gerry Cott). Most of my familiarity with the band came from Bob Geldof’s role as the anti-poverty humanitarian organizer for Band Aid and Live Aid, as well as his starring role in Pink Floyd’s 1982 film “The Wall” (which scared the crap out of my 11 year old self – those horrifyingly masked kids going through the meat grinder gave me nightmares). That said, this LP is a really enjoyable pop/new wave album, mostly upbeat and bouncy in its musical arrangement and very unlikely to give me bad dreams, despite some of the darker lyrical content.