Track Listing (Original)

1. A Hold of Me
2. Drag Me Down
3. Dave
4. Over Again
5. Another Sad Story
6. Tonight
7. Hard Times
8. Lucky
9. An Icicle In The Sun
10. Up Or Down

Mercury 1984

Track Listing on Remaster - Released February 2005  Universal Records

1.Dave
2.Over And Over
3.Drag Me Down
4.A Hold Of Me
5.Another Sad Story
6.Tonight
7.Hard Times
8.Lucky
9.An Icicle In The Sun
10.Up Or Down
11.Dave (Single Version)
12.Walking Down Town (B-Side)
13.Precious Time (B-Side)
14.She's Not The Best (Home Demo)

Sleeve Notes from the remastered CD release
In The Long Grass - Peter Paphides

I didn't know much in 1984, but even I knew that it wasn't a great time to be a Boomtown Rats fan. No-one thought I was cool for scrawling the band's name on my burgundy Adidas holdall, less still for the fact that I had used a rather poofy Rotring metallic gold pen to do it. But by this time, I was hardcore, my love of The Boomtown Rats was weatherproof. As far back as 1978, I had already pronounced them my favourite punk band. On my ninth birthday, I marched down to Easy Listening records in the Birmingham suburb of Acocks Green and handed over something like 80p for She's So Modern. Being a Pistols fan, my elder brother was appalled, he took it upon himself to explain to me how Bob Geldof wasn't a real punk. He ran upstairs to his room and returned seconds later with a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks. The Boomtown Rats, he gravely intoned, would never dare make a record with the word 'bollocks' in it.

But in 1979, my understanding of what constituted a punk sentiment was nebulous. The facts, as I understood them, were plain enough. I knew that if myself, Keith Smith, Jaspal Singh and Brian Taylor were to have formed a band, we would have probably called them something like The Boomtown Rats. It was so, well, so gangy. And Bob, well, he looked like such a great gang leader. When they did Rat Trap on Top Of The Pops, my adoration went through the roof. Until that point, no-one in the history of pop had thought to perform a sax solo into a lit candelabrum (I bet Health & Safety would have something to say about that now). And needless to say, when they followed it up with a song about someone who didn't want to go to school on Monday, I knew that my love for this band would be long haul. And so it came to be. My copy of Diamond Smiles has 'P.P. 2A' scrawled on the picture sleeve - which tells me that I would have taken it to the 1981 Christmas disco at Yardleys Secondary School, forlornly hopeful that Mr Stretton the maths-teacher cum-DJ might play it; the Dun Laoghaire flexi that came free with Flexipop is now smooth on both sides; and my copy of Never In A Million Years doesn't play too well either, partially a result of the cover 'concept', which had the titular dots die-cut into the sleeve. However, by 1984, even I could see that Bob Geldof's role as the cool youth club leader of my record box may not be enough to sustain his band as a viable commercial concern. Two years had passed since the superb V Deep, and that album had failed to yield any Top 20 singles. That said, the augurs for the new album were more promising. Released in January that year, the punchy sado-pop of Tonight was a strong return. And tellywise, it was everywhere: The Oxford Road Show, Saturday Superstore and - perhaps not surprisingly - The Tube. Radio One called it a return to form. I shook my head and piously tutted. Return to form? Hadn't they heard V Deep? Bob Geldof must have been stunned when Tonight stalled at 73, but the next single Drag Me Down wielded a hook so huge, you could have raised the Titanic with it. Surely that would steer them back on course? Um, not quite. Peaking at number 50, The Boomtown Rats were faced with the unenviable challenge of putting out an album on the back of two singles that had failed to crack the Top 40. In The Long Grass appeared to mixed reviews. Some critics couldn't get their heads around the band's continued existence in the mid-80s. But it featured some great music - free of the complacency that afflicts cooler bands. Inspired by the break-up of Johnnie Fingers' relationship, Another Sad Story pitched Geldof's poetic fatalism against a succession of keening sax intrusions.

A Hold Of Me must have had an immediate effect on me because I wrote the lyrics out and showed them to Richard Baneham on our lunch break. Such acts of longhand devotion weren't an isolated occurrence. I remember that The Doors' People Are Strange and Echo & The Bunnymen's The Cutter had also been accorded a similar privilege. Every day, Richard and I would walk along a stretch of industrial wasteland adjoining the Lucas car parts factory, vaguely aware that a poor showing in our exams would sentence us to a lifetime of nine to fives there. Two decades on, I realise that Bob Geldof may have been experiencing similar anxieties over his own career options. With In The Long Grass failing to chart, the odds of him having a hand in a Top 10 single by the end of the year were longer than Bono's lustrous raven mullet. Because I'd never consciously made a distinction between Geldof and his band, I got to thinking that we may not hear from either of them again. With every passing month, he was becoming as much Paula Yates' husband as the bloke from The Boomtown Rats. So you can imagine how I felt on the morning of November 16, when I turned on Breakfast TV and saw what almost every pop star in Britain had been up to the day before. However proud Britain was of Bob Geldof, I was that little bit prouder. Band Aid was a sort of vindication for the two of us. Every time I saw Bob polemicising over the morality of famine relief, I would turn to my parents and earnestly inform them that I had been buying this man's records for the last five years. No-one congratulated me for my prescience, but that was ok. I was perfectly good at congratulating myself. Asked by our R.E. teacher to write an essay about someone who followed the model of Christ, I elected to write a typically ponderous essay about the life and times of Bob Geldof. That I knew almost nothing about the life and times of Bob Geldof mattered very little.

I used the lyrics of Rat Trap as inspiration for this dramatic tale of escape from the 'ghettos of Ireland' and got 7/10 for my troubles. Naively, I thought that Band Aid might reignite interest in The Boomtown Rats' sixth album. A single, entitled Dave, had been released about a week before Do They Know It's Christmas. It remains one of the group's very best - a tense, tender paean which exhorts its down-at-heel subject to ride his bad luck into more forgiving terrain. But while Band Aid thrust Geldof's profile higher, it had the opposite effect on The Boomtown Rats. In the new year, Ensign attempted to re-promote Dave by issuing a limited clear disc which had a ticket sealed into it. The idea was simple. The record entitled its owner free entry into any of the dates on the band's winter tour. But whoever regulates these things decided that the device contravened chart regulations. On Central News's Friday pop slot, a knackered-looking Geldof tore into a decision which effectively put paid to the album's commercial chances. As the footage of the interview finished, Showaddywaddy singer-turned-local presenter Dave Bartram disapprovingly intoned, 'He's got a lot to say for himself, hasn't he?' It began to sink in that the resurrection of The Boomtown Rats may yet take some time. Of course, there was one last hurrah, something to really put that bloke out of Showaddywaddy in his place. In May 1985, when news broke in the Evening Mail about a massive transatlantic benefit for the Ethiopian famine, I knew that I would be there, WHATEVER IT TOOK. That said, there were problems.

Tickets were due to go on sale at 10am the following Friday - the very morning I was due to sit my History GCSE. I knew that there'd be no point getting the bus to Cyclops Records - Birmingham's sole ticket outlet - after I had sat the exam. By midday, it would be way too late. As things stood, there was only one person on the planet who loved me enough to get join that queue at dawn, but Friday was the busiest morning in my parents' chip shop - my mum had three crates of cod to fillet and portion, and a gallon of curry sauce to make. The last thing she needed was to spend four hours queuing outside Cyclops trying to secure my entry into the Greatest Gig Of All Time. But she did. I repaid her by failing my History 'O' level. That night in the chippy, word spread that Chris and Victoria's son had a ticket. My parents would phone in offers from customers, first £50, then £100, then £500. A week later, another customer came in with an offer of £1000. Absolutely no way. My parents thought I'd gone mad - but I knew that any gig which gathered together talent like Ultravox, Sade, Dire Straits and The Style Council in one place would surely never be repeated. In decades to come, people would look back at the line-up and wonder how so many pop titans could have been gathered together at such short notice. I would not only witness, but be present when the Revolution took place. I may have failed at history, but soon I was going to be part of it.

In the week preceding the show, there had been murmurings that The Boomtown Rats wouldn't have stood a chance of getting on a bill like this - had one of them not put it together. Perhaps this was all a shameless bid on Bob's part to reignite his failing career? Needless to say, I totally supported his decision to do a Boomtown Rats set that afternoon. As Bob had said it was his ball and he was going home if he couldn't play with it. In Wembley, I noticed that I was the only person singing along to Drag Me Down. We all joined in for I Don't Like Mondays though. When Bob sang, 'And the lesson to day is HOWTODIE!' whilst raising his saintly first in the air and holding the pose for what felt like a tiny eternity, it felt like I had seen nothing quite as poetically meaningful in all my life. 'Yes!' I thought to myself, 'Because, when you think about it, the lesson today sort of is how to die.' It was a good day for this sort of pop revisionism. For a while it seemed like you could take any sad song and pretend it was about Ethiopia. We all fell a bit silent when The Cars' Drive appeared on the big screens, accompanied by news footage of the famine. 'Well put,' I pondered earnestly, 'Who is going to drive him home tonight? NO-ONE. That's who.' Needless to say though, the best bit came right at the end, when I saw Bob held aloft in the finale by almost every sticker in my Smash Hits yearbook. At that moment, it seemed as though - both literally and metaphorically - Bob Geldof had been restored to his rightful place in the pop pantheon. From hereon in, it was going to be all right for The Boomtown Rats. How could it not be? Now people were really going to have to sit up and pay attention when that seventh album came along.

---

 A Retrospective Look At the Rats Albums 2005
by David Clancy

It was a long time coming, but 7th February 2005 was a very special date in the hearts of a few poor souls who relish the work of the power pop punk paddies, aka The Boomtown Rats. Universal wisely, have re-released all of the Boomtown Rats back catalogue on CD. Looked upon by the scribes who write our pop and rock history as a bunch of punk light weights, the Boomtown Rats are not loved and revered as frequently as their musical contemporaries The Pistols, The Jam, The Clash. This maybe justified, maybe not.

But one of the regular contributors to this site is David Clancy, who has taken time out to produce reviews for us of the back catalogue of material for which we are extremely grateful. (IMG bobgeldof.info). You will find each of David's reviews on the relevant release page.

What's the story?

1.Dave
2.Over And Over
3.Drag Me Down
4.A Hold Of Me
5.Another Sad Story
6.Tonight
7.Hard Times
8.Lucky
9.An Icicle In The Sun
10.Up Or Down
11.Dave
12.Walking Down Town
13.Precious Time
14.She's Not The Best

Just when you least expected it, The Boomtown Rats returned with another great album! With barely enough money to make the album, and following the less than wonderful Mondo Bongo and V Deep, In the Long Grass marked a return to form. Though not commercially successful, it spawned some great singles (none of them were hits), and was the most consistent album from the Rats since the Fine Art of Surfacing.

The first single off the album, Tonight has a reggae beat, some lower key vocals and a sassier attitude than would have been expected from the Rats. Not as overt as say Banana Republic or House on Fire, it promised a lot from the forthcoming album. Horns dominate the music, showing the Rats with just a single guitarist had other means of filling out their songs. Of course, no one bought it!

Drag Me Down was another great single. Geldof and Crowe exchange vocals in the introduction before a swirling keyboard kicks the song into life. Some great horns kick in at the end of the verses. One of the most driving songs from the Rats, with really good guitar work for Garry Roberts. The horns that play out at the end are similar to those on House on Fire.

Dave was one of the best singles the Rats ever made. It plays as a plea to a suicidal friend to reconsider, and implores him to keep going. That it never troubled the charts is purely down to low regard the Rats were held in by the press & public, and a shambolic re-release involving singles with embedded tickets! In America, they had to rewrite the lyrics, as the notion of a man singing about another man was deemed as faggy by the record company, and turned it into a song about Rain. Oh dear! There are two tracks penned by Johnnie Fingers.

A wistful sax and tinkling piano begin Another Sad Story, before the sax blasts in. A story about Johnnie and Susan, though not of the ilk of Geldof’s earlier Dublin trilogy, but much more generic. The middle eight is from Bowie’s Let’s Dance period, Geldof affecting his best Anthony Newley voice. The sax solos break up this song, and provide a link back to Joey and Billy of yesteryear.Also from Fingers and starting off with a guitar from Atomic.

Lucky has Geldof telling you how lucky you are if time remembers you. The song namechecks JFK, and tells you what went wrong for him! This isn’t an Eva Braun, as the song is more personal than that addressed directly to the listener. The ‘work’ chants remind you of Chain Gang, and the song finishes with some dubbed horns.

Aaaaah, not Chic’s Good Times, but The Rats’ Hard Times! There are some yeah yeahs from the Beatles in there, and a simple little Depeche Mode little keyboard (think Just Can’t Get Enough, not Personal Jesus!). The songs builds and builds and then bursts into life with Geldof singing over some female oriental backing vocals (Molly & Polly!). Hard Times sound good with The Boomtown Rats!

Pete Briquette and Simon Crowe contribute the wonderful Up and Down. The Chic guitar is there, and the vocals are urgent, and it even gets ska-like at points, probably more Police (Material World) than Specials but it’s certainly there. Twice it breaks into the glorious ‘lying in the sun’ with the horns blasting out. The song comes down when nothing seems to changes, but only to get on with some urgent ad-libbing.

There is a low key start to Over and Over with Geldof mumbling before it breaks into a joyous chorus with some great tenor harmonies. A lovely flamenco interlude reminds you of Zorro! A shimmering low key fade outs the song.

Another gem!With its Latin intro, Icicle in the Sun starts off as if it dares to take us back to Please Don’t Go from Mondo Bongo. It turns out to be a far more pleasant experience. Possibly the most eighties sounding track on here with its funky guitars and keyboards interjecting throughout. At one point, the song threatens to break into a good old pub sing song, but keeps on track.

But the last word on this album is A Hold of Me. The song fades in gently and builds to Geldof cutting in with "What’s the Story?…" The song builds and builds with a series of questions, layering the sound until the chorus arrives and then the song dips again. In many ways this is the song that Never in the Million Years should have been. As Geldof implores "I’m for people, I’m for life!" it’s the perfect bookend to the Rats’ singles career. This song marks the arrival of selfless crusader who has long left his selfish youth behind.Garry Roberts now had a guitar sound for the band, and the songs were all well written, performed and produced. More ideas than narrative in the songs, but there isn’t a bad track to be found. This was the realisation of the experimentation of Mondo Bongo and V Deep. The sound was less produced but no worse for that, and this was a more mature album than any that had gone before. Sadly, this album was also the last The Boomtown Rats recorded. A great swan song, but lack of commercial success and the aftermath of Band Aid and Live Aid, led to Geldof striking out as a solo artist.

CD Review
The single version of Dave is the original album version! I’m pretty sure it is, as it sounds the same as my vinyl version. The album version is the version from the Best of. Add in Rain,which is not here, and there are a few versions of this track knocking around. However, for all that, the single version is the best! The album version is a more drawn out affair and doesn’t flow as well as the single version. Both versions here are well worth listening to, whereas you’d not miss anything by never hearing Rain!

Walking Downtown returns to the jazz-by-numbers of The Little Death, and is little better. Part Mood Mambo, part jazz, there is the gnawing feeling that this was another attempt at something that was beyond the Rats. The piano in the song puts me in mind of Singing in the Rain! I have never really liked jazz anyway, and this song is of little appeal.

Precious Time is a track that would have been a great addition to In the Long Grass. Doo do dos courtesy of the Rolling Stones and a Pete Briquette bass line get the song going along with Chic-like guitars are also there. On the two middle eights, Geldof drifts into a Bowie tribute again, aping China girl. The instrumental gets funky, so much so it does sound like Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards had a hand in the production. The guitars that play out as from the Let’s Dance Bowie period as well.

There’s not a great deal to She's Not The Best (Home Demo). It sounds like an idea for a song with Geldof playing acoustic guitar and sounding like Bob Dylan. A nice curiosity, and more like something from Geldof’s recent past than a Rats song.

Perhaps the seed of the solo career!Just to complete the story, alternative versions of Drag Me Down and Lucky exist. Fortunately, they aren’t here. This is good news as they sound like Huey Lewis & the News! The production was changed for the US, but the originals which appear on this re-release are far superior.

What's the score?
To wrap it all up, the ubiquitous five star ratings! I have rated the original album/with extras.
Boomtown Rats original 4½ stars / re-release CD 5 = 9½
Tonic for the Troops original 5 stars / re-release CD 5 = 10
Fine Art of Surfacing original 4 stars / re-release CD 4½ = 8½
Mondo Bongo original 3 stars / re-release CD 2½ = 5½
Yes, the extras on Mondo Bongo do make it worse, along with the new ordering of the tracks!
V Deep original 2 stars / re-release CD 3 = 5
In The Long Grass original 4 stars / re-release CD 4 = 8

Is That It?I’m afraid so. The re-releases are not the complete story of the Boomtown Rats. There are some alternative versions of songs out there, and some live recordings that can be unearthed by the devotee. Some b-sides are absent from the CDs, but those aside, these six albums plot the career of one of the most important bands of the last thirty years, even if they are one of the least appreciated. The Boomtown Rats gave the punk/new wave movement commercial credibility and also opened the door for other talented Irish bands, like U2! The Boomtown Rats were also one of the best live bands ever. Whilst peers like Blondie, Elvis Costello, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Jam, The Clash, The Damned, The Undertones, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols and The Stranglers have all garnered accolades for their part in the punk/new wave explosion in the late seventies, The Boomtown Rats are always absent despite being the most commercially successful band at that time. Their commercial success was always inversely proportional to their critical acclaim from The Fine Art of Surfacing onwards, but that is no reason for them to end up as just a footnote. Maybe people listening to these albums with fresh ears will appreciate them as the great records they are and not be side-tracked by the Bob/Paula circus that accompanied the Rats as far as the music and popular press were concerned.Personally, my teens were spent growing up with the Boomtown Rats, and the impression they made back then shaped my musical appreciation. For a long time, especially during the rock wilderness known as the 1980s, they were my favourite band, and I still rate them very highly.

It has been a pleasure to listen to all the Boomtown Rats albums back to back, and provide my comments. I’d like to thank Ian and Tina for asking me to review the albums. I’m not sure they agree with all I have written though! I’d also like to thank Chris Graham of the wonderful Boomtown Rats site for asking me to review the debut album a while back which led to this. His site was also a very useful reference for all those little facts which have escaped my memory! I’d also like to thank my wife, Ellen, who despite having little knowledge of any of the albums, read though the reviews and offered opinions on my writing. But most of all I’d like to thank Pete, Johnnie, Gerry, Garry, Simon and Bob without whom there would not have been this wonderful body of work to listen to!

Cheerio!