Track Listing

1.Someone's Looking At You
2.Diamond Smiles
3.Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)
4.Having My Picture Taken
5.Sleep (Fingers Lullaby)
6.I Don't Like Mondays
7.Nothing Happened Today
8.Keep It Up
9.Nice N Neat
10.When The Night Comes

Ensign 1979

Additional Tracks on Remaster - Released February 2005  Universal Records

11.Episode #3
12.Real Different (B-Side)
13.How Do You Do? (B-Side)
14.Late Last Night (B-Side)
15.Nothing Happened Today (Live In Cardiff)

'They erupted in boos or maybe it was Brooooce. Whatever' Geldof remembers, grinning, twenty-five years later. 'We did that song. It was a good gig. But that was it. We were fucked.' The Rats would be back, playing dynamite shows in the U.S in 1980 and '81. They would keep releasing fine records here until the very end. But they would never do in America what I had seen them do in Glasgow.

'I don't think I had the overwhelming need to dominate America that was in other bands,' Geldof claims. 'But of course American music formed my rock & roll consciousness.' One of his fondest musical memories is bumbling up to the stage at Slattery's, a bar in Dublin, when he was fifteen, 'waving a harmonica at a bemused John Lee Hooker, drunkenly leaning over his shoulder and lurching into his microphone, as this very cool, bemused man just looked up at me, letting me blow this shite harmonica.

'I was weaned on this. Bob Dylan told me to look at Woody Guthrie, and I did. I took the name Boomtown Rats from his book, Bound for Glory. Mick Jagger told me to listen to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. That was my upbringing. It was never a thing for me to come to America and beat you at your own game. What I did, in my arrogance, assume was that because we had so many monster hits in Europe, America would just fall prostrate at my feet.' He laughs. 'They didn’t give a fuck.'

The hard road to that realisation runs all the way through The Fine Art of Surfacing. Geldof had been this way before, when Mercury Records in America buried the Rats' spectacular 1977 debut, The Boomtown Rats, with incompetence and under-promotion. Columbia in the U.S. went to the other, ludicrous extreme for A Tonic for the Troops. In January, 1979, the label sent Geldof and Fingers on a grueling, good-will crusade to radio stations across the country, where they were mostly grilled by knuckleheads in satin baseball jackets who knew nothing about the Rats, cared less and couldn't pronounce 'Geldof.' We were told, 'You gotta be fucking good to these guys,' Geldof says, recalling the band's first show in the States, a late-February disaster at a radio-programmers convention in San Diego, California. 'Red flag to a bull,' Geldof concedes, without apology. His remarks on stage, about the all-Styx-all-the-time state of American rock radio, got the Rats thrown off dozens of playlists overnight.

Ultimately, Geldof discovered more about America and himself - particularly the price of the life he had chosen and fought for - than America learned about him during the rough passage that climaxed at the Palladium in New York. He wrote and sang about it all with trademark flair and candor on The Fine Art of Surfacing - in the paranoia lacing the sunshine'n'thunder of 'Someone’s Looking at You'; in the kinetic ennui of 'Nothing Happened Today' and the caustic Bowie-ana of 'Having My Picture Taken'; and in the uncompromising grandeur of 'I Don’t Like Mondays,' the Rats' second, million-selling single after 'Rat Trap.' Geldof was at a college radio station in Atlanta, Georgia on Monday, January 29th, 1979, when a wire-service flash came in about a sniper in San Diego: sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer, who was firing a rifle at an elementary school from her home across the street. A journalist had called the house and, incredibly, got Spencer on the phone. When asked why she was shooting at innocent kids, Spencer replied, 'I don’t like Mondays.' By the time she stopped, two adults were dead and eight children were wounded, along with a police officer.

Geldof responded to the senselessness of that morning, and his haywire feelings about selling himself on one side of the country while children were under attack on the other, with a quick, frank majesty. A month after writing 'Mondays' (originally to a reggae beat), he unveiled it in San Diego, at that DJs' soiree, with Fingers on the piano. There was no arrangement; the rest of the Rats hadn't rehearsed it yet. Lacking an intro, Geldof asked Fingers to do 'one of those Disney-waterfall things,' eventually set in ivory on the single.

As if there wasn't enough irony to go around, 'I Don’t Like Mondays' - song about America, written and debuted in America, arranged and recorded with unbeatable big-ballad savvy - died there, at Number 73 in Billboard, the victim of an all-but-official radio station ban. Further paradox: The Fine Art of Surfacing has the peculiar honor of being the Rats' most commercially successful album, in America as well as Britain, and their most musically underrated. The battle for America brought out the suffocating darkness in Geldof’s songwriting; it also unleashed the fuck-it-all, Irish-R&B-warrior fight in the Rats. Geldof spared no acid or self-examination; the Rats, working for the third and last time with producer Robert John 'Mutt' Lange, threw themselves into the songs with compelling ferocity.

The compression of hooks, licks and sonic kicks perfectly matched the air of siege: the crack of Crowe's drumming and the tangled twang of Roberts' and Cott's guitars in 'Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)'; the swinging-cantina beat and Sixties ice-cream organ of the suicide story 'Diamond Smiles'. The high cost of those first maddening months in America came through especially bleak and clear in 'Sleep,' a restless Gothic lament written by Fingers but sung by Geldof ('Tired and sick, sick and tired/I’m falling on my feet') with autobiographical force.

Surfacing was so packed with action - 'the manic overacting of Sparks and the jock-rock cool of Thin Lizzy,' as I put it in my original, enthusiastic Rolling Stone review - that, to be honest, even I missed a few things at the time. What I thought was a flippant, show-off smack at organized religion in 'Nice 'N' Neat' was actually rooted in earnest, heated debates about faith and truth that Geldof used to have with a close friend who had gone on to become a priest. I also suggested that Surfacing's frantic, closing tale 'When the Night Comes' was a rewrite of 'Rat Trap' with Spanish-guitar decor. I was more right than I knew: The song was, in fact, the final episode in a Dublin trilogy that began with 'Joey's On The Street Again' from The Boomtown Rats and included 'Rat Trap' - ll written, as Geldof puts it, 'in that Van Morrison street style.' The characters in each song were people that Geldof says he knew in Dublin, all locked into lives of numbing routine and bare-minimum promise: 'The kid in 'Rat Trap' - his real name was Paul. I worked with him in a meat factory. It was very dispiriting to me, these situations I found myself in, in Dublin. I had to get out of there.' Which he did.

Yet for all of Surfacing's claustrophobia and despair, the music was high-octane and deliriously ornate, Geldof says, 'because I wouldn't let that other stuff overwhelm me. I was doubting everything. But I was also having fun. And I was wondering, 'How long does this go on? Am I that interested in this life? Does it really matter if I'm in the American charts or not?'

In the end, it didn't: Geldof's full, second life as a solo artist and the founding conscience of Band Aid and Live Aid has proven that. And while the Boomtown Rats never fully recovered from their collision with America, I know what might have been - indeed, should have been. It’s all here on this album.
And I'll always have Glasgow.

David Fricke - New York City
December, 2004

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 these reviews for us of the back catalogue of material for which we are extremely grateful. (IMG bobgeldof.info)

Riding the Crest of a Wave
The Fine Art of Surfacing 

1.Someone's Looking At You
2.Diamond Smiles
3.Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)
4.Having My Picture Taken
5.Sleep (Fingers Lullaby)
6.I Don't Like Mondays
7.Nothing Happened Today
8.Keep It Up
9.Nice N Neat
10.When The Night Comes
11.Episode #3
12.Real Different
13.How Do You Do?
14.Late Last Night
15.Nothing Happened Today (Live In Cardiff)


Prior to the release of the Fine Art of Surfacing, The Boomtown Rats were arguably the biggest band in Britain. In the wake of the chart-topping Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays, only The Police and Blondie were close in terms of stature, but The Rats were seemingly on top. The Fine Art of Surfacing was very eagerly awaited.

I Don't Like Mondays is the best known Boomtown Rats song. With Fingers' piano taking centre stage, it sounded nothing like the Rats had ever done before. This was produced by Phil Wainman of Sweet fame unlike all the other tracks produced by Mutt Lange. A heightened sense of drama pervades the song, rising to the "Tell me why?" chorus and the come down when the playing stops in the playground as the lesson today is how to die. No other band of the punk/new wave era could have made a song like this. Brilliant.

The second single off the album was Diamond Smiles. The song is about a débutante killing herself and only being remembered for her smile. Like I Don't Like Mondays another story about death (suicide this time), it’s more repetitive, and takes a while to get to its short chorus. Lots of quirky keyboards and the never ending la la las evoke memories of Hot Love and Hey Jude. It wasn’t the song to consolidate the Rats domination of the singles chart, but a good track nonetheless.

In contrast, Someone's Looking at You was a great single, and a pretty personal statement for Geldof on fame. The song starts with a gentle rhythmic acoustic guitar, built on by organ keyboard sounds, then breaking into a crash of electric guitars. The keyboard and guitar solos rock, and there is a great climatic build to the last uh-oh-oh-ohs. The song fades to a chorus of someone’s looking with Geldof ad-libbing before the final pay off of Geldof deserving to get kissed once or twice!

A train whistle and a crash of drums introduce Nothing Happened Today. For the Rats, this is familiar territory, with its singing and sing backs throughout. Keyboards and guitars duel with each other vying to set the tone. Watching TV news and looking out the windows in the wake of a hangover there is a urgency to discover what is happening on March 28th , not that there is any significance in the date at all. In the midst of this, there’s the greatly inventive and seamless vaudeville-style break where Harry Hooper’s toupee is discussed at length. The break could be said to be akin to Mr. Kite, of Sgt. Pepper fame.

How about a song on impotency? Keep it Up! Geldof looks to Elvis Costello for lyrical influence, with some nice couplets. The joint song writing effort with Gerry Cott showcases another great guitar solo, The song resurrects the ghost of Howard Hughes in many ways, with the repetition of the ‘Does it Feel Right?..." throughout. Just as the song ends, with an exhausted organ, it burst back into life with some blistering drums, and again Geldof ad-libs all over the Rats chorus of Keep It Up!

Geldof gets personal in Wind Chill Factor, returning to the paranoia hinted at in Can't Stop & So Strange. With a shrill of keyboards, Simon Crowe’s drums break it up and create a stark atmosphere. Then some oh-ho-hos before the now familiar reggae drum break has Geldof coming in after a night of coping. The chorus is almost sinister, and with its whoops and hollers, a disturbing mood prevails. The song revs up into its question and answer session, before Geldof crawls into a corner looking for relief. At the end, the song gives the impression of wind howling beneath high-rise blocks before the drums bring it to an abrupt finish.

After that the mood lightens, with Having My Picture Taken. Essentially the song is a trivial look at the world of celebrity and stardom. Reggae drum breaks punctuate the song and it all jaunts along to the "so fantastic!" middle eight. This song was always marked in its live performance by a thousand instamatics clicking as the band posed for pictures. The song echoes Don’t Believe What You Read from Tonic, this time focusing on the photographers rather than the journalists.

Written by Johnnie Fingers, Sleep (Finger's Lullaby) explores insomnia, and replicates the confused state of mind that ensues. The song is almost epic, with Supertramp pianos in the middle eight, and lots of differing vocal effects. However nothing works, not only wired and tired, and with lights and noise all around. no amount of pills or sheep counting seems to work, but finally the songs drifts off. ....but then comes the nightmarish reprise, with ghostly voices chanting ‘that’s not funny, I’m not laughing, that’s not funny…’. Considering the quality for song writing either via partial or full credits, it is a shame that the other Rats did not contribute more.

In Nice 'n' Neat, it’s Geldof vs. God, and Geldof wins! A really great track inspired by a clerical friend. From the moment the guitar bursts in through to the "final truth is there is no truth", it is a blistering attack on belief. It also hosts one of the greatest guitar solos heard on a Rats song, almost as if Gerry Cott was signing off. However, the unnecessary bop-shoo-wop fade out detracts from such a cutting song. Strange that a song that finishes with "that's all" should be followed by another!

When The Night Comes is another mini-Dublin epic. Frankie instead of Joey or Billy time, but office boys ain’t rock ‘n’ roll and the lyrics lack the flow of Joey or Rat Trap. The flamenco guitar throughout is absolutely wonderful and makes this track well worth listening to.

The un-credited Episode #3 is tacked onto the track after it fades out, to sum it up voice says “That concludes Episode 3, we will return shortly", door slams and washer woman sings. That’s all. (well, it used to be).

The Fine Art of Surfacing though a great album does not quite have the magic of the first two albums. It was another well-produced album; there are no bad tracks, but possibly not enough great tracks. I Don’t like Mondays did overpower the rest of the album being revolutionary as far as the Boomtown Rats were concerned, whilst the rest of the album much more of an evolution of what had take place on Tonic for the Troops.

The Fine Art of Surfacing did not top the charts (unlike its rivals Eat To The Beat or Regatta de Blanc), and was, as far as the UK was concerned, done with in a matter of weeks, whereas Tonic for the Troops spent a year in the charts. At the time there was also a backlash to Geldof in the music press and, to an lesser extent, the popular press. No doubt this affected the album's popularity. Nevertheless The Fine Art of Surfacing is an album that more than matched much of what was happening back in 1979.

In retrospect, this album completed a trilogy of albums all marked by predominately guitar led story telling songs. With later albums bringing the rhythm section to the fore, the Boomtown Rats would never sound the same again or, in my opinion, as consistently good.

CD Review

The CD re-release contains three B-sides and a live track. It is arguable that the b-sides truly relate to the same period. One is from Clockwork, whilst the other is from Elephant’s Graveyard. And It’s All The Rage which was the b-side from Mondays is omitted entirely.

Late Last Night which is the only track from the era and would have easily fitted onto Surfacing, and enhanced the album. It's a shame LPs only lasted for 40 minutes! The B-side of Diamond Smiles, it starts off with a clockwork introduction, and sounds like a troubled night for Geldof, possibly caused by something he ate. The song is very typical of the Rats of that era with the lyrical guitar solo.

Real Different appears to draw inspiration from Elvis Costello, even down to the Oliver’s Army style piano. It may have been a Surfacing leftover, appearing of the B-side of Elephant’s graveyard. It does sound as if it pre-dates Mondo Bongo and belongs more with this disc. It’s interesting that of all his peers, Geldof seemed to look to Costello more than most, obviously recognising his cleverness, but never quite satisfactorily matching it with the Rats.

From the flip side of Like Clockwork, How Do You Do? appears to have started as a tirade on the record industry, but ultimately descends into Bon Jovi territory saying as long as the band play well on a Saturday night it'll all be OK! Musically the song is good with a great guitar solo, and a crescendo of an ending. Maybe with better developed lyrics this would have been a great song, instead of been merely good to listen to.

The live version of Nothing Happened Today gives a good insight on why the Boomtown Rats were a great live band. Geldof milks the pauses, and the drums are more manic than the recording. The vaudeville break doesn’t sound as good, but remember this is live, and that sort of thing is always easier to mix in the studio.

Beware Episode #3 isn’t what you expect! Now I expected "That conclude Episode #3, we will return shortly", door slams and washer woman sings. END.

But no! That's not the end suddenly there is some cackling, and some voices saying "that's not funny, I'm not laughing, that's not funny".... For some unknown reason, the spooky reprise on Sleep has transferred itself to the end of episode #3!!!! This means that despite the running order being as the original album you are required to splice episode #3 and burn it to get the album back as it should be. Grrrrr!!!!

This CD is less essential than either of the first two albums as a re-release as a CD version did previously exist with the correct running order. The album finds the Boomtown Rats at their commercial-peak, with an album that sold right across the world and put itself into more homes than any of its predecessors or successors. To many people, this album epitomises the Boomtown Rats.

Personally, I prefer the first two albums, but I would wholeheartedly recommend this as essential listening as far as the Boomtown Rats are concerned.