I Don’t Like Mondays is more upsetting than you thought

5 days ago
6 min read

The title of this Boomtown Rats track - I Don’t Like Mondays - is pretty relatable. But did you know the song was inspired by such tragic events that many radio stations in America refused to play it?

Now, for those of you who don’t know, the Boomtown Rats were an Irish rock band who started out in 1975. Over the course of about a decade they had a handful of hits in the UK and Ireland. Bob Geldoff, of course, was on vocals.

This is one of those times where I’m not sure if certain people are as famous abroad as they are here in the UK and Ireland…

Pretty much everyone knows who Bob Geldof is in the UK and Ireland, but if you didn’t, he is the guy who organised Band Aid and Live Aid, and is generally just a bit of a charity legend. He has raised millions over the years for good causes and even received a knighthood for it.

He found fame in the first place with the Boomtown Rats.

Anyway, I Don’t Like Mondays is one of those songs that has a few different influences. Let’s start with Geldof’s personal influence.

In their peak, the Boomtown rats toured A LOT. During one particular US tour around 1979, it all seemed to hit Geldoff hard.

He felt like the band was struggling to get through to the American audience. He was frustrated at the time that everyone only seemed to be interested in disco and corporate rock, and here they were trying to be a bit different but… no one seemed to care.

You can imagine as an artist how that might get to you a bit.

So that’s where Geldof’s own experiences filter into the song. The frustration at the repetitiveness of the touring life, the joy being sucked out of it a little bit.

Another inspiration was a magazine interview he had read on the flight over with a guy he never heard of called Bill Gates. Yes, that Bill Gates.

In the interview Gates was explaining his prediction that everyone in the future would have personal computers, but in order to do that they had to figure out how to get enough memory on a tiny silicone chip.

Now the concept of this in 1979 to most people must have been nuts… how on earth could you get enough memory on a tiny chip? It blew Geldof’s mind, and made him think of a poem he knew. Watch this clip from 4.25 to hear him explain.

So in one sense, he had the inspiration of being stuck in slow motion and just being bored, but in another sense he had the inspiration of being on the cusp of a technological revolution which could change everything.

But it was another event entirely that shaped the song into what we know it as today.

On the morning of January 29th, 1979, Geldof and keys player Johnnie Fingers were doing an interview at an Atlanta radio station when some terrible breaking news came in from San Diego, California.

There had been a mass shooting at an elementary school. A 16 year old schoolgirl called Brenda Spencer, who lived in the house opposite the school, had leaned out of her window and opened fire on the playground with a .22 calibre rifle.

The lethal weapon had been gifted to her by her own father for Christmas.

Apparently, she had asked for a radio instead that year. Spencer would later claim that her father had been sexually abusing her for years, and she was suicidal because of it.

She claimed that he had given her the gun in the hope that she would kill herself with it.

Of course it’s hard to know what the truth really is.

In the shooting, she murdered two adults, Principal Burton Wragg and custodian Mike Suchar, who were heroically trying to help the children, 8 of whom she injured. She also shot a police officer when he tried to approach the house.

What followed was a 6 hour standoff between Spencer and the police, in which time a journalist called the house phone. When he asked Spencer why she did it, the Evening Tribune reported that she said:

“I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”

She apparently only agreed to leave the house when the police promised her a Burger King meal.

Now all of this was coming through to the Atlanta radio station in live time, and Geldof was both horrified and perplexed by her response. He told the BBC in 2013:

“There was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said, ‘silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’.”

Geldof couldn’t get this idea out of his head, and went back to the hotel to write it.

Now musically, the song actually started as a reggae-style track. The idea always was that the dark lyrics would juxtapose the almost joyous arrangement. However, they moved away from the reggae idea when Fingers came up with the piano arrangement we know today. Again, it’s upbeat and pretty fun as piano arrangements go… it’s sort of catchy, almost pop rock in its tempo… that’s entirely deliberate.

There’s a contrast there. We often find on this channel that songs which marry dark lyrics and themes to upbeat, joyful music have great impacts. Think of Back on the chain gang by pretenders, 1999 by Prince, 99 Red Balloons, Born In The USA… its a long list and it works for a reason. It taps into your psychology, the juxtaposition it makes you think

Now at first, Geldof really didn’t see this song as a hit. In fact, he insisted that it should be a B-side if anything, as it was so unusual and experimental.

But the record company insisted, and I Don’t Like Mondays was released 6 months after the shooting in San Diego.

As you can imagine, reactions to the song were varied. It did well in the UK charts, reaching No. 1, but it flopped a bit in the US, only reaching No. 73 in the Billboard hot 100.

Some saw the song as an opportunity to exploit a tragedy. Geldof adamantly denies this. Geldof told the BBC:

“It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act, and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”

The claims that the song was exploiting the tragedy were pushed partly by Spencer’s father. He tried to get the single banned in the US, but was unsuccessful in his attempts. But this whole time Geldof has insisted that it was in no way an attempt to glorify what happened or make light of a tragedy.

In fact, despite receiving a letter from Spencer thanking him for making her famous, he insisted that the song wasn’t really about her; her situation just so happened to channel the phenomenon he was hoping to capture in his song writing. Geldof told the Independent in 2004:

“I didn't mention her. I wasn't interested in her - she's an idiot whose father had been buying her guns for her birthday. What I was interested in was the event and what it meant. The song is about amorality. You don't have to have a reason to live, and you, therefore, don't have to have one to die - I don't like Mondays, I don't like the taste of this mineral water - and... bang!”

It really links back to that first inspiration… how mundane life can be, and the horrible nihilist thought of ‘oh wow, nothing really matters. Life and death doesn’t matter.’

Again, not that he was promoting that - he was always clear that Spencer was wrong for what she did. He was just fascinated by the human conditions that get you to that point, I guess.

This kind of feels like a really early example of the moral panic in music, where people started accusing musicians of inspiring or benefitting from horrific crimes. Remember when certain groups tried to blame Marilyn Manson for the Columbine shooting in 1999 because the killers listened to his music? People began to question if it was the right thing to do to censor certain types of music.

It’s a really interesting debate, one I feel will never be agreed on.

Anyway, Spencer’s dad never managed to legally censor I Don’t Like Mondays. But although it was never legally banned, many radio stations in California refused to play it, which obviously affected exposure of the song in the states. Like I said, it was never really a hit there, despite being born from and inspired by it.

But what a story this song has.

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Music Mongoose