I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS

Somebody somewhere is probably writing a university thesis about songs with days of the week in their title.
And if not, why not? There have been so many of them just listing them alone would be half way to a mortar board and a feature in one of the quality Sunday newspapers.

For the record (no pun intended) the most popular day by a nose whisker looks like Saturday with better known offerings including Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting (Elton John), Another Saturday Night (Sam Cooke), Saturday Night at the Movies (The Drifters), Get Down Saturday Night (Oliver Cheatham) and Saturday Nite (Earth Wind and Fire).
Sunday doesn’t do too badly with high spots including Everyday Is Like Sunday (Morrissey), Lazy Sunday (Small Faces), Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees), Sunday Bloody Sunday (U2), Sunday Girl (Blondie) and Sunday Morning (Velvet Underground).
Tuesday is a bit quieter with Ruby Tuesday (Melanie and the Rolling Stones), Tuesday Morning (The Pogues), Love You Til Tuesday (David Bowie) and Everything’s Tuesday (Chairmen of the Board) flying the flag.

Wednesday is a bit boring with only Waiting for Wednesday (Lisa Loeb), Wednesday Week (The Undertones) and Wednesday Morning 3am (Simon and Garfunkel) worth remembering – and Thursday isn’t much better with Thursday’s Child (David Bowie and Eartha Kitt), Thursday (Country Joe & the Fish and Jim Croce) and Thursday Afternoon (Brian Eno’s 61 minutes opus).
So it’s TGI Friday then with Friday On My Mind (The Easybeats), It’s Friday I’m In Love (The Cure), Friday (Daniel Bedingfield),

Friday Street (Paul Weller), Friday’s Angels (Generation X) and Friday’s Child (Will Young).

Hang on a minute. What happened to Monday? Well there’s new and old Blue Monday (New Order and Fats Domino) the New Romantic New Moon On Monday (Duran Duran), the realistic Manic Monday (The Bangles), the meandering Monday Monday (Mamas and Papas) and, of course, I Don’t Like Mondays (The Boomtown Rats).

So that’s optimism, realism, doldrums and dreams all covered – not to mention…….. mindless murder.
Bearing in mind its inspiration, the July 1979 Boomtown Rats’ chart topper I Don’t Like Mondays would be lucky to get airplay these days.

On the Monday morning of January 29, 1979, 16 year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on the elementary school across the street from her family home in San Diego, California. Using a .22 caliber rifle, she killed two adults and injured eight students as well as a police officer. Before giving herself up to the police, she spoke to a reporter on the phone regarding her motive: “I just started shooting, that’s it. I just did it for the fun of it. I just don’t like Mondays. I just did it because it’s a way to cheer the day up. Nobody likes Mondays.”

She showed no remorse for her crime but could probably sue for a share in the songwriting royalties of what came next.
Boomtown Rats writer and frontman (and erstwhile National Treasure – albeit a bonkers one) Bob Geldof said later about the song: “I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [keyboardist Johnnie] Fingers and 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’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ 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.”
Of course not.

But for a band that seemed to still be in search of a direction it was a godsend. They had previously flitted from punk to new wave, from pop to being Bruce Springsteen’s Irish cousins. This was the band’s sixth UK Top 20 hit and their second number one (Rat Trap was the first – and the first new wave number for anyone).

Lyrically it was a reasonably clever interpretation of the event starting out with:
“The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?”
And ending with:
“And all the playing’s stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with the toys a while
And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
(With the problems of the how’s and why’s)
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die?
Oh Oh Oh”

Plus variations on the memorable chorus/hook of:
“Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoot
The whole day down, down, down, shoot it all down’“

It was released as the lead single from the band’s third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing and was a number one single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979, emerging as the sixth biggest hit of the UK that year.
Geldof had been contacted by Steve Jobs to play a gig for Apple, inspiring the opening line about a “silicon chip”. The song was first performed less than a month after the shooting.

Geldof had originally intended it as a B-side, but changed his mind after it was successful with audiences on the Rats’ US tour. Spencer’s family tried unsuccessfully to prevent the single from being released in the United States.
In later years, Geldof admitted that he regretted writing it because he “made [Brenda Spencer] famous.”
Despite reaching number one in the UK, it only reached number 73 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song was played regularly by album-oriented rock format radio stations in the United States throughout the 1980s, although radio stations in San Diego refrained from playing the track for some years in respect to local sensitivities about the shooting.

In the UK it won the Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric categories at the Ivor Novello Awards.
On 9 September 1981, Geldof was joined on stage by fellow Boomtown Rat, Johnnie Fingers, to perform the song for The Secret Policeman’s Ball sponsored by Amnesty International. A recording of that performance appears on the 1982 album, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball.

The Boomtown Rats performed the song for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985. This was the band’s final major appearance. On singing the line, “And the lesson today is how to die”, Geldof paused for 20 seconds while the crowd applauded on the significance to those starving in Africa that Live Aid was intended to help.

I Don’t Like Mondays was subsequently covered by Tori Amos on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls and later by G4 on their 2006 album Act Three.

The original Boomtown Rats broke up in 1986, but re-formed in 2013, without founder members Johnnie Fingers or Gerry Cott.