"I Don't Like Mondays" is a song by the Boomtown Rats that was a number one
single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979, and
ranks as the sixth biggest British hit of 1979. Written by Bob Geldof, it was
the band's second number one single. History
According to Geldof, he wrote the song after reading a telex report at Georgia
State University's campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of
16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground
at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, USA on 29 January
1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer.
Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions
was "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day". The song was first
performed less than a month later. Geldof explained how he wrote the song:
I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [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.
Geldof had originally intended the song as a B-side, but changed his mind after
the song 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. Despite being a major hit in the United Kingdom, it only reached #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.
The song became Number One in the UK single charts in July 1979. In the UK it
won the Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric categories at the Ivor
Novello Awards. Chart performance
Live performances 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 to be the band's final major
appearance. On singing the line, "And the lesson today is how to die", Geldof
paused for several minutes while the crowd applauded on the significance to
those starving in Africa that Live Aid was intended to help.
At a concert in London in 1995, almost ten years later to the day, Bon Jovi
covered the song after being joined on stage by Geldof at Wembley Stadium. This
recorded performance features on Bon Jovi's live album One Wild Night Live
1985–2001, as well as on the bonus 2-CD edition of These Days. Bon Jovi was
again joined by Geldof for a performance of the song at The O2 Arena on 23 June
2010, the 10th night of their 12-night residency. Geldof himself performed a
version of the song while hosting the Live 8 concert in London, on 2 July
2005. "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. In popular culture
In "20 Hours in America, Part II", the second episode of season 4 of The West
Wing, the song was featured during the aftermath of a fictional bombing at
Kennison State University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the story behind the song
having been told in the previous episode: "20 Hours in America, Part I".
The title of the song can be seen scrawled in graffiti on a set of lockers
at the beginning of the 1985 film The Breakfast Club.
The song appeared in the television series House in the episode "Half-Wit".
Dr. House played the piano introduction to the song for a patient, a musical
savant with dystonia, who then repeated it perfectly.
Tori Amos' cover of the song was also used in a major touring production of
Romeo and Juliet by Headlong in a sequence many theatre critics commented
on, where its refrain of 'Tell me why' spoke to the production's emphasis on
coincidence and chance leading to the play's tragedy.
VH1 rated the song at #67 on its list of the top 100 one hit wonders of the '80s,
despite the song being released in 1979 and the Boomtown Rats having several
other hits in the UK and Ireland. In 2006 while presenting the NME Awards,
Russell Brand made the joke, "Really, it's no surprise he's such an expert on
famine; he has after all been dining out on 'I Don't Like Mondays' for thirty
years". References