1979 The Boomtown Rats: I Don't Like Mondays

In January 1979, sixteen year old Brenda Ann Spencer of San Diego, California fired shots at children in an Elementary school playground, killing two adults and injuring eight of the kids. When asked why she did it, the only answer she could give was "I don't like Mondays, this livens up the day." A chilling story, and one that would inevitably attract investigative dramatisation or commentary, though it's doubtful that a pop song was the most fitting medium for this or that Bob Geldof was necessarily the best person to have a stab at writing it.

In terms of its theme of violence born of frustrated boredom, 'I Don't Like Mondays' could have been a great follow up to 'Rat Trap', a sequel to form a kind of punky, two part epic version of 'In The Ghetto' that showed what Billy and/or Judy did next, but by basing it firmly in fact (and very recent fact at that), Geldof paints himself into a corner very quickly - how are you supposed to take this? Or more to the point, what ways can you take it?* Because if you're going to be covering events like a real life schoolyard shooting in any meaningful way then a degree of understanding subtlety is required. Geldof, however, has never done subtle terribly well and true to form 'I Don't Like Mondays' is about as subtle as one of the Banana Splits.

"I wanna shoot he whole day down", "The lesson today is how to die"; if an American punk/new wave band had scowled those lines in a song about the Dunblane massacre then there'd be outrage, and understandably so; they are clumsy, crass and totally insensitive. And just because Spencer herself used the glib 'I don't like Mondays' as excuse for her own rampage, it's no justification to glibly compound its insanity by repeating it throughout the course of the song as the hook of the chorus.

It's not that Geldof is deliberately out to cause offence - he's on record as saying he wasn't using the song to exploit tragedy - but his propensity for overwriting sinks 'I Don't Like Mondays', a song geared solely toward the descriptive, to the depths of the lowest common denominator from the word go; just whose 'side' is Geldof on with all this? He sings the chorus in Spencer's persona and, while he's not sympathetic to her, there's nothing here that could be considered heartfelt or accusatory either. The tune itself is not unpleasant, but the song it's hitched to is blank tabloid reportage of the most sensational kind. And where a level of analysis or comment would have been welcome, Geldof is content to cover the front page with the bold 'TELL ME WHY?!?', a cynical device that helps shift units through shock value but leaves a bitter aftertaste. I'm not suggesting that Geldof should have had the answer, but by the same token this was hardly the time and place to ask the question.

* Bon Jovi covered the song at Wembley Stadium in 1995 and was joined onstage by Geldof himself. The incredulous look on Bob's face as Bon Jovi mimes a shooting action with his fingers on the 'shoot the whole day down' line is a picture, but then in providing no moral compass within the song, he only has himself to blame if it's taken as something celebratory. No wonder Spencer's family were pissed off in 1979 and tried to get it banned.