Somewhere in the late spring/early summer of 1978, The Boomtown Rats came on Top of the Pops with She's So Modern. Well, perhaps it was the follow-up single from the album, Like Clockwork, but I can't find a decent YouTube version of that, so let's stick with Theory A. My dad chipped in with a curmudgeonly Hmmm-don't-think-much-of-them. I didn't rise to the bait, but quietly I thought to myself, Actually-that-stirs-me-in-some-way-I-can't-yet-name. A few weeks later, exams over, I got A Tonic for the Troops on cassette — one of the first ten I ever owned, in a sequence I've rehearsed a few times on Music Arcades, most recently here. And a couple of weeks after that, I became a teenager.
Up to that point I kept my hair preppy and neat. It became tussled and unkempt more or less overnight. I bought a Boomtown Rats fold-out poster in the local WH Smiths, and it lived on my bedroom wall for many months. The photo was from the same shoot as the album cover, and there was also an interview on the back where Bob Geldof spoke of cynicism being a necessary survival strategy growing up in Dublin. That same summer term, my school report remarked on my propensity for "cynical indifference and sullen apathy". I didn't know what all those words meant, but I put two and two together, and realised that It Was Good.
Before Geldof was a household name, my dad had an irritating habit of referring to him as "Bob Geldard", usually with a tut, though once when Bob was interviewed on telly, Dad acknowledged that he was "quite articulate actually". I figured that was Good, too, and resolved to try and be articulate. (I'm still trying.) One of the fringe benefits of Band Aid/Live Aid, years after The Boomtown Rats had vanished from my thoughts, was an unspoken vindication of those early adolescent fads. You-said-he-was-good-for-nothing,-remember? Ha!
I Never Loved Eva Braun was my favourite song then. It would have been my dad, again, who told me who Eva Braun was (the sound quality of my cassette set-up was so poor, I doubt I could make out the "Are you really going out with Adolf?" at the start). I think it's still my favourite: the Rats were very good at that thing they do at the end of the song, where everything drops out apart from the drums, and then they come back in with some whistling, a Ba-Ba-Bada, building to a full-blown La-Lala-La-La-Laaa-La. Old fashioned pleasures.
I played that cassette so much on my mono radio cassette machine that it started to wow disturbingly (remember good old analogue wow and flutter?). I guess the plastic base of the tape had become stretched. I hit on the dishonest plan of returning it to a shop as though I'd bought it the day before, to get it changed for a genuinely new one. But the fault was too subtle to be evident to a busy shop assistant, so I hit on a tactic to make it more evident that the tape had a blemish. I put some scrunched-up paper in the hole that stopped you recording over your pre-recorded tape and I recorded blank noise over the last few seconds of Don't Believe What You Read. I then took it into the same WH Smiths and demonstrated what was wrong so I could get it replaced. Busy Shop Assistant came back with, "Well, you never know, maybe it's supposed to end like that; they're funny in that way, some of these groups." He got another new copy from behind his counter and put that in the machine. To my astonished dismay, this new copy also had a premature and sudden end to Don't Believe What You Read. What are the chances of that? "There, see, told you so," BSA nodded to me. Bastard. I had to go to another shop — one without damaged stock — and repeat my con. It worked that time.
I don't have that cassette any more. This is a CD copy, bought for nostalgia, in 2002, for a fiver from Fopp
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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