I remember seeing them on TV on a late night show, and I remember it being SNL. Looking over the SNL wiki, though, The Boomtown Rats don’t show up as musical guest. Googling does show them appearing on a show called Fridays, which was a similar show to SNL. Maybe that’s what I recall.
To be fair, only a handful of radio stations in the US were playing that type of music in 1979 or 1980. I was in college in Chicago at the time, and I heard it on the radio, either the college station or the commercial one (WXRT, I think). I think that a lot of college stations would have played it. It wouldn’t be until MTV took off that radio stations started to play new wave/post punk music with some regularity. Looking at the billboard US charts in 1979, and it is still a lot of disco.
Yeah, as I understand it, the Boomtown Rats were never particularly popular or well-known in the US (at least not until Bob Geldof became famous for Band Aid and Live Aid). It’s not like any of their other songs were getting airplay here.
They used to play it all the time on the local progressive/new wave station. But it was not a hit over here, so no one else took it up.
Except one. A local top-40 station decided to base an entire “I Don’t Like Mondays” promotion around it. They had promos on the air using part of the chorus and announcing it would begin the next Monday.
Monday came, and the promotion was never mentioned.
I assume someone told them the origin of the song.
I remember hearing it as a kid (no idea what it was in reference to, of course), and that would have been on the radio at about the time it was released. Most likely KZOK out of Seattle.
Of course, the OP suggests radio play would have started after the Merv Griffin appearance, and I can’t say whether I’d heard it before that.
According to Wikipedia (and Billboard), it contemporaneously hit number 73 on the Hot 100 (Feb 23, 1980), so I’d think that it must have been played here (though the Hot 100 is a mix of airplay and sales [and now streaming]. The radio-only chart the Airplay 100 didn’t show up until 1984.) The Wikipedia article further states: “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.”
I would have been too young to know, though. I know the song well, but that’s the only song I know by the Boomtown Rats. As far as I can tell, the band never had much traction here in the US.
I remember it getting a lot of play in Canada. Wikipedia says it was a big hit in UK/Ireland/Canada/Australia/New Zealand but never very big in US. I suppose that’s consistent with self-censorship.
Cash Box magazine, which used some combination of radio airplay and sales to come up with its rankings, had the song peaking at #85 during the week of 3/8/80.
Of course, it’s not quite accurate to say “American radio.” In that era, programming decisions were made by an untidy group of individual station executives, outside programming consultants, and (mostly small) radio station groups.
Boomtown Rats was released on Columbia Records in the U.S. Columbia had a major promotion department, but that same week, they also had songs charting by Pink Floyd, Neil Diamond, Toto, Barbra Streisand, Crystal Gayle, Kenny Rogers and Karla Bonoff, so they probably weren’t putting much of a push behind an obscure Irish band.
I remember hearing it in Baltimore on a station that tended to play New Wave groups (Clash, Ian Drury). I can’t remember exactly when it happened but Geldof in his autobiography says a record label employee decided to promote the Boomtown Rats by mailing dead rats in formaldehyde to radio stations. Later when the group was on tour and stopped by various radio stations, quite a few told them how that gimmick pissed them off.
Just looking further through the Billboard 200, the Boomtown Rats albums did marginally chart a few : The Fine art of Surfacing (#103), Tonic for the Troops (#112), Mondo Bongo (#116), and In the Long Grass (#188.)
So it’s not much to do with self-censorship, I think, but rather the Boomtown Rats simply weren’t very popular here. Though The Fine Art of Surfacing did place the highest of the bunch, and that’s the one “I Don’t Like Mondays” is from. And that’s the only song of theirs to make a mark on any Billboard chart that I can find. “Rat Trap,” their other UK #1 hit, never charted here, so “I Don’t Like Mondays” fared better than any Boomtown Rats song here in the US, which to me would suggest that it got some exposure on the radio, not so much that all of a sudden people were buying the single and that’s why they broke the Hot 100.
I remember this video got a lot of airplay on the pre-MTV music video show on the local cable access station in Buffalo, NY. Back in 1980, videos were still new and rare enough that anybody who made one at all it seemed would get put into heavy rotation whether or not it was a popular hit song.
I don’t understand why this song would be censored from the radio in 1980. I can see stations being reluctant to play it now, given the rise in school shooting incidents; but back then, it was a song about what seemed like a freak incident that was unlikely to happen again. And Geldof’s claim that he was being censored kind of falls apart when you factor in that CSNY had a top 20 hit with “Ohio” – a song about an even more controversial school shooting – less than 10 years earlier.
My personal opionion is that this is really a lame song. It’s pretentious, unmelodic, and forgettable in that insufferable way that early 80s New Wave one-hit wonder bands could often be. I think that has more to do with its lack of airplay than any controversy surrounding the subject matter. (If anything, the subject matter probably got it as far up the charts as it did than anything else about it.)
I used to watch Fridays, as well (it was on ABC), and I remember seeing the Boomtown Rats’ appearance on it. At that point, I had heard of them (I was about 15), but I really didn’t know anything about them.
Echoing other posters: the Rats just never really broke through in the U.S. I doubt that there was much censorship of that song, so much as their music just really wasn’t well-suited to what was on pop radio here in that era.
Parenthetical: the one song in the 1980s that I do remember being actively censored / not played by radio stations was George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” IIRC, MTV would only play it late at night, as well.
I remember hearing it a lot on the Los Angeles album-rock stations (KMET, KLOS, KWST) wedged between all the Zeppelin and Skynyrd but not much on the Top 40 stations. However, I do remember Top 40 stations playing “Up All Night” from the subsequent album quite a bit, which is strange as that one didn’t even chart in the US.
I think it’s less censorship than the band simply never took off in the US. Prior to Live Aid, Bob Geldof was best known here as “the guy in the Pink Floyd movie.”
I agree it had more to do with their lack of popularity rather than censorship.
The song certainly was played on NYC radio stations. Not in heavy rotation but I did hear the song. I knew the song long before I knew who Bob Geldof was. When Live Aid happened I realized he was the I Don’t Like Monday’s guy. It was years after that when I realized what the song was about.
I don’t recognize him, but the one time he really talks in the clip (at around 8:10), he says, to Geldof:
“No, but I explained it to you, that, you thought it was a controversy over the lyrics, but it was publicized, it was a matter of format.”
This makes it sound like he already knew (and worked with) Geldof. Given that he’s American, not Irish, my guess is that he was with the Rats’ U.S. record label, as a publicist or manager.