Photo Credit: Zamrznuti Tonovi
Celebrating 50 years of Internationally Renowned Irish New Wave Band The Boomtown Rats the band have announced their only Irish show for 2026 in The Hub, Kilkenny on January 31, 2026. This follows the release of their The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory. The collection spans from their debut single to their latest release, ‘There’s No Tomorrow Like Today’.
Tickets go on sale 10AM Friday, October 10 and are available from www.theboomtownratsofficial.com, powertik.com and Ticketmaster.ie.
The Boomtown Rats’ legacy is marked by their dynamic music and impactful contributions to rock history. Their 50th-anniversary highlights their lasting influence and connection with audiences old and new. Long before Live Aid hero, Sir Bob and ‘conscience of the world’ Bob, there was a band called The Boomtown Rats fronted by a scrawny, Jagger-lipped, mouthy paddy called Bob Geldof along with his mates Pete Briquette on bass, Simon Crowe on drums, Garry Roberts on guitar, Johnny Fingers on piano and Gerry Cott on guitar.
Ireland in the mid-70s was a poor, grey, joyless place mired in murder and political and financial corruption and dominated spiritually and socially by a dogmatic and suffocating Catholic church; a country that offered no future to its young.
The Boomtown Rats, named after Woody Guthrie’s childhood gang and taken from Bound for Glory, the dustbowl poet’s classic autobiography, arrived like an irritating swarm of biting, stinging mosquitoes at a quiet Sunday picnic, playing high-octane garage rock, singing of their country through their still unclouded, uncompromised eyes, and, like their namesake, of injustice, and the dispossessed, goading and overtly publicly challenging the status quo and in so doing…”helped call a new country into being.” (Prof Eoin Devereux, Limerick University)
We knew nothing of this in the UK but when The Rats arrived in London at the height of the punk explosion and found similar social conditions to those they had just left in Ireland (27% inflation, high unemployment, societal discontent) they fitted neatly in and were, thanks to their well drilled live sound and the considerable charm of their motormouth singer, an overnight sensation. Their debut single ‘Looking After No. 1’, taken from their 1977 debut album The Boomtown Rats crashed into the UK charts and was a sensation on their first TV appearance on the Marc Bolan show followed by a breakout performance on Top Of The Pops.
Their second album, A Tonic for the Troops (1978) featured the UK No. 1 hit ‘Rat Trap,’ a powerful, lowlife narrative song, written by Geldof when he was working in an abattoir speaking to the hopelessness of an already doomed young couple that became the first UK chart-topping single by an Irish rock group and the first ‘new wave’ No 1.
The album also included sophisticated songs like ‘(I Never Loved) Eva Braun’, the Paul McCartney approved ‘Me And Howard Hughes’ and two other top ten smash singles in ‘She’s So Modern’ and ‘Like Clockwork,’ and garnering the band an extraordinary hat trick Album Of The Year in NME, Melody Maker and the ITV Music Awards.
The Boomtown Rats’ biggest international success came in 1979 with the release of ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,’ a haunting ballad inspired by a tragic school shooting in San Diego, California. When 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer was asked why she opened fire on an elementary school, killing two adults and injuring several children, she reportedly said, “I don’t like Mondays.”
Geldof turned this chilling quote into ‘one of the greatest songs on the uselessness of violence’ (Hot Press) that topped the UK Singles Chart and became a global smash, hitting No 1 in 32 countries. It was however banned in the US, the record company having been threatened with lawsuits, refused to distribute the song despite it being a massive radio hit.
Horrified by TV images of famine in Ethiopia, Geldof and Midge Ure wrote the 1984 Bandaid song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. The track brought together the UK’s biggest contemporary music stars, as well as his fellow Rats, and then became the best-selling single of all time.
Having gone to the “Hungrylands, the Horrorlands” and seeing a record was not enough even after “The Greatest Rock Concert Ever” (many sources) held on July 13, 1985, simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, Live Aid raised $160 million (480 million in today’s money) for famine relief. He then organised the distribution of the funds and utilised the political lobby thereof over the past 40 years. Geldof was later knighted and has been nominated 8 times for the Nobel Peace Prize and received numerous honours.
Whilst all this activity necessitated a hiatus with the Rats, Geldof was only doing what their namesake and their songs had always suggested. But he had taken the Rats inspiration and music and applied its sentiment to the real world with real action. Initially like their peers in the UK and despite being momentarily banned in their home country, they had helped articulate a different Ireland….a better version of itself, and have lasted long enough to see that come into being and be celebrated and acknowledged for it.
The Boomtown Rats were central participants in the Cultural Revolution that was Punk/New Wave and its demand for change, and were one of its major success stories and one of its greatest rock bands. They have written many classics and a few standards and with full encouragement by his fellow bandmates he co-wrote the biggest selling single and organised the biggest concert ever, which famously culminated in the Rats playing the Xmas song behind Bowie, Bono, Elton, George, Pete Townsend, Macca and….Bob.
The Boomtown Rats have released seven studio albums: The Boomtown Rats (1977), A Tonic For The Troops(1978), The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979), Mondo Bongo (1980), V Deep (1982), In the Long Grass (1984), and Citizens Of Boomtown (2020).
They are regarded as one of the most influential and socially conscious bands to emerge from the late 1970s punk explosion, a group whose impact went well beyond the music charts, inspiring a whole new generation of Irish bands including U2 (Bono: “Literally I can trace my life to pre-BG and post BG. The Rats are an amazing band.”, Sinead O’Connor (“Geldof taught me to be free with my voice…”), the Undertones and to the present in the poetics and attitudes of Fontaines DC and the sheer bolshiness of Kneecap.
Boomtown Rats Lead by Bob Geldof announce only Irish show at the Hub Kilkenny Saturday 31st January. Live in concert plus exclusive Boomtown Rats documentary screening.
Tickets go on sale 10AM Friday, October 10 and are available from www.theboomtownratsofficial.com, powertik.com and Ticketmaster.ie.