Ireland In 50 Albums, No 37: A Tonic For the Troops by The Boomtown Rats (1978)
Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats released A Tonic For The Troops in 1978.
“This is the second LP for the Boomtown Rats,” wrote magazine in its February 1979 review of The review continued, “The first was released during the short-lived punk invasion, and never went anywhere. This one stands head and shoulders above the previous effort. The songs are well realized, drawing from such musical antecedents as The Who, Springsteen, Kinks and Thin Lizzy. But the final result is The Rats own, with the six-man band following its own musical directions.”
The Billboard review mentions that the first Boomtown Rats album went nowhere in the US. This was despite (or maybe because of) a promotional idea cooked up by Michael Bone, the Mercury Records Promotions man in Chicago. Bob Geldof remembers what happened.
“Mike comes up with this whiz-bang idea, trying to get his head around this punk, new wave idea. He sends away to the New York City Sanitation Department for 300 dead rats, actual dead rats, and he asks for them to be packaged in formaldehyde in plastic bags,” says Geldof.
“His idea is to staple to these packages. He sends them down to the mailroom of Mercury Records and there’s a kid there with a summer job that his auntie has given him who works in Mercury.
"His name is Robert Prevost. Bobby. And Bobby is given the task of stapling the records to the plastic bags with the rats in them, and mailing them out to the 300 most significant DJs in the United States.
"So Bobby sends out our record with the dead f**king rat in an envelope, and they land with a thud on the desk of every preeminent DJ who immediately refuses point blank ever to play the Boomtown Rats in their life. So that’s the end of the Boomtown Rats for the foreseeable future in America.”
the band’s second album produced three huge singles. the album’s first single, peaked at No. 12 in the UK Singles Chart in May 1978. The next single, climbed to No 6 in August. But everything changed for the Boomtown Rats with the release of the third and final single from the album.
hit No. 1 in November 1978. The second, third and fourth chart placings were all held by Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta with songs from the soundtrack to Grease, the highest grossing film worldwide in 1978.
“Well I just know they’ll be celebrating in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin tonight,” smiled the BBC’s David Jensen as he introduced the Boomtown Rats on “Because their favourite wayward sons have made it to the top. Quite an achievement for The Boomtown Rats. This week No 1 with .”
The camera focused on an image of John Travolta. It slowly zoomed out to reveal Geldof holding a magazine with the photograph of Travolta. He tore the magazine in half and as he threw the pieces away he feigned a yawn. This was revolutionary stuff from Geldof and co.
They were only the second Irish band to reach the top of the UK Singles Chart (after The Bachelors back in 1964, although keen pop quizzers would of course be right to point out The Bachelors didn’t write their hit single ).
The Boomtown Rats were at No. 1 with a song inspired by Geldof’s time spent working in an abattoir. “I was desperate. I knew my life wasn’t going to be in the abattoir, but the people around me, this was their life, and they had no option,” recalls Geldof.
“And the obvious metaphor was that their life was as condemned and doomed as the animals that they were killing themselves. They were trapped.
“There was a kid there called Paul. He was a gouger and he used to keep an axe in his waistband. And after a weekend, he’d come in, he’d go, ‘Hey, how’s it going, Robert? What you get up at the weekend?’ I said, ‘I just went out with a couple of friends, what about yourself?’ He’d tap affectionately on the hatchet in his waistband and he’d say he gave someone a six stitcher, meaning that he’d got into a fight and slammed somebody over the head and opened up their head in six stitches. That’s the story, it was just an essay or it was a long poem or something. That sounds very grand. I wasn’t aware of what anything was. I’d just write stuff endlessly.”
When the band were nearing completion of the recording of A Tonic for the Troops, Mutt Lange, the famed record producer, asked Geldof had he any other songs? “I said, ‘Come on man give me a break.’ It was exhausting working with Mutt, genius as he was,” recalls Geldof.
“He asked me had I anything. I remember sitting in a room with the guitar and I started doing, ‘Billy doesn’t like it living here, he doesn’t like it living here in this town’. He just dragged this thing out of me. And that’s how that was done. And by the end of the afternoon, I had all the stuff I’d written in the abattoir beside me. So, you know, that’s really what a producer can do. And the discipline of Lange, the things he made me do were worse than school. It drove me nuts, but came out of it and it’s a great song. It really is.”
When hit the top spot in the UK Charts it was huge news in Ireland. “Boomtown Rats No 1 in Britain” ran a headline in the on November 14, 1978. Beneath the news item about the band’s success ran another story headlined “Pope Names New Bishop,” about the appointment of a new Catholic bishop in Middlesbrough. The close proximity of the two articles is a palpable allegory of a changing Ireland.
“There was a generation who pushed for change and I’ve talked about it a lot,” sighs Geldof. “But it’s almost impossible 50 years on to understand what a different country Ireland was. And the arc of the Rats is to live through and to propagate and call for and demand that change and navigate its own way through it and articulate it as this country became what it should have been a lot earlier, intelligent, creative, with a very viable, plausible future.
“It was awful to live in that Ireland. There was this great cultural claustrophobia, this great suffocating silence,” continues Geldof.
“We just didn’t know how to say it. And eventually it was said. People talk about when the Rats were on it for the first time. But the next day, my dad went to mass in Glasthule and the priest got up and started railing about me and the band. ‘Did you see those poor young deluded things last night’. And he called out my father and said, ‘We all feel a great sympathy for this man who’s the father of that young pup.’
"It just had to change. We’d all had enough, we just didn’t know it.”
And what became of Bobby Prevost the young lad who had the unenviable task of posting out the dead rats from the mailroom of Mercury Records all the way back in 1978?
“As for Bobby, Well, he pursues a different career,” says Geldof. “And in 2025, Bobby Prevost becomes Pope Leo XIV.” He pauses for a second or two.
Geldof breaks the silence, “There’s so many weird things about the Rats and the coincidences that get them out of Dún Laoghaire and around the world.”
- The Boomtown Rats play The Hub at Cillín Hill in Kilkenny on Saturday, 31 January, 2026
- For the other albums in this series, see here
- Paul McDermott’s podcast To Here Knows When – Great Irish Albums Revisited is available on all listening platforms.
