Irish examiner View: Leader of the rat pack

Boomtown Rats founder Garry Roberts passes away

Garry Roberts of The Boomtown Rats performing live on stage.

You need to be of a certain age to separate the impact of Bob Geldof from the Boomtown Rats whose founder, guitarist Garry Roberts, died this week aged 72.

Roberts gathered the new band together in a pub in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, in 1975 and their punkish persona drove them on to become the first Irish band to top the charts twice consecutively in the UK and deliver nine successive top 20 singles. Their prescient anthem to a school shooting, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, driven by a startling example of the new technology of video, took them to the top in the US.