Why I miss the Boomtown Rats There is something very shrill about The Rats" run of hits, the aggressive selfishness of Lookin" After No 1, the taut lechery of Mary of the Fourth Form, the shrieking satire of She's So Modern. As they became fixtures of the charts, they tried to soften their sharp edges with thicker keyboard lines and Geldof's voice lower in the mix, but that underlying contrariness is still present in the snarling paranoia of Always Someone Looking at You, and bitter sentiments of their last top 10 hit, limp reggae satire Banana Republic. This quality of aggressive, attention-demanding neediness came from Geldof, the archetypal rock star with a chip on his shoulder, and it was crucial to breaking out of an Irish music scene characterised by a sense of inferiority and inadequacy. Although Van Morrison was a legend, and Thin Lizzy had made some inroads, The Rats were the first Irish band to reach number one in the UK. Like such fellow travellers as Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and The Stranglers, The Rats were musical misfits who suddenly found a niche in punk. They were essentially a high tempo pub rock R'n"B group but when The Sex Pistols upturned the established rock order in 1976, Geldof was already in his mid-twenties, one of a generation of experienced musicians well placed to give this new phenomenon some musical clout and pop slickness. His bar-tested band were super-sharp and Geldof emerged as an utterly compelling frontman, serious and ridiculous, and determined to take the world by storm. He became known as Bob The Gob for his outrageous stage patter and provocative interviews in music papers. All of The Boomtown Rats play on the Band Aid single Do They Know it's Christmas, but the world-changing success of Live Aid propelled their leader into a whole new area of politics and celebrity, and the group split the following year. The truth is, their pop moment was already long gone. Yet Geldof briefly made a great fist of being a rock star, using music as a classic mode of escape from crushing limitations. They may not be much celebrated now, but when The Boomtown Rats released their second album, A Tonic for the Troops, in 1978, it was greeted at all the hippest music papers as a pop masterpiece. It contains the forgotten gem I Never Loved Eva Braun, perhaps the most audacious lyric in rock history. Delivered as a new wave Brechtian pastiche, Geldof sings in the character of Adolf Hitler, moaning about his place in history, "Oh yeah, I conquered all those countries/ They were weak, I was strong/ A little too ambitious maybe/ But I never loved Eva Braun." It still makes me laugh when I hear it. Even then, Geldof addressed the world in ways that made you wonder if he was really allowed to say that. But at least I can say, without controversy, that I always loved The Boomtown Rats. I, for one, am glad that they are going to be heard again.