"Someone's Looking at You" was the third and final single from the The Boomtown Rats' album The Fine Art of Surfacing. It peaked at number two on the Irish charts and number 4 in the UK. It is an organ-based song that paints a humid picture of 1984-style government surveillance and has been described as a gently humorous song about paranoia.
The second verse starts They saw me there in the square when I was shooting my mouth off about saving some fish. Now could that be construed as some radical's views or some liberals' wish. This refers to singer Bob Geldof's participation in a Greenpeace anti-whaling rally in London's Trafalgar Square. Geldof's website describes the song as a personal statement on fame.
The Boomtown Rats
THE FINE ART OF SURFACING - 1979
1.Someone's Looking At You
2.Diamond Smiles
3.Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)
4.Having My Picture Taken
5.Sleep (Fingers Lullaby)
6.I Don't Like Mondays
7.Nothing Happened Today
8.Keep It Up
9.Nice N Neat
10.When The Night Comes
Ensign 1979
The ten songs on the Boomtown Rats' 1979 album, The Fine Art of Surfacing, have everything to do with America. It's right there in the title: the thrill of invasion, the struggle for air, the adventure gone sour. But the story actually starts in December, 1978, in the magnificent grime of the Glasgow Apollo, where I saw what I thought was the future of the Rats in the States. And it was huge.
Bob Geldof, Pete Briquette, Simon Crowe, Gerry Cott, Garry Roberts and pyjama-clad Johnny Fingers were touring the U.K. like they owned it, which they did that season. I was along for the frenzy, the lone survivor of a pack of U.S. writers who had come to see the Rats in London, then gone home. In the two years before they took the Apollo stage that night, the band had captured Britain with an Irish vengeance, driving the nation to joy with two hit LPs, a run of killer singles including the Number One tenement opera 'Rat Trap' and the best live show in the isles. In London, I'd seen everything the Rats had to make the States go green as well: the songs, with those take-no-prisoners choruses; the pop brains inside the punk bravado and glam-guitar firepower; Geldof's unstoppable combo of mighty mouth and ringleader magnetism.
But I was in Glasgow for another reason: Geldof wanted me to see the Rats defy the laws of physics. Earlier that day, Fingers - in his sleepwear, of course - took me up to the Apollo balcony to show me how to shake it. Looming over the stalls, without any pillars beneath for structural support, the balcony was, Fingers said, famous for bending as much as three feet in the middle, under the stomping heels of a packed, out-of-its-mind audience. Geldof gave me a demonstration at showtime.
'Some American journalists came to see us in London,' he told the howling Scots. 'But we told them the real gig was here in Glasgow. One of them is here tonight, so show him what you can do, Glasgow. I want to see that balcony move, 'cause if it don't, we're fucked.' Then as the Rats hit the tick-tock intro of 'Like Clockwork,' the balcony army jumped as one, literally making the Apollo quake in time to the Rats. I was no longer just impressed by the band. I was a believer. 'I dig the Rats,' Geldof declared to me proudly at one point. 'If I wasn't in the band, I'd go see them every night.' I figured the rest of America would feel the same way.
Five months later, in New York, I saw that future go up in smoke. At the Palladium on East 14th Street, in front of a full house waiting to see if the Rats were truly the Next Big Thing, Geldof introduced 'Rat Trap' with his signature blarney. First, he noted that 'Rat Trap' was the only Rats song on U.S. radio because DJs thought it sounded like Bruce Springsteen. 'But I want you to know,' Geldof added with a loaded chuckle and cod gravitas and in a US DJ accent, 'that Bruce Springsteen couldn't write a song half as good as this if he tried.' That laugh should have been a dead giveaway; I knew he was kidding. Nobody else did.
'They erupted in boos or maybe it was Brooooce. Whatever' Geldof remembers, grinning, twenty-five years later. 'We did that song. It was a good gig. But that was it. We were fucked.' The Rats would be back, playing dynamite shows in the U.S in 1980 and '81. They would keep releasing fine records here until the very end. But they would never do in America what I had seen them do in Glasgow.
'I don't think I had the overwhelming need to dominate America that was in other bands,' Geldof claims. 'But of course American music formed my rock & roll consciousness.' One of his fondest musical memories is bumbling up to the stage at Slattery's, a bar in Dublin, when he was fifteen, 'waving a harmonica at a bemused John Lee Hooker, drunkenly leaning over his shoulder and lurching into his microphone, as this very cool, bemused man just looked up at me, letting me blow this shite harmonica.
'I was weaned on this. Bob Dylan told me to look at Woody Guthrie, and I did. I took the name Boomtown Rats from his book, Bound for Glory. Mick Jagger told me to listen to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. That was my upbringing. It was never a thing for me to come to America and beat you at your own game. What I did, in my arrogance, assume was that because we had so many monster hits in Europe, America would just fall prostrate at my feet.' He laughs. 'They didn’t give a fuck.'
The hard road to that realisation runs all the way through The Fine Art of Surfacing. Geldof had been this way before, when Mercury Records in America buried the Rats' spectacular 1977 debut, The Boomtown Rats, with incompetence and under-promotion. Columbia in the U.S. went to the other, ludicrous extreme for A Tonic for the Troops. In January, 1979, the label sent Geldof and Fingers on a grueling, good-will crusade to radio stations across the country, where they were mostly grilled by knuckleheads in satin baseball jackets who knew nothing about the Rats, cared less and couldn't pronounce 'Geldof.' We were told, 'You gotta be fucking good to these guys,' Geldof says, recalling the band's first show in the States, a late-February disaster at a radio-programmers convention in San Diego, California. 'Red flag to a bull,' Geldof concedes, without apology. His remarks on stage, about the all-Styx-all-the-time state of American rock radio, got the Rats thrown off dozens of playlists overnight.
Ultimately, Geldof discovered more about America and himself - particularly the price of the life he had chosen and fought for - than America learned about him during the rough passage that climaxed at the Palladium in New York. He wrote and sang about it all with trademark flair and candor on The Fine Art of Surfacing - in the paranoia lacing the sunshine'n'thunder of 'Someone’s Looking at You'; in the kinetic ennui of 'Nothing Happened Today' and the caustic Bowie-ana of 'Having My Picture Taken'; and in the uncompromising grandeur of 'I Don’t Like Mondays,' the Rats' second, million-selling single after 'Rat Trap.' Geldof was at a college radio station in Atlanta, Georgia on Monday, January 29th, 1979, when a wire-service flash came in about a sniper in San Diego: sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer, who was firing a rifle at an elementary school from her home across the street. A journalist had called the house and, incredibly, got Spencer on the phone. When asked why she was shooting at innocent kids, Spencer replied, 'I don’t like Mondays.' By the time she stopped, two adults were dead and eight children were wounded, along with a police officer.
Geldof responded to the senselessness of that morning, and his haywire feelings about selling himself on one side of the country while children were under attack on the other, with a quick, frank majesty. A month after writing 'Mondays' (originally to a reggae beat), he unveiled it in San Diego, at that DJs' soiree, with Fingers on the piano. There was no arrangement; the rest of the Rats hadn't rehearsed it yet. Lacking an intro, Geldof asked Fingers to do 'one of those Disney-waterfall things,' eventually set in ivory on the single.
As if there wasn't enough irony to go around, 'I Don’t Like Mondays' - song about America, written and debuted in America, arranged and recorded with unbeatable big-ballad savvy - died there, at Number 73 in Billboard, the victim of an all-but-official radio station ban. Further paradox: The Fine Art of Surfacing has the peculiar honor of being the Rats' most commercially successful album, in America as well as Britain, and their most musically underrated. The battle for America brought out the suffocating darkness in Geldof’s songwriting; it also unleashed the fuck-it-all, Irish-R&B-warrior fight in the Rats. Geldof spared no acid or self-examination; the Rats, working for the third and last time with producer Robert John 'Mutt' Lange, threw themselves into the songs with compelling ferocity.
The compression of hooks, licks and sonic kicks perfectly matched the air of siege: the crack of Crowe's drumming and the tangled twang of Roberts' and Cott's guitars in 'Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)'; the swinging-cantina beat and Sixties ice-cream organ of the suicide story 'Diamond Smiles'. The high cost of those first maddening months in America came through especially bleak and clear in 'Sleep,' a restless Gothic lament written by Fingers but sung by Geldof ('Tired and sick, sick and tired/I’m falling on my feet') with autobiographical force.
Surfacing was so packed with action - 'the manic overacting of Sparks and the jock-rock cool of Thin Lizzy,' as I put it in my original, enthusiastic Rolling Stone review - that, to be honest, even I missed a few things at the time. What I thought was a flippant, show-off smack at organized religion in 'Nice 'N' Neat' was actually rooted in earnest, heated debates about faith and truth that Geldof used to have with a close friend who had gone on to become a priest. I also suggested that Surfacing's frantic, closing tale 'When the Night Comes' was a rewrite of 'Rat Trap' with Spanish-guitar decor. I was more right than I knew: The song was, in fact, the final episode in a Dublin trilogy that began with 'Joey's On The Street Again' from The Boomtown Rats and included 'Rat Trap' - ll written, as Geldof puts it, 'in that Van Morrison street style.' The characters in each song were people that Geldof says he knew in Dublin, all locked into lives of numbing routine and bare-minimum promise: 'The kid in 'Rat Trap' - his real name was Paul. I worked with him in a meat factory. It was very dispiriting to me, these situations I found myself in, in Dublin. I had to get out of there.' Which he did.
Yet for all of Surfacing's claustrophobia and despair, the music was high-octane and deliriously ornate, Geldof says, 'because I wouldn't let that other stuff overwhelm me. I was doubting everything. But I was also having fun. And I was wondering, 'How long does this go on? Am I that interested in this life? Does it really matter if I'm in the American charts or not?'
In the end, it didn't: Geldof's full, second life as a solo artist and the founding conscience of Band Aid and Live Aid has proven that. And while the Boomtown Rats never fully recovered from their collision with America, I know what might have been - indeed, should have been. It’s all here on this album.
And I'll always have Glasgow.
