Post by johnfoyle on Mar 8, 2005 19:33:27 GMT
The Sunday Times , March 6 '05
Michael Ross criticises Bob Geldof's work with The Boomtown Rats and finishes with this -
Quote -
The groups that best caught the reality of the period — the Radiators and later Microdisney — sold few records but proved the most influential on their peers. Crucially, unlike Geldof, their work was created through the prism of political consciousness. Their music became an alternative narrative that helped the new Ireland emerge long after the Rats had departed, particularly the Radiators’ Ghostown, which makes Geldof’s work look like the self-serving mediocrity it is.
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Here's the article in full -
Comment: Michael Ross
In the oldest corridors of Blackrock College, with their coffin-like lockers and their sickly smell of beeswax, some class photographs from the early 1970s attract particular attention — featuring as they do the school’s most famous and most vituperative past pupil, Robert Frederick Xenon Geldof.
Appearances can be deceptive, but it’s hard to square the gawky youth beaming from the class photographs with the Geldof whose years spent in the school were, by his account, like a slow crucifixion, his disdain of rugby rendering him a pariah, his distribution, in a quaintly 1970s gesture, of Chairman Mao’s little red book earning him expulsion. After he left it, Geldof lost little time denouncing his alma mater, describing it as “a hovel” in the Boomtown Rats ’ first interview on The Late Late Show.
Curiously, the school’s lay teachers, a generally conceited lot, took greatest offence. The Holy Ghost Fathers, on the other hand, kindly men in the main, who schooled the brats of south Dublin under sufferance and pined quietly for the African missions they had left behind, could not understand what had gotten into young Geldof. They recalled him as a polite young man who gave them little trouble.
Geldof’s miserable time in Blackrock became, in his 1986 biography and in countless interviews, one of the causal explanations of his work, and shorthand for the awfulness of 1970s Ireland from which the Rats emerged. It still comes up in articles about Geldof, as in an Observer piece from a couple of years ago, which recounted how the singer, passing through a village in Ethiopia as part of his work for the Third World, paused to ask a young boy who his worst teacher was.
Just as he denounced Blackrock, Geldof decried at every turn the narrow-mindedness of the Ireland from which he emerged, characterising the Rats’ resistance to it as one of the locally defining struggles of his generation, writing about it in songs such as Banana Republic. Indeed, the Rats wrote about nothing else apart from the wretchedness of 1970s Ireland, one of the reasons why their career ran out of steam relatively quickly, and why their remastered back catalogue sounds so dated.
For all Geldof’s articulate rage, the Rats came across like nothing so much as Macbeth’s baleful summary of human existence: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Musically they were a hairsbreadth above other faux new wave Dublin acts of the period, such as the Vipers and Berlin, but that was little to boast about.
They influenced few if any other bands, and quickly disappeared to London, their subsequent pronouncements on Ireland indicating only their detachment from what was going on here.
The groups that best caught the reality of the period — the Radiators and later Microdisney — sold few records but proved the most influential on their peers. Crucially, unlike Geldof, their work was created through the prism of political consciousness. Their music became an alternative narrative that helped the new Ireland emerge long after the Rats had departed, particularly the Radiators’ Ghostown, which makes Geldof’s work look like the self-serving mediocrity it is.
Michael Ross criticises Bob Geldof's work with The Boomtown Rats and finishes with this -
Quote -
The groups that best caught the reality of the period — the Radiators and later Microdisney — sold few records but proved the most influential on their peers. Crucially, unlike Geldof, their work was created through the prism of political consciousness. Their music became an alternative narrative that helped the new Ireland emerge long after the Rats had departed, particularly the Radiators’ Ghostown, which makes Geldof’s work look like the self-serving mediocrity it is.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the article in full -
Comment: Michael Ross
In the oldest corridors of Blackrock College, with their coffin-like lockers and their sickly smell of beeswax, some class photographs from the early 1970s attract particular attention — featuring as they do the school’s most famous and most vituperative past pupil, Robert Frederick Xenon Geldof.
Appearances can be deceptive, but it’s hard to square the gawky youth beaming from the class photographs with the Geldof whose years spent in the school were, by his account, like a slow crucifixion, his disdain of rugby rendering him a pariah, his distribution, in a quaintly 1970s gesture, of Chairman Mao’s little red book earning him expulsion. After he left it, Geldof lost little time denouncing his alma mater, describing it as “a hovel” in the Boomtown Rats ’ first interview on The Late Late Show.
Curiously, the school’s lay teachers, a generally conceited lot, took greatest offence. The Holy Ghost Fathers, on the other hand, kindly men in the main, who schooled the brats of south Dublin under sufferance and pined quietly for the African missions they had left behind, could not understand what had gotten into young Geldof. They recalled him as a polite young man who gave them little trouble.
Geldof’s miserable time in Blackrock became, in his 1986 biography and in countless interviews, one of the causal explanations of his work, and shorthand for the awfulness of 1970s Ireland from which the Rats emerged. It still comes up in articles about Geldof, as in an Observer piece from a couple of years ago, which recounted how the singer, passing through a village in Ethiopia as part of his work for the Third World, paused to ask a young boy who his worst teacher was.
Just as he denounced Blackrock, Geldof decried at every turn the narrow-mindedness of the Ireland from which he emerged, characterising the Rats’ resistance to it as one of the locally defining struggles of his generation, writing about it in songs such as Banana Republic. Indeed, the Rats wrote about nothing else apart from the wretchedness of 1970s Ireland, one of the reasons why their career ran out of steam relatively quickly, and why their remastered back catalogue sounds so dated.
For all Geldof’s articulate rage, the Rats came across like nothing so much as Macbeth’s baleful summary of human existence: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Musically they were a hairsbreadth above other faux new wave Dublin acts of the period, such as the Vipers and Berlin, but that was little to boast about.
They influenced few if any other bands, and quickly disappeared to London, their subsequent pronouncements on Ireland indicating only their detachment from what was going on here.
The groups that best caught the reality of the period — the Radiators and later Microdisney — sold few records but proved the most influential on their peers. Crucially, unlike Geldof, their work was created through the prism of political consciousness. Their music became an alternative narrative that helped the new Ireland emerge long after the Rats had departed, particularly the Radiators’ Ghostown, which makes Geldof’s work look like the self-serving mediocrity it is.