THE Rats are back in Belfast tonight. Is it just a one-off gig or are you doing more live stuff around it?
Well, we can hardly f***in' do a tour of Ulster can we? I think it would be thin gruel We're doing Dublin tomorrow night too to kick-off the start of the festival thing all over Europe, which I love doing.
The last time the band – Pete Briquette (bass), Simon Crowe (drums) and Garry Roberts (guitar) – were in town was at The Ulster Hall on your first reunion tour back in 2013. The reunion seems to have stuck?
I never think of it as a 're-union', more as a 'regrouping'. I know that's probably a subtle difference but in my head it's a larger difference. It's a revitalising of that which I knew was already there but had forgotten how good it was.
I thought I'd just do the Isle of Wight (Festival) and a couple of others because they're mega and fun, but then the character who's on stage with the Rats turned out to be – and we're sort of getting into pseudo-Bowie stuff here – an avatar of a part of my personality which I hadn't really understood.
It's a completely different person: 'Bobby Boomtown' is brash, he doesn't give a f***, he will say whatever. He's about giving it large and having a laugh and that seems to be important to me.
It must have been interesting to reawaken that inner enfant terrible in your 60s. Did you worry about having to living up to his reputation?
I was moaning at the beginning like, y'know, 'I'm not gonna suddenly get out and do what I did when I was a kid and leap around and all that' – but, the minute the whole thing started, there I was – leaping around like when I was a kid.
But it's literally not in any way thought through. That particular band just start playing those particular songs and off I go.
Then there was the rediscovery of how good the songs were and of how good the band were, because, well... I never really enjoyed it that much first time around. The triumphs I liked and enjoyed, but they're instantly followed with "F***, what next?!". So, when we get to number one (with 1978's Rat Trap, the first ever Irish rock song to top the UK charts), you're panicking that anything less than another number one and you're on the way out.
But you did follow Rat Trap with another chart-topper, I Don't Like Mondays. The Rats were in the top 20 right from your very first single Lookin' After No 1 in 1977, so was the anxiety of ambition and competition always there?
Yeah: "Did we sell more tickets than the Pistols?" "Were the tickets more expensive than The Clash?" The record company is on your case, the manager is on your case, in my case the band look to you for new songs. All that went on, but suddenly now the songs which you were too close to and too worried about have – again, w***y word – 'marinated' in your head and they sound really good. They sound very pertinent to the political and economic aromas of the times, so they don't sound nostalgic – to me at least – in any sense.
And there's the other acknowledgement, or perhaps I wasn't even really aware of it, that the songs probably only work because they are driven by that set of individuals who make up The Boomtown Rats.
It's a very powerful outfit, which I hadn't realised. So, with all those things going on, of course it's pleasure now – it's pure pleasure. There isn't that career thing going on, there isn't any doubt. All that's left is pure enjoyment.
And that literally is where I am – because I would tell you otherwise.
It's interesting to hear that you'd forgotten the power of stuff like She's So Modern's ode to London girls and your mid-teenage lust anthem Mary of The 4th Form. Now that you're all getting on a bit, can you still get away with doing Mary?
Not only can I get away with it, I wouldn't give a f*** if I got away with it or not! I would absolutely play that song anywhere, I love it!
I thought it was a good one because musically it obviously refers to Gloria and, y'know (sings) 'boom-boom, doodle-oodle-doo-doo', all those sorta rhythm and blues riffs, that's what it's constantly referring to – it's in that mode. To me it sounds like a standard – and for the Rats, it is a standard.
I just wish a station would play it when you're in the car one day: the f***in energy just b*****king out of the radio, it's like "just f*** off!". You're just grinning with the excitement of it.
For years I thought I hated She's So Modern. I really thought it was f***in' lame, because we wrote it specifically to be a hit. We were Paddies in London for the first time and that was our first London song. Suddenly I was in babe central with all these girls like Julie Parsons, Magenta Devine and Paula Yates who were just as up-front and ballsy as guys – and I liked it!
We stacked riffs on top of riffs and used every trick in the book to try and make it a hit (it hit the magic number 12) and until the Rats regrouped, I couldn't play it. But now, I love it. It's very odd to see 14-year-old girls in the audience all singing "she's so 20th century, she's so 1970s" – it's like, "Dude, you weren't even born in the year 2000!"
You included two new tunes on the 2013 compilation Back to Boomtown: Classic Rats hits, the electro-tinged number The Boomtown Rats and a more 'traditional' Rats song, Back To Boomtown. Have you continued to work on new stuff?
Yeah, I love this new way of doing things on computers where you can augment that which is already there – it's not an attempt to be groovy and hip, it just f***in' fascinates me, because tools like that weren't necessarily available to us back in the day.
Like, I'll go round to Pete's and work on stuff up in his bedroom like we were kids again, only now we're using Pro-Tools and all that s***e. I have about 182 new tunes on my phone, and we're probably going to record 15 of them in the studio after these gigs.
But the thing is, who gives a f*** if we do new stuff or not? 'Nobody', is the truth – we're not deluding ourselves. And I'm more than happy doing the songs that we wrote when we were kids.
If one day 'Bobby Boomtown' doesn't go "F*** yeah!" when we do, then I'll stop – honest to God!
:: The Boomtown Rats, tonight, Mandela Hall, QUBSU, Belfast.
