The Boomtown Rats

Rocker

Gave 'The Best Of The Boomtown Rats' a spin in the CD player and was floored by the quality of the songs and the playing. I liked the band when they came on the scene around the late 1970s but did not fully appreciate the skilled songwriting or the playing on the recordings. Another surprise is that the songs still sound as good and fresh as ever. Well worth seeking out....

dindude

Yeah stuff like Diamond Smiles and Someone Looking At You are insainly good guitar pop songs 

ICBM

Rat Trap is one of the greatest songs ever written in my opinion.

A Tonic For The Troops is absolutely chock-full of classics as well as that, Like Clockwork and She's So Modern - there isn't a poor track on it, and as you say the musicianship and arrangements are superb too. Oddly, it was produced by Mutt Lange, whose production I usually dislike.

The Fine Art Of Surfacing is nearly as good and has I Don't Like Mondays on it - the really shocking thing about that song is that when it was written, school shootings in the USA were so rare and shocking that a band from another country wrote a song about one. Now, they're so commonplace that a shooting on that scale - two dead, nine injured - would probably not even make the national news.

After that I really don't know what happened...

Rocker

There is a feature about the shooting on the internet @ICBM, google I don’t like Monday’s and follow the links. 

The BR song ‘Banana Republic’ is about Ireland as it was back then. Sadly not a lot has changed in the meantime. 

sev112

I play Rat Trap acoustically, goes down well

stopped playing “I don’t like Monday’s” publically cos the theme is a bit grim these days, which is a shame as it’s a good song to play

always loved diamond smiles

merlin

I liked their eponymous first album best. 

axisus

So many great bands in that era to be honest