Best of Boomtown Rats

Other great hits include Rat Trap, Looking After No. 1 and She's So Modern, all of which reached the upper echelons of the UK charts. I also love the Springsteenesque excursion Joey's On The Street Again and I Never Loved Eva Braun, whilst Diamond Smiles shows them at their lyrical best. The passionate Mary Of The Fourth Form and the urgent Like Clockwork are two of their very best songs.

There are some serious omissions however - Don't Believe What You Read and Me And Howard Hughes from the Tonic For The Troops album and Kicks from the debut also deserve to be remembered.

Besides that gripe, it is still a great showcase of a very original 1970s group that combined melodic flair with intelligent and sometimes very witty lyrics. What a pity that the Boomtown Rats had to fold so soon. If they had carried on, who knows what amazing music might have resulted?

Diddly squat apart from Tonic for the Troops, and a half baked collection of tracks ruined by Geldof's faltering efforts as a solo artist (Great Song of Indifference excepted). Less important bands of that like the Vapors and the Flys have more extensive back catalogue!

Most familiar to all will be Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays, the two number one singles that were sandwiched between the Grease phenomenon and the advent of the Police. For a short period, The Boomtown Rats, and in particular, Geldof and Paula Yates, were foremost in the nation's consciousness.

Before this came some great songs such as Joey's on the Street Again, Looking after number one, Mary of the Fourth Form, She's So Modern and Like Clockwork, which gave the Rats their early chart success, developing their craft to become chart toppers. Neon Heart, I Never Loved Eva Braun, and I Can Make It If You Can also come from that prolific period.

Post I Don't like Mondays, it could be said that the band started to lose affection from the public due in part to Geldof's celebrity. Diamond Smiles was released to indifference (possibly the weakest track on this collection), but there was the marvellous Someone's Looking at You and Banana Republic (Geldof's description of Ireland), before the Rats chart success went on the wane. And for the first time, the melancholic Fall Down is on CD, which would be worth the purchase price on its own.

Nevertheless, the Rats continued to plug away and make some great music, including the fantastic House on Fire, possibly their greatest moment, which for some unknown reason is omitted from this collection.

In their last days, the Rats showed an impressive return to form with a great triumvirate of singles (on CD for the first time) including Dave, a masterpiece that deserved a bigger audience.

Like any retrospective, it lacks some of the better album tracks (Howard Hughes, Kicks, Go Man Go), at the expense of some weak singles (Diamond Smiles, Never In a Million Years and Elephant's Graveyard), but that does not detract from the overall quality of this release.

This is an essential purchase for anyone who has enjoyed anything from the Boomtown Rats. For those who did not purchase their albums, it is probably the best way of listening to the greatest new wave band. And for those of us that did, there are half a dozen tracks that are finally on CD. Those with patience could wait for the re-release of the back catalogue, but no one knows when that will be.

Any reason to not have this ? Not having a CD player is the only one I can think of!

They were never quite the punk band that they were made out to be, with some wide musical influences shining through. I mean, how many other punk bands had a pianist? Although the very early stuff was more in the punk vein, it moved towards more complex arrangements and musicianship in a very short space of time.

The early material is well represented here, with 'She's So Modern', 'Like Clockwork', and the seminal 'Rat Trap' which helped define the path for new wave. Of course, 'I Don't Like Mondays' is here - how could it not be? It was one of the greatest songs of the 70's (only just making it as it was late '79), being both contentious and brilliant. No punk/new wave band had released a piano only single before, and this was such a wake up call for everyone, that they soon realised that post-punk music had something much bigger to offer.

The later material is not bad either, with not so successful yet pretty good songs like 'Banana Republic' and 'Diamond Smiles' fitting in well here. Sorry Sir Bob - you should have finished here, as this was by far your best!