The Boomtown Rats – I Don’t Like Mondays

Watching the video for I Don’t Like Mondays is like watching a tragedy echo through pop culture. It begins with children sitting in pews, mouthing “Tell me why,” before the band takes over the scene. Bob Geldof stands against a stark white backdrop, sunglasses on, the visuals alternating between domestic imagery and surreal chroma-key effects. The polished look contrasts sharply with the dark story behind the lyrics, giving every frame a haunting edge.

Released in July 1979 as the lead single from The Fine Art of Surfacing, I Don’t Like Mondays was written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers and produced by Phil Wainman. The song was inspired by the school shooting carried out by Brenda Ann Spencer in San Diego on January 29, 1979. When asked why she had done it, Spencer chillingly replied, “I don’t like Mondays.” Geldof, who read about the incident via a telex report during a U.S. radio interview, later said he returned to his hotel and wrote the song almost immediately. The result was one of pop’s most unsettling anthems — a reflection on senseless violence disguised as a piano-driven pop lament.

The music video, directed by David Mallet, underscores that tension with minimalist precision. Children’s faces, stark lighting, and abstract imagery merge into a disquieting tableau that balances innocence with unease. The staging — white rooms, slow pans, fragmented gestures — became a hallmark of Mallet’s late-’70s visual style, also seen in his work for David Bowie and Queen. Here, it amplifies the contrast between the song’s melodic beauty and its horrifying backstory.

The track opens with a Beatles-esque piano line and builds into a lush pop-rock arrangement led by Johnnie Fingers’ keys and Geldof’s narrative vocal. Despite its grim subject, the single became an enormous hit, topping the UK Singles Chart for four weeks and ranking as the sixth-best-selling British single of 1979. In the United States, the song peaked at #73 on the Billboard Hot 100, where many stations — particularly in California — hesitated to play it given its real-world inspiration.

In the UK, the song earned critical recognition as well as commercial success. It won both **Best Pop Song** and **Outstanding British Lyric** at the Ivor Novello Awards, confirming Geldof’s reputation as a songwriter able to merge social commentary with pop form. Its narrative power — clear-eyed, literate, and uncomfortable — made it stand out from the era’s more conventional hits.

Fifteen years later, in 1994, I Don’t Like Mondays returned to the charts when it was re-released to promote The Boomtown Rats’ greatest-hits compilation Loudmouth – The Best of Bob Geldof & The Boomtown Rats. The reissue reached #38 on the UK Singles Chart, introducing the song to a new generation and reaffirming its uneasy place in pop history.

On stage, the song grew even more powerful. At Live Aid in 1985, Geldof’s deliberate pause after the line “the lesson today is how to die” left Wembley Stadium in silence — an unforgettable moment that reminded audiences how music could carry grief, outrage, and reflection all at once. Decades later, I Don’t Like Mondays endures not just as The Boomtown Rats’ signature song, but as a stark example of how pop can turn tragedy into something that demands to be remembered.