Day After Day #73: I Don't Like Mondays

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

I Don't Like Mondays (1979)

Long before Law & Order was doing "ripped from the headlines" storylines, musicians were using the news as inspiration. Bob Geldof of the Irish new wave act The Boomtown Rats was doing an interview in the Georgia State University radio station WRAS in January 1979 when he read a report about a school shooting at an elementary school in San Diego. Sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer fired into an elementary school playground, killing two adults and injuring eight children and a police officer. When asked why she did it, Spencer said, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

Geldof later said the line "Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload" came to him right after the interview and Geldof and keyboard player Johnnie Fingers wrote a song about such a senseless act. The band performed "I Don't Like Mondays" in concert less than a month later, originally intending to use it as a B-side, but U.S. audiences reacted well to it so the song was released as a single in the UK in July '79 and in the U.S. in October. 

School shootings were still pretty rare back in 1979, even in the U.S. Spencer fired 36 times into the schoolyard that morning as students were going into the school. She barricaded herself inside her home for several hours before she surrendered. Spencer was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She was sentenced to life in prison and is still incarcerated.

The Boomtown Rats had formed in 1975, releasing their first album two years later. Their second album, the Mutt Lange-produced A Tonic for the Troops, followed in 1978. It featured three U.K. hits including the #1 song "Rat Trap," which was the first rock song by an Irish band to hit #1 in the U.K. The band had a lower profile in the U.S. but was making inroads when its third album The Fine Art of Surfacing came out in June 1979.

Up in Toronto, I had never heard of the band until "I Don't Like Mondays" came out and immediately, I was hooked. Led by Fingers' on piano and accompanied by orchestral strings, the song was unusual sounding, especially for a new wave band. And of course, the lyrics. Even though I hadn't heard about the school shooting, "I Don't Like Mondays" was a grabber.

"The silicon chip inside her head/Gets switched to overload/And nobody's gonna go to school today/She's going to make them stay at home/And daddy doesn't understand it/He always said she was good as gold/And he can see no reason/'Cause there are no reasons/What reasons do you need to be shown?"

The song was a huge hit in the U.K., where it went to #1, and in Canada, where it went to #4 on the singles chart. It was catchy and shocking and sad all at the same time. The Rats caught some heat for capitalizing on a tragedy, and Geldof later said he regretted writing the song because he made Spencer famous. But there's no denying the power of the song.

Of course, some folks who didn't know or care about the story behind it just adopted the song as an anti-Monday screed because who doesn't hate Mondays?

"Tell me why?/I don't like Mondays/I wanna shoot/The whole day down."

Geldof and the Rats released a few more albums and had some hits, but he became bigger than the band eventually. He starred in Pink Floyd's movie of The Wall and then in the mid-'80s became famous for organizing Live Aid, where the Rats played at Wembley. The band split up a year later and reunited in 2013 for a tour. They released a new album in 2020.

Meanwhile, school and other mass shootings have become a common occurrence here in the U.S. Crazy to think that it's been 45 years since "I Don't Like Mondays" and we're no closer to a solution.