#3: I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats
Peak Month: December 1979
16 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #73
YouTube.com: “I Don’t Like Mondays”
Lyrics: “I Don’t Like Mondays”
The Boomtown Rats formed in Dublin in 1975. Bob Geldof was born in 1951 in a town on the coast south of Dublin called. Dún Laoghaire. After graduating from school, he had several jobs including working for The Georgia Straight newspaper in Vancouver, before returning to Ireland. Pete Briquette (born Patrick Martin Cusack) was born in 1954 in Ballyjamesduff where peat briquettes were burned for heat instead of coal. Garrick Roberts was born in Dublin in 1950, while Gerry Cott was born there in 1954. Cott learned to play flamenco guitar at the age of 11, and saw Bob Dylan in concert on May 5, 1966. The experience inspired Cott. Simon Crowe was born in Dublin in 1955, while Johnnie Fingers (born John Peter Moylett) was born in Dublin in 1956. When the band formed in 1975 they first named themselves The Nightlife Thugs. But they changed their name after Bob Geldof read Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory. In Guthrie’s autobiography, the Boomtown Rats is the name of Guthrie’s boyhood gang.