After more than three decades on the backburner, Irish rockers The Boomtown Rats are back in the studio, with frontman Sir Bob Geldof announcing their music plans in a new interview.
The band first broke up in 1986, two years after their sixth album In The Long Grass, but reformed in 2013 having replaced original members Johnnie Fingers and Gerry Cott.
Geldof has of course spent the intervening years pursuing a solo career, while also famously working on his musical charity efforts with Band Aid, and running monster benefit concerts like Live Aid and its follow-up Live 8, earning himself a knighthood in the process.
With a few years under their belts playing live gigs in this new iteration, they’ve recently turned their attention to the studio, where they’ve been very busy.
“We’ve done 26 tracks,” he revealed to The Mirror. “We’re mixing them now, I’ve done the vocals on them. We’re getting really excited, we think they’re great. We did a lot of songs. We have a situation now where a song comes out and a day later it’s dead.
Why so many tracks? Well, it seems the band are anticipating quite a demand for new music, and have a high-concept plan for the release.
“What we’re probably going to do is issue a series of EPs,” Bob reveals. “I’m going to call the album Mega. I’ll release four tracks and then a couple of months later another four tracks, and then another four, which allows us to space out the music but also do different things.
“I’ve no idea if we’ll call each EP something different, but when we collect them and make one album with it then that album will be called Mega.”
The Boomtown Rats are often remembered outside of the U.K. as one of the definitive one-hit-wonders of their era for their famous track ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, although that’s not strictly true, as their previous single ‘Rat Trap’ had beaten it to the punch as their first U.K. #1 single, and they managed a string of top 40 singles in the half-decade surrounding its release.
We’ll have to wait and see if the resurgent Rats and their multi-part release can produce a mega-hit on the scale of Geldof’s earlier work, like the world-shaking charity hit ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’.
