Mondo Bongo Tour 1981 (Toronto Gig Review)

Rats Never Stay With The Pack
by Paul McGrath(The Globe and Mail)

Ireland's best whisked in and out of town this week. Thursday night it was The Chieftains, the best known traditional group, then last night at Maple Leaf Gardens, The Boomtown Rats, the island's only well-known rock group.

A couple of inches of blarney could forge a non-existent link between the two, but they were plying different trades entirely: The Chieftains were locked in a regional setting while The Rats, led by the well-travelled Bob Geldof, were playing global rock and roll, the music that has no home.

Geldof and his quintet are most remembered for 'I Don't Like Mondays', a dramatic ballad about teenage confusion that turns to decision in a nasty way. There hasn't been much since, but there were three or four selections in last night's performance, all of them from a new album, that are likely to add to their mystique. Geldof, chief songwriter, singer and focal point, opened the show with the best, Mood Mambo, a frenetic drum exercise that started out with only Geldof and bongos and ended grandiosely after a curtain rose behind the singer to reveal the rest of the band singing a low vaguely African chorus over the rhythm. It was as exotic a piece as Geldof has ever written, a startling way to open the show.

What followed was more mainstream, but distinctly beyond the old or new wave norm. Straight Up and This Is My Room were up-tempo rockers, the second another snippet of pre-adult thought. Things African were again revealed, in the same chorus idea, in Up All Night.

Through all of this Geldof maintained an unusually warm relationship with the crowd. This has always been his forte; his song writing involves itself in people's problems, and in performance he goes out of his way to grab his audience visually and vocally. As is now customary, he rendered obsolete half the hired security force early in the show by inviting the crowd to fill the no-go area between the front row and the stage. It was done, in under 10 seconds, bad news for those who had waited in line to get the best seats in the house, but a much better situation for a rock and roll show.

The band shows no signs of being left behind by Geldof's stylistic shifts. They were as comfortable with Mood Mambo as they were with I Don't Like Mondays and other now standard tunes. Johnnie Finger, the keyboard player, is still the shinning light behind geldof, the only one capable of stealing any attention away from the singer. Last night he may not have overpowered Geldof musically, but he had him licked in the costume department.

Credit: Michael Tutton of Canada
(see his band: Marni And The Men)