Canadian folk rock band Crash Test Dummies released their second album God Shuffled His Feet in October 1993. The first single from the album was Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, was released in the same month. The song’s distinctive chorus of simply “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm …” sung in singer, songwriter and guitarist Brad Roberts’ distinctive bass-baritone voice helped to make the song the band’s most successful single and an international hit. The song was a number one hit in Germany, Australia and on the US Modern Rock Track chart. Additionally, it reached number 2 in the United Kingdom and number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Of writing Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, Roberts, whom had studied to be a professor of English literature prior to the band’s success, told The Independent in May 1994:
“When I wrote that song, it didn’t flow through me, I wasn’t inspired. I sat down and I decided I had certain themes that I wanted to make sure I handled in a way that wasn’t sentimental but at the same time was powerful and poignant. I wanted to put a funny angle on it without being merely slapstick. It all boils down to careful scrutiny of what you’re doing, your rational faculties being brought into play”.
Each verse of Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm deals with the isolation and suffering of a child, two of whom have a physical abnormality. The first verse of the song tells of how “Once there was this kid who, Got into an accident and couldn’t come to school, But when he finally came back, His hair had turned from black into bright white, He said that it was from when, The cars had smashed so hard”. Ironically, in 2000, Roberts was nearly killed in a car accident but escaped with a broken arm before his car exploded.
Meanwhile, in the second verse, Roberts sings about a girl with birth defects: “Once there was a girl who, Wouldn’t go and change with the girls in the change room, But when they finally made here, They saw birthmarks all over her body, She couldn’t quite explain it, They’d always just been there”.
Following this, the bridge of the song expresses the boy and girl’s relief that “one kid had it worse than that” before Roberts tells of how “then there was this boy whose, Parents made him come directly home right after school, And when they went to their church, They shook and lurched all over the church floor, He couldn’t quite explain it, they’d always just gone there”. During a live performance of Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm for Dutch radio station Kink FM, Roberts whispered during the third verse, “Pentecostal”, inferring that the lyrics relate to the Christian denomination.
Sometimes when the band perform the song in concert, the character in the third verse is replaced by a boy whose mother disposed of his tonsils after a tonsillectomy, thus depriving him of the possibility of bringing them to show and tell.
The promotional video for the single sets the song’s lyrics as the script for a series of one-act plays performed by school children. During the performance of the plays, the band are seen playing the song at the stage side.
Despite the success of the single, Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm is constantly mentioned on lists of bad songs. The song was ranked number 15 on VH1’s 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever, whilst Rolling Stone magazine named it as the “15th Most Annoying Song”. On AOL Radio’s list of 100 Worst Songs Ever in 2010, Matthew Wilkening described the song as “Not only bad but amazingly monotone and depressing”, and “Absolutely the last song to play for your sad friends”. On a positive note though, in 2011, VH1 named Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm the 31st greatest one-hit wonder of the 1990’s.
School’s Out, from Alice Cooper’s 1972 album of the same name, became the singer’s breakthrough hit. The song became Alice Cooper’s first major hit single, reaching number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart and number one on the UK singles chart for three weeks. The single marked the first time that Alice Cooper was seen as more than just a theatrical novelty act. Due to the huge success of the single, its parent album also became highly successful, reaching number two on the Billboard 200 chart. On his radio show, Nights With Alice Cooper in 2008, Cooper explained the inspiration behind the song when he was asked “What’s the greatest three minutes of your life?”:
“There’s two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you’re just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you’re sitting there and it’s like a slow fuse burning. I said, ‘If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it’s going to be so big’.”
Additionally, Cooper went on to joke that the main riff of the song, written by Glen Buxton, was inspired by Miles Davis. Cooper has also explained on various occasions that School’s Out was also inspired by a warning often said in Bowery Boys movies in which one of the characters declares to another, “School is out”, meaning ‘to wise up’. The Bowery Boys were trouble-making New York City tough guy characters featured in 48 movies which ran from 1946 to 1958. The movies were often shown on American television throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, eating up a lot of air time on independent stations.
Lyrically, Schools Out discusses the students’ disdain for school life to the extreme with its chorus stating that “School’s out for summer, School’s out forever, School’s been blown to pieces”. Additionally, on the last chorus, Cooper plays on the idea of being absent from the school with the line, “School’s out with fever”, before bringing the song to a climax with the line, The song also incorporates part of the childhood rhyme, Pencils and Books in the lines “No more pencils, no more books, No more teachers’ dirty looks”. This part of the song includes children singing, an idea by producer Bob Ezrin. Ezrin would later use this effect when he produced another school-themed song, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, from the album The Wall (1979).
In later live performances of School’s Out, Cooper has been known to incorporate parts of the first verse of Another Brick in the Wall Part 2.
For the album version of the song, Ezrin also used a “turn off” effect on the school bell and sound effects at the end of the song. This effect is not present on the single version, with the school bell and effects simply fading out.
On the single’s release, some US and UK radio stations banned the song, deeming that it gave the students a negative impression of rebelliousness against childhood education. The song was also shunned by teachers, parents, principles, counsellors and psychologists who demanded that it be removed from radio playlists. In the UK, Mary Whitehouse, as part of her Clean Up TV Campaign, attempted to have School’s Out banned by the BBC, where it was receiving heavy play on their flagship music entertainment show, Top of the Pops. In August 1972, Whitehouse wrote to the BBC’s head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, complaining of the “gratuitous publicity” given to the song. She continued to say: “Because of this, millions of young people are imbibing a philosophy of violence and anarchy … It is our view that if there is increasing violence in the schools during the coming term, the BBC will not be able to evade their share of the blame”. Alice Cooper famously sent Whitehouse a bunch of flowers to thank her for helping to publicise the song in a manner that they couldn’t have imagined and helping the song to the top spot on the UK singles chart.
Today’s Song of the Day is a staple part of every school reunion and other school themed event in the UK. Madness’ Baggy Trousers, from their 1980 album, Absolutely, is also the antithesis to yesterday’s Song of the Day, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, from the album The Wall (1979).
In an interview with Uncut magazine in 2008, Suggs said:
“Baggy Trousers was sort of an answer to Pink Floyd, even at that age I thought the line “teacher leave the kids, alone” was a bit strange, sinister – though I think Floyd are a great band. It sounded self-indulgent to be going on how terrible school days had been; there was an inverted snobbery about it too. ‘You went to a posh school? You wanna try going to my school’”.
Baggy Trousers was written by lead singer Graham ‘Suggs’ McPherson and guitarist Chris Foreman, and finds the band remembering their school days with a joy and abandon which has made the song such an enduring classic. In an interview with The Daily Mirror on the 18th September 2009, Suggs said of the song’s title:
“The title refers to the high-waisted Oxford bags we used to wear with Kevin Keegan perms – the worst fashion known to humankind. It became so popular with primary school kids that it resulted in us doing a matinee tour”.
Coming across like Grange Hill put to music, lyrical reminisces include “Naughty boys in nasty schools, Headmaster’s breaking all the rules, Having fun and playing fools, Smashing up the woodwork tools”. The band began playing the song live in April 1980 and it was released as a single on the 5th September 1980, spending eleven weeks in the UK chart and reaching number three. It became the eleventh best-selling single of the year in the UK.
On the BBC documentary Young Guns Go for It in 2000, Suggs said of the song writing process of Baggy Trousers:
“I was very specifically trying to write a song in the style of Ian Dury, especially the songs he was writing then, which [were] often catalogues of phrases in a constant stream”.
The promotional video for Baggy Trousers was shot at a school and a park in Kentish Town. The video was Baggy Trousers was met with great critical response from the public and was popular with television shows such as Top of the Pops. In the whacky style which the band had by this point become renowned for, saxophonist, Lee Thompson decided that he wanted to fly through the air for his solo, which was achieved with wires hanging from a crane. Guitarist Chris Foreman spoke about Thompson’s flying moment in a 2008 Uncut interview:
“One night Lee and I had bunked into see Genesis at Drury Lane – at a point in the set there was an explosion and Peter Gabriel went flying through the air. That’s why Lee went flying in the Baggy Trousers video – he always vowed that when he got the chance he’d do the same thing”.
The resulting shot is one of the most popular and well remembered of any Madness videos, so much so that the moment was recreated at the band’s 1992 reunion concert, Madstock! It was also recreated during the band’s 2007 Christmas tour, at Glastonbury Festival in 2009 and on a 2011 television advert for Kronenbourg 1664, which features a slow version of Baggy Trousers.
The slow version was later released on the 3CD box set, A Guided Tour of Madness under the title Le Grand Pantalon.
In an interview with The Telegraph on the 1st June 2014, when asked “So is Baggy Trousers your pension plan?”, Suggs replied:
“Well in some strange way, yes. That’s the great thing about a song. You write a song on your own and come up with some funny old lyric, somebody puts music to it, and then it’s out there, doing its own thing. It may keep resurfacing and it may not, it may keep you going, it may just wither and die. But when they keep going, ironically, you have more chance of coming back because then they keep relating to different generations”.
The Wall is a 1979 rock opera by Pink Floyd exploring abandonment and isolation, symbolised by a metaphorical wall. The songs which make up The Wall form an approximate storyline of events in the life of protagonist, Pink. The character of Pink is based upon former Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd multi-instrumentalist Roger Waters, whose father was killed during the Second World War. Pink is oppressed by his overprotective mother and tormented at school by tyrannical, abusive teachers. These traumas become metaphorical “bricks in the wall”. He eventually becomes a rock star and due to these past traumas, his relationships are impaired by infidelity, drug use and outbursts of violence. His marriage begins to crumble and he finishes building his wall, thus completely cutting himself off from human contact. Here, hidden behind his wall, Pink’s crisis escalates, culminating in an hallucinatory on-stage performance where he believes he is a fascist dictator performing at concerts similar to Neo-Nazi rallies, at which he sets brownshirts-like men on fans whom he considers to be unworthy. He is tormented by guilt and places himself on trial with his inner judge ordering him to “tear down the wall”, thus opening himself up to the outside world.
In the canon of education inspired songs, Another Brick in the Wall is probably the best known. Another Brick in the Wall is split into three parts on the album, with each section taking on a different part of the story. With its catchy refrain of “Hey teacher, leave those kids alone” sung by the Islington Green School Fourth Form Music Class, Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) is the most widely recognised. When released as a single, the song became a number one single in fifteen countries, including the band’s native United Kingdom.
On The Wall album, Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) segues from previous song, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, with Roger Waters’ signature scream.
In the song, Waters speaks out against the cruel teachers from his childhood whom he blames for contributing to the bricks in the wall of his mental detachment. Waters attended The Perse School in Cambridge. Though he was a keen sportsman and highly regarded member of the high school’s cricket and rugby teams, he disliked his educational experience immensely. In the 2008 book Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake, Waters recalls his school days, saying:
“I hated every second of it, apart from games. The regime at school was a very oppressive one … the same kids who are susceptible to bullying by the other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers”.
Lyrically, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 begins with the rallying call of “We don’t need no education”. Firstly, this statement is a double negative, with “don’t” and “no” cancelling” each other out, producing an affirmative, as in ‘We do need education’, perhaps suggesting that education can be a good thing in developing well-rounded individuals and also suggesting that education is needed to stop the bullying of pupils by teachers. Additionally, the double negative acts as rhetorical litotes in this context, used especially to emphasise the point being made, therefore Waters is saying “We don’t need this type of education”. Taken in this context, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 is an anthem about reclaiming one’s individuality rather than being one of complete revolution. Another Brick in the Wall is a criticism of teachers and systems that, as in Pink’s case, ridicule an imaginative child for writing poetry.
The second line of the song, “We don’t need no thought control” further bashes the oppressiveness of the teachers being criticised. On the 21st June 2006, Waters spray-painted this line on the Israeli apartheid wall whilst visiting the West Bank City of Bethlehem, the day before he performed in the Arab / Israeli Peace Village. The concert was originally scheduled for Hayarkon Park outside Tel Aviv. However, it was moved after discussions with Palestinian artist and Israeli refuseniks about the Palestinian call for an international cultural boycott against Israel’s inhumane and illegal policies. Two years prior to this incident, Waters had helped launch a campaign against the wall run by the social justice organisation War or Want. The following line, “No dark sarcasm in the classroom”, refers to the ways in which bad teachers find to ridicule the weaknesses of their students in order to crush their souls and dreams.
Following this, we find the chorus of “Teachers leave them kids alone, Hey teachers leave them kids alone, All in all it’s just another brick in the wall, All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”. On The Wall album, walls are a metaphor for the narrator, Pink’s isolation from the outside world and from other people. The lines also refer to the fact that the bullying incurred in the school has contributed to Pink building up a metaphorical wall around himself. The ‘bricks’ also refer to the other students.
In the final section of the song, “Wrong! Do it Again! If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding, How can have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? You! Yes! You behind the bike sheds! Stand still laddie!”, we find the teachers’ ritual humiliation of the students in full effect. The teacher was portrayed by David Gilmour.
Musically, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’s disco beat was an idea that came from producer Bob Ezrin. Gilmour explained this in an interview with Guitar World in 2009:
“It wasn’t my idea to do disco music. It was Bob’s. He said to me, “Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what’s happening with disco music”, so I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the bar bass drums and stuff and I thought, Gawd, awful! Then we went back and tried to turn one of the [song’s] parts into one of those so it would be catchy”.
Ezrin immediately recognised the hit potential of Another Brick in the Wall Part 2. It was Ezrin’s idea to use the school choir for the song, as he explained to Guitar World in 2009:
“The most important thing I did for the song was to insist that it be more than just one verse and one chorus long, which it was when Roger wrote it. When we played it with a disco drumbeat I said: “Man, this is a hit! But it’s one minute 20. We need two verses and two choruses”. And they said, “Well, you’re not bloody getting them. We don’t do singles, so fuck you”. So I said, “Okay, fine”, and they left. And because of our two [tape recorder] set up, while they weren’t around we were able to copy the first verse and chorus, take one of the drum fills, put them in between and extend the chorus.
Then the question is what do you do with the second verse, which is the same? And having been the guy who made Alice Cooper’s School’s Out [album, 1972], I’ve got this thing about kids on record, and it is about kids after all. So while we were in America, we sent [recording engineer] Nick Griffiths to a school near the Floyd Studios [in Islington, North London]. I said, “Give me 24 tracks of kids singing this thing. I want cockney, I want posh, fill ‘em up”, and I put them on the song. I called Roger into the room, and when the kids came in on the second verse, there was a total softening of his face, and you just knew that he knew it was going to be an important record”.
The Police released their third studio album Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980, preceded by the single, Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The single gave the band their third number one single, following Message in A Bottle and Walking on the Moon from their previous album Regatta de Blanc in 1979. Additionally, the song won the band the 1982 Grammy Award for the Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It was the biggest selling single in the UK in 1980.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me concerns a schoolgirl’s crush on her young teacher which leads to an affair, which is then discovered. Sting, who worked as a teacher before the band became successful, has denied that the song is autobiographical. He qualified as a teacher in 1974, after attending Northern Counties College of Education for three years, before working as a teacher at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington for two years. Of Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Sting said in the 1981 biography L’Historia Bandido:
“I wanted to write a song about sexuality in the classroom. I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year old girls fancying me – and me really fancying them! How I kept my hands off them I don’t know … Then there was my love for Lolita which I think is a brilliant novel. But I was looking for the key for eighteen months and suddenly there it was. That opened the gates and out it came: the teacher, the open page, the virgin, the rape in the car, getting the sack, Nabakov, all that”.
The lyrics and music of Don’t Stand So Close to Me were both written by Sting. Lyrically, the song deals with the lust, fear and guilt that a female student and a teacher have for one another. The female student’s feelings towards the teacher are found in lines such as “Young teacher, the subject, Of school girl fantasy, She wants him so badly, Knows what she wants to be”. Later in the song, we find the teacher’s feelings towards the student in lines such as “It’s no use, he sees her, He starts to shake and cough, Just like the old man in, That book by Nabokov”. The last line of the verse likens the affair between the song’s characters with the predicament of the characters in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita. In the novel, the male character, Humbert Humbert is obsessed with the 12 year old Delores Haze, whom he nicknames “Lolita” and becomes sexually involved with after becoming her stepfather. In Lolita, Humbert is described as “not quite an old man”.
Sting has often been criticised for rhyming “cough” with “Nabokov”. In an interview on sting.com, the singer said of the rhyme:
“I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme – where it’s so appalling, it’s almost humorous. You don’t normally get those types of rhymes in pop music and I’m glad”.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me features a guitar synthesiser in the middle of the song, played by Andy Summers. In an interview with sting.com, Summers said of the inclusion of the guitar synthesiser: “After Sting had put the vocals on Don’t Stand So Close to Me, we looked for something to lift the middle of the song. I came up with a guitar synthesiser. It was the first time we’d used it. I felt it worked really well”. The verses and choruses do not feature this effect. Don’t stand So Close to Me utilises a common effect in Police songs, that of the verses being quieter and more subdued whilst the chorus is bolder and bigger in sound.
A few years later, Sting was asked to perform on the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing (Brothers in Arms, 1985) due to being in Montserrat at the same time as the band were recording the song. Sting performs the “I want my MTV” line, which reuses the melody from Don’t Stand So Close to Me. After the likeness was mentioned to reporters during the promotions for Brothers in Arms, lawyers for Sting became involved and whilst early pressings of Brothers in Arms only credit Mark Knopfler with having written the song, later copies credit both Knopfler and Sting. It is one of only two shared songwriting credits on a Dire Straits album, the other being Tunnel of Love, from the 1980 album Making Movies, which includes an extract from The Carousel Waltz by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In 1986, Don’t Stand So Close to Me was re-recorded with a new, more brooding sounding arrangement, a different chorus and more opulent production. The new version, titled Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86, appeared on the album Every Breath You Take: The Singles and was released as a single, reaching number 24 on the British singles chart. The song’s tempo was decreased for the new version and features a slight lyric change in order to compensate for it, with the line “Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov” becoming “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov. The Police had already split by the time the single was released and aside from the then-unreleased De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86, it is the most recent studio recording released by the band. A new music video was produced for the reworked song by Godley and Creme. The video is notable for its early use of computer graphics.
The Headmaster Ritual, the first track on The Smiths’ second album, Meat is Murder (1985) tackles a taboo subject in the field of education, that of corporal punishment. In state-run schools, and also in private schools where at least part of the funding came from the government, corporal punishment was outlawed by Parliament with effect from 1987. In other private schools in England and Wales, it was banned in 1999. Scotland followed in 2000 and Northern Ireland in 2003. In 1993, the European Court of Human Rights held in Costello-Roberts v. UK that giving a seven year old boy three whacks with a gym shoe over his trousers was not a forbidden degrading treatment.
The implement often used to deliver corporal punishment in state and private schools in England and Wales was a flexible rattan cane, applied either to the student’s hands or, especially in the case of teenage boys, to the seat of the trousers. Slippering, the act of smacking the bottom with the hand or a slipper, was widely used as a less formal alternative. In a few English cities, a strap was used instead of a cane. In Scotland, a leather strap, known as a tawse, administered to the palms of the hands, was universal in state schools but some private schools used the cane.
In 2005, there was an unsuccessful challenge to prohibition of corporal punishment in the Education Act 1996 s.548 by headmasters of private Christian schools. They claimed it was a breach of their freedom of religion under Article 9ECHR. In a poll carried out amongst 6,162 UK teachers by the Times Educational Supplement found that one in five teachers would still back the use of caning in extreme cases.
The Smiths’ The Headmaster Ritual tells of Morrissey’s days at St. Mary’s Secondary Modern School and the corporal punishment handed out there by the “Belligerent ghouls” who “Run Manchester schools”. In the manner we have come to expect from Morrissey when he gets a bee in his bonnet, he does not even attempt to mask his contempt, as he continues to tell of “Spineless swines” and graphically discusses the beatings handed out in lines such as “Mid-week on the playing fields, Sir thwacks you on the knees, Knees you in the groin, Elbow in the face, Bruises bigger than dinner plates” and “Please excuse me from gym, I’ve got this terrible cold coming on, He grabs and devours, He kicks me in the showers, kicks me in the showers, And he grabs an devours”.
In 1997, Johnny Marr told Guitar magazine that it took him two years to complete work on the guitar part of the song: “The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album [The Smiths, 1984] and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I’ve got a song”.
The Headmaster Ritual is the first song of an album’s worth of songs mentioning violence of some sort. Take for example, Rusholme Ruffians where “someone’s beaten up” at “The last night at the fair”; …
I Want the One I Can’t Have with its cameo appearance from “A tough kid who sometimes swallows nails, Raised on Prisoner’s Aid, He killed a policeman when he was, Thirteen” …
… and Barbarism Begins At Home where “A crack on the head, Is what you get for not asking” and “Unruly girls, Who will not settle down, They must be taken in hand”.
Morrissey would revisit the theme of education on his 1995 album Southpaw Grammar. According to Morrissey, the title of the album refers to “the school of hard knocks”. ‘Southpaw’ is slang for a boxing left-hander and ‘Grammar’ is a reference to British grammar schools. The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony sampling 11 minute long opening track, The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils turns the idea of the teachers bullying the pupils seen in The Headmaster Ritual on its head. This time, the pupils are in control and wreaking their merciless revenge on those “Belligerent ghouls”. Society has now changed and teachers struggle to control unruly children. The teachers are now persecuted by nasty, spiteful students. Gone are the days of corporal punishment; “Lay a hand on our children”, sings Morrissey, “And it’s never too late to have you”.
Starting off this week’s theme of education is a song that could have also been placed in ‘Crime in Music’ a few weeks back. That song is I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats, from the album The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979). The song became the band’s second number one after previous single, Rat Trap (from the album A Tonic for the Troops, 1978).
According to singer and songwriter Bob Geldof, he wrote I Don’t Like Mondays after reading a telex report at Georgia State University’s campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16 year old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, USA on the 29th January 1979. Spencer killed two adults and injured eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”. Within the next month, Geldof had written the song and it had been performed live for the first time. In an interview with Smash Hits in 1979, Geldof explained how he had come to write the song:
“I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [Johnnie] Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said, ‘Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, “Tell me why?” It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy”.
The telex machine is mentioned in the second verse with the lines, “The telex machine is kept so clean, And it types to a waking world”. Elsewhere in the song, the chorus takes the form of a police investigation, with the backing vocals singing, “Tell me why” and Geldof singing “I don’t like Mondays … I wanna shoot the whole day down”. Meanwhile, the verses of the song find the school and Spencer’s parents trying to find a reason for the tragedy before Geldof concludes that “… that there are no reasons” both speaking of various peoples’ shock over the senselessness of the killings and echoing Spencer’s lack of remorse.
The song was originally intended to be a B-side but Geldof changed his mind following the song’s success with audience on the Boomtown Rats’ US tour. Spencer’s family tried unsuccessfully to prevent the song from being released in the US. Despite it being a number one single in the United Kingdom, the song only reached number 73 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song was played regularly by US radio stations in the 1980s. However, radio stations in San Diego did not play the track for years after the crime in respect to local sensitivities about the shooting and to the families of the victims. In the UK, the song won in the Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric categories at the Ivor Novello Awards.
Eight months after the shooting, Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She was sentenced to 25 years to life. She has been denied parole four times since 1993 and will not be considered again until 2019.
The Boomtown Rats performed the song for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985. This performance became the band’s last final major appearance. After singing the line, “And the lesson today is how to die”, Geldof paused for a moment. The crowd applauded on the significance to those starving in Africa which the event had been organised to help.
Courtney's Sound World 