Chart performance ĭespite reaching number-one in the United Kingdom, it only reached number 73 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Fingers received a financial settlement and co-credit. In 2019, Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers reached an agreement in their dispute over who wrote the song, until then credited solely to Geldof. In later years, Geldof stated that he regretted writing the song because he 'made Brenda Spencer famous'. Spencer's family tried to prevent the single from being released in the United States, but were unsuccessful. Geldof had originally intended the song as a B-side, but changed his mind after the song was successful with audiences on the Rats' US tour. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. And the journalists interviewing her said, 'Tell me why?' It was such a senseless act. 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'. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with Johnnie Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. The song was first performed less than a month later.

Geldof had been contacted by Steve Jobs to play a gig for Apple, inspiring the opening line about a 'silicon chip'. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime her explanation for her actions was 'I don't like Mondays. Written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers, the piano ballad was the band's second single to reach number one on the UK chart.Īccording to Geldof, he wrote the song 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, on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. The song was a number-one single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979, and ranks as the sixth-biggest hit of the UK in 1979. It was released in 1979 as the lead single from their third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing. ' I Don't Like Mondays' is a song by Irish new wave group the Boomtown Rats about the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego. It is not to be confused with the Japanese band I Don't Like Mondays.

This article is about the song by the Boomtown Rats.

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