The Boomtown Rats : Someone's Looking At You
On October 24, The Boomtown Rats released The Fine Art of Surfacing. The album would peak at U.K.#7 thanks to its distillation of Bowie, Thin Lizzy and Bruce Springsteen influences into a single new wave sound. The success of singles "I Don't Like Mondays", "Diamond Smiles" and "Someone's Looking At You" didn't hurt either.
David Fricke of Rolling Stone found a common theme running through the album:
Thematically, paranoia rears its nasty head an awful lot here: in "Someone's Looking at You," "Nothing Happened Today" and the schizophrenic exhibitionism of "Having My Picture Taken." This is especially true in "I Don't Like Mondays," the Boomtown Rats' controversial British smash in which the ostentatious wash of violins strikes a soap-operatic contrast with the unsettling notion of a young girl shooting people and blaming it on a day of the week.
Robert Christgau of the Village Voice gave the album a grade of B-:
From Red Starr of Smash Hits a 3 out of 10:
Here we go again. Look, this exceedingly tiresome record "borrows" so heavily from Bowie and Springsteen that you might as well buy Hunky Dory and Darkness on the Edge of Town and have two genuine articles instead of none. Much frantic activity signifying absolutely nothing - the most overrated band of the century. Awful cover as well.
Geldof summed himself up in a Smash Hits interview at the time of the album release:
I describe myself as a rock and roll hack. I don't think any of our songs will stand up to immortality and I don't care. The last thing that I'm interested in is the eternal.
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