Guitarist co-founded Boomtown Rats
String of hits included I Don’t Like Mondays
Garry Roberts, who has died aged 72, was a co-founder and lead guitarist of the Boomtown Rats, the Irish band who rode the punk wave with hits such as Rat Trap and I Don’t Like Mondays and launched the career of Bob Geldof.
Garrick Roberts was born in Dublin on June 16, 1950, and brought up a few miles down the road in Dun Laoghaire. At boarding school, he started a band with the future Rats drummer Simon Crowe, inspired by the Small Faces, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.
Roberts took music lessons in piano and clarinet, but was seduced by the guitar. “At school there was a dance every term which was called the Supper Dance,” he recalled. “The first dance I went to, there were these sixth formers up there with electric guitars and I thought: ‘God, that’s amazing,’ and it was that that got me into playing.”
The band — Roberts, Crowe, Geldof, Johnnie Fingers on keyboards, Pete Briquette on bass and Gerry Cott on rhythm guitar — was originally called the Nightlife Thugs. But Roberts threatened to quit if it was not changed and Geldof came up with the new name.
They quickly established themselves as a live act around Ireland, then in 1976 they moved to London in search of a record deal, signing with Ensign Records.
In August 1977 they released their debut single, Looking After No 1, which they played on their TV debut, on The Marc Bolan Show, two weeks before his death in a car crash.
It was the first in a stream of hit records — all rocket-fuelled by Roberts’s razor-sharp guitar — that continued for five years and included the U.K. No. 1s, Rat Trap (which also topped the U.S. charts) and I Don’t Like Mondays, which was inspired by a school shooting in San Diego.
But by 1983-84 the tidal wave of fame had abated — though there was a brief resurgence when they played Live Aid, famously organized by their lead singer — and in 1986 the Rats split when Geldof left to go solo.
Roberts wrote songs for Kirsty Maccoll and worked as a live sound engineer for bands including Simply Red and OMD, and played on some of Geldof’s solo records.