Bob Geldof sued over I Don’t Like Mondays

Almost 40 years years after the release of the Boomtown Rats’ UK chart topping I Don’t Like Mondays, the sole credited songwriter Bob Geldof is being sued by another member of the band.

The Rats’ keyboard player Johnnie Fingers (John Moylett) is claiming that he wrote the music and some of the lyrics to the 1979 hit.

But, he claims in a High Court writ, he always wanted a co-credit. But in an “intimidating” telephone call, Geldof, the band’s singer, pressurised him not to take credit and that he would receive his “fair share”.

At stake is millions of pounds: 60-year-old Moylett, who now lives in Japan, wants two thirds of the royalties accumulated over the past 37 years.

Two of The Boomtown Rats were doing a promotional tour of America when, on January 29, 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer of California fired shots in the playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego.

She killed her head teacher and the school caretaker. Eight children and a police officer were injured.

She later explained the shooting: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” Now 54, she remains in jail.

Geldof and Fingers were in Atlanta, being interviewed at Georgia State University’s campus radio station WRAS, when the news came through the telex machine next to them.

Geldof said at the time, “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.”

Geldof says he had written the song (words and music) on his guitar when they were still in America. He performed it for the first time, he claims, to listeners of a Dallas radio station. He initially intended the song as a b-side to a future single but changed his mind due to audience response.

But according to Moylett now, the Rats only started work on the song after the pair returned to the UK in February 1979. He had begun work on the famous piano riff over three days. He alleges Geldof initially thought was “too classical” and “not Ratsy enough”.

I Don’t Like Mondays was the Rats second UK chart topper. It reached #6 in Australia and only #83 in the US where Brenda Spencer’s family tried unsuccessfully to stop the record from being released.

Geldof wants the Moylett lawsuit struck off claiming they were likely to be “a figment of his imagination”.

In his counter-claim, the 65-year old says that a fair trial was not possible because events of how the song came together took place so long ago, and that the keyboard player was taking advantage of him.

Moylett says he began writing letters to Geldof calling for compensation since 2004 but got no satisfaction.

In any case there is a precedent. In 2009, British band Procol Harum’s keyboard player Matthew Fisher won a credit for their 1967 hit A Whiter Shade Of Pale – after waiting 38 years to launch his bid. The song was originally credited to the band’s Gary Booker and poet Keith Reid.

But Fisher convinced the court that his keyboard riff played a major role in the song selling 10 million copies, reaching #1 in the UK and #5 in the US. However Fisher was only awarded 40% of the royalties share (not the 50% he asked for) and only for sales after 2005.

A date has not been set for the hearing over I Don’t Like Mondays.