How many times at gigs have we sang along to Diamond Smiles “Everybody tries – It’s Dale Carnegie Gone Wild”???  So, who was Dale Carnegie and what has he got to do with the song? Now, it’s very possible that what I’m about to ‘reveal’ has been blindingly obvious to all of you for years – there’s

Well it looks like the Rats delivered an electrical performance at Let's Rock Southampton last Saturday - I'm really, really, looking forward to Let's Rock Shrewsbury, this weekend. Talking about electrical performances ..... you probably know the name ‘Tesla’ from the US electric vehicle business

Following on from all the excitement of April Fools’ Day (sorry If I got all your hopes up 😉), I wanted to drag things back to some sort of normality - if Suss's fiendish Easter competition will let us!!!? We had an on-line get-together before Christmas and MajorPaul mentioned Albert Camus - some

Many of the people that get a name check in Boomtown Rat’s songs are mentioned only in passing – they are referenced in a line of the song - but others are given immortality by being refenced in the title of a song.  And so, we come to Eva Braun. After first commending the band for pronouncing

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a character from history that featured in a Boomtown Rats song. There’ll be more posts on characters from Rats song along in due course, but I also wanted to look at a few people from history who are perhaps even more obscure: people

“Hand me down a strong panacea – one that’s guaranteed to make me feel like Hercules”… These are the opening lines from Me and Howard Hughes - from the 1978 mega-hit album “A Tonic For the Troops”.  What was it about Mr. Hughes that Bob Geldof was so keen to sing about??? Born on Christmas Eve

So, we thought we’d make some space in Citizens of Boomtown to share our recommendations for films, books, recipes and things – this is an open invitation for you to let us know about your favourites. There’s no need to post a full-depth review – though you’re welcome to. Alternatively, just gi