Mary Of The 4th Form

You are locked into The Zoo, the station that still believes a record can walk in off the street and rearrange the room. Pull up a chair for Mary of the 4th Form, track and calling card from the self-titled debut by The Boomtown Rats, the Dublin six-piece who crashed the British charts in 1977 with a grin, a snarl, and a story that still makes people argue. If you want the whole freeform ride, commercial-free and listener-supported, park it at The Zoo and stay a while.

The song is a little movie shot in a schoolroom and a pool hall. Mary sits in the front row of the fourth form, hitching a short skirt, stretching long legs, combing out black hair, and staring down the teacher until the bell saves everybody. Then the lyric flips. Makeup on, jeans skintight, she heads for the Pillar Bar, walks into the pool-room gloom, takes a smoke and a drink from a boy named Johnnie, and shoots a frame before they vanish into the dark. Bob Geldof sings it like a reporter who got too close to the subject. The band plays it like a street fight that learned a chorus.

Here is the part the liner notes usually skip. In his book Is That It?, and again years later onstage, Geldof said the name belonged to a real Dun Laoghaire schoolmate, Mary Preece, the same age as him, who used to hang around the town. She later worked as a senior aide in the Irish civil service, close to the taoiseach's office. She has said she only learned she was the muse when she read the autobiography, and she has insisted she did not live the life the lyric invents. Geldof's line, delivered with that familiar shrug, was that it just showed good taste. So the record is part snapshot, part tall tale, the way a lot of great rock songs are. The classroom tease and the teacher's wandering hand made some writers hear a cousin to the later Police hit Don't Stand So Close to Me. Same heat, different accent, and the Rats got there first.

Mary of the 4th Form was the band's second single and the first pulled from the debut album, even though the seven-inch is not the album take. Ensign put it out on November 11, 1977, catalogue ENY 9, with Do the Rat on the flip. The single is a re-recording, about nineteen seconds longer than the album cut, which clocks in around three minutes and thirty-three seconds. On French and Dutch pressings the sides were swapped, so Do the Rat was the plug side and Mary rode underneath. In Britain it entered the chart in the middle of November, climbed to number 15 in early December, and hung around for nine weeks. Not a number one. Just enough to prove Lookin' After No. 1, the August single that cracked the Top 40, was not a fluke.

The credits split the writing between Geldof and keyboard player Johnnie Fingers, born John Moylett, the man in the pajamas who looked like he had wandered in from a different band and then stole the middle eight. Producer was Robert John Lange, already Mutt to the people who hired him, still early in the run that would later turn City Boy, AC/DC, and Def Leppard into radio architecture. Sessions ran June and July 1977 at Dierks Studios in Stommeln, outside Cologne, the same room that was hosting Scorpions around the same stretch. Engineer Steve Brown got the Stiffgee nickname in the credits. The album landed in September 1977 on Ensign in Britain and Mercury in the States, nine songs that swing from punk sprint to rhythm-and-blues muscle. In the thanks they tip the hat to the Lizzies, long may you be thin, which is Thin Lizzy, the other Irish band that had already shown London how loud a Dublin accent could be.

The Rats did not start as the Rats. In 1975, in Garry Roberts's kitchen in Dun Laoghaire, the lineup gathered as the Nightlife Thugs: Geldof on vocals, Roberts and Gerry Cott on guitars, Fingers on keys, Patrick Cusack on bass under the name Pete Briquette, and Simon Crowe on drums. The story goes that they dumped the old name during the interval of the first gig, October 31, 1975, after a gang in Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory. Guthrie used Boomtown Rats for the oil-field roughnecks. Geldof liked the snap of it. By 1976 they had moved to London, into the middle of the punk storm, and signed to Nigel Grainge's Ensign label. They were never pure punk. Too many chords, too much showmanship, too much of Geldof's columnist's eye. New wave with a glam hangover and a reporter's notebook is closer to the truth.

What followed the debut is the part everybody remembers, and it is worth the walk. A Tonic for the Troops in 1978 delivered She's So Modern and Rat Trap, the first British number one by an Irish group, Geldof tearing up a picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops while the Bee Gees still owned the year. The Fine Art of Surfacing in 1979 carried I Don't Like Mondays, written after Geldof read a teletype about a school shooting in San Diego and the line the shooter gave about the reason. Mondo Bongo, V Deep, and In the Long Grass carried them into the middle of the eighties. They split after Live Aid, the 1985 concert Geldof built with Midge Ure, then came back in 2013. Citizens of Boomtown arrived in 2020, the first album of new songs in decades. The fiftieth year brought The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory and a theatre tour. Roberts died in 2022. Cott had left early, back in 1981. The engine room of Geldof, Briquette, and Crowe kept the name on the road.

Play Mary loud and you hear the whole argument the band was making before the big hits. A saxophone-free, piano-spiked sprint. A narrator who will not look away. A chorus that just chants the name until it sticks. Fourth form, for anyone who went to school on the Irish or British side of the map, is the early teenage year, old enough to know the power in a room and young enough that the adults still think they are in charge. The record knows that is a lie. It also knows the lie is funny, uncomfortable, and built to be sung by a crowd.

The Rats keep the lights on at the official site, with dates, shop, and the long scrapbook. The verified page is on Facebook, and the photo roll lives on Instagram. The long-running webmaster account is on X. For a fan-built Irish archive of the lineup and the early years, the Irish Music DB Boomtown Rats page still does the job. Spin the debut again. Mary is still in the front row, and the bell has not rung.