You Might As Well

I watched American Bandstand just about every Saturday from the time I was very small, since I had teenage aunts at my grandmother's house at the time, until probably sometime in the early Eighties in high school, when I was likely more interested in sleeping off the hangover from the Friday night before and sleeping late than getting up to watch TV.  At some point, I just stopped, but for years, I never missed it unless I was out of town for some reason - vacation, church camp, whatever.

In January 1980, I made the trek across the hall from my room to my parent's bedroom late one Saturday morning - since I had a tiny black & white TV in my room and they had the bigger color TV - to watch Bandstand, and what I saw that day was one of those things that would just stick with me.

"New Wave" had sort of been filtering in to the States for a while at that point, I suppose.  I was already listening to the Ramones, The Clash, the Pretenders, and a lot of stuff like that so a lot of what was being touted as "New Wave", I wasn't all that interested in for the most part. Some of it; not all.

And I'd heard The Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" at that point, so when I saw they were one of the musical guests on Bandstand that morning, I was all right with it.  Not hugely excited, but better than most options.

But then something else happened.  The Rats played "Someone's Looking at You", and by the time Bob Geldof shook up what was a relatively calm couple of bars in the song by snarling "You might as well shout it from the roof, scream it from your lungs, and spit it from your mouth" - I was hooked.

And bought the record the very next day.