The Boom is Back!
CAVAN CONCERT Rats' bassist Patrick Cusack, AKA ‘Pete Briquette’ looks forward to coming home for Egg Market gig
The last time The Boomtown Rats' bassist Patrick Cusack, AKA ‘Pete Briquette’, played a gig locally was the Cavan Sports Centre in November 1980.
It wasn’t exactly a glitzy show for Pete and Rats’ keyboardist and saxophonist, the late Dave McHale, nor for their support band ‘Dirty Weekend’. A roller disco had taken place the evening before, and vying for punters' interest that same night as they arrived in Cavan was Margo at the Carraig Springs.
“We had this band, and went around Ireland, eight or ten gigs, and one of the stops was Cavan Sports Centre. We called it Pete Briquette’s Dirty Weekend’. It was a long time ago. I’d never really played in a band before that. So that was the first, and last.”
He accentuates the obvious, clarifying that “the Rats have never played Cavan.”
That, however, is all about to change.
Pete admits he’s nervously “excited” about The Boomtown Rats playing Cavan Town’s Egg Market, as part of Cavan Calling, for Cavan Day on Saturday, July 29.
Until then it’s as much the “unknowns” considering the show is located in a place “outside the normal route of bands” that occupies Pete’s thoughts. “But I’m up for it!” he assures. “We all are.”
The youngest son of the late Paddy and Margaret Cusack, Ballyjamesduff, best known for their involvement with the local ‘Frolics’, Pete is asked how a boy from Cavan- with a keen interest in cars and acoustic guitar- came to join the Rats.
For that, Pete invites the Celt to cast their mind back to Ireland in the mid-1970s.
“It was a pretty bleak place,” he describes bluntly. “We had Charlie Haughey, there was no future for anybody young, the church ignoring the murder up North. The country was a very dysfunctional place, and the music scene was zero. So really from an early age I just wanted to get out. I wanted to go to other places. Places like the UK and America looked like the lights were on, and the lights seemed off in Ireland at the time. So the first opportunity I got to join with a bunch of people I identified with was the Rats, and we became like a small tribe. We got out.”
Pete had been studying architecture in Dublin at the time, as was Johnnie ‘Fingers’ Moylett, keyboardist with the Rats - first cousins through their mothers: Margaret ‘Peggy’ (Bowles) Cusack and Cecilia ‘Sheila’ (Bowles) Moylett.
Singer Bob Geldof was a “jobsworth journalist”, remembers Pete, having worked for a Canadian weekly news and entertainment newspaper and in children’s TV before returning to Ireland circa 1975.
The band found its footing around that time, gelling through their connections within Ireland’s fast rising punk and new wave movement.
Drummer Simon Crowe joined from art college, and rhythm guitarist Gerry Cott and lead guitarist Garry Roberts completed the line-up.
Five of the six members originated from Dún Laoghaire, and Pete landed in amongst them from Ballyjamesduff.
Patrick became ‘Pete’. He openly accepts that the ‘Briquette’ joke doesn’t travel far beyond these shores.
Regardless, it has “become” his name.
“Even my wife calls me Pete, and everyone except my accountant,” Pete tells the Celt. “Out of convenience really I’ve come to accept it, because it’s a pain being one name to someone and another to someone else.”
He explains: “In the Rats the guitar player was ‘Max Volume’, and the drummer was ‘Hertz van Rentals’, the famous Dutch percussionist. And then there was Johnnie Fingers on piano, and me as ‘Pete Briquette’ because I was from the country, and they use to call me ‘muck savage’. It just stuck with me, and I was quite happy to keep it because I liked it.”
Initially known as ‘The Nightlife Thugs’, the Rat’s changed their name in reference to a line contained in Woody Guthrie's autobiography ‘Bound for Glory’.
Their first live performance was at Bolton Street Architectural College, and after that a monthly showing at Dublin’s Moran’s Hotel, with queues out the door and “chips on the floor”.
By summer 1976 the Rats moved to London to sign with Ensign Records.
Pete had always seen music as a potential “way out” of the expected and accepted norms of Irish life.
“As I left secondary school I was told there was no future really! Best of luck and off you go, but there’s nothing there. Architecture was the pits as well, so I didn’t want to go there either.
“Once I joined this band I suddenly saw a future, and being more than just a functional and unhappily married alcoholic with a dead end job, because that’s what it looked like to me then. Everything was grey, it was monochrome, it was sad. It was a sad place to be. We were just coming out of being a third world country in some ways. Ireland still hadn’t found its identity yet.”
As Ireland was trying forge its own identity, Pete was finding his.
“I’d been playing an acoustic guitar and banging on a piano from about the age of 12. I came from a musical family anyway. But my main influence was Radio Luxembourg on my little transistor radio under my pillow going to bed at night, Radio International, and pirate radio stations. That’s where I heard R&B, the [Rolling] Stones, American blues, that kind of thing. In Ireland, everywhere else it was the showband scene, country and Irish, and that was it. There was no way for me to express how I felt musically at least until I got up to Dublin, until I met these other guys and formed a band. That’s why I embraced it without hesitation, and dropped the whole architecture thing, dropped the whole Ireland thing, and went on this journey.”
While identifying as ‘Irish’, the Rats' outlook was always much broader.
“We were trying to make Ireland come of age, and quit being apologetic for being Irish. ‘Oh, aren’t they great, look at them they’re Irish’, that bullsh*t kind of attitude. We wanted to be looked at in equal terms with any American, any UK band. Enough of that ‘cute little Irish band’ culture, f**k that! We never wanted that, so we never used our Irishness as a way to get forward. We’re all Irish and proud to be Irish, but we were never going to use it, and we never have.”
After the Rats scored a UK Top 40 hit with their first single ‘Lookin' After No. 1’, and followed it up with ‘Mary of the 4th Form’ (no 15), the sentiment back home in Ballyjamesduff was one of “bemusement”, Pete recalls.
“There was the whole ‘It’ll be done in a year and he’ll go back to college and finish off his course’. But they didn’t understand, and then soon they became proud that you actually are doing it, that these songs were in the charts, tours of the UK, and America. It suddenly became real to people, as real to them watching as it was for me going to all these places.”
The Rats followed up their eponymously named debut album (1977) with ‘A Tonic for the Troops’ a year later, capturing many of the band’s best known hits - ‘She's So Modern’, ‘Like Clockwork’, and ‘Rat Trap’.
At the same time they then began touring the US, a lesser known yet just as fast rising U2 were sound-checking at Cavan’s Lavey Inn on a cold Wednesday evening in February 1980.
Pete outlines how the trails formed by the Rats in their rise to international stardom helped open new opportunities for others.
“As often happens, when one band opens a door, the others coming after them become much bigger. I think they’d acknowledge it themselves, we made it possible, and they made it happen.”
Looking back, Pete says: “We had a blind, youthful over confidence. We had a plan, and if it didn’t work, f**k it. I mean, I wouldn’t have that today. With age you lose that blind purity, that drive to get from ‘A to B’ by doing this, that and the other, whatever the cost. It was quite naïve, but sure, we were certain we were going to do it, break Ireland, break the UK, break Europe, and then America.”
After nearly 50 years on the road are there any songs the band simply loathes playing?
“Weirdly no,” shares Pete with honesty in his tone. “I know why people might think that, but the big hits, which we’ve been playing for what feels like 100 f**kin years now, ‘Mondays’ is a great tune and I play keyboards on that, and ‘Rat Trap’ is a great song, it’s got parts and is interesting, so no is the answer to your question, because it’s not like you’re playing it every day either. But you do play them maybe 60 times a year.”
In the present Pete is as well known for his Rat's bass playing exploits as for his other industry work - as a record producer and composer.
He produced the last Rats' album ‘Citizens of Boomtown’ (2020), the first recorded as a four-piece when keyboardist Johnnie Fingers opted not to return in 2013. It is also the last album featuring long time guitarist Garry Roberts who sadly died November 8, 2022.
Outside of Rats fame, Pete has worked as a record producer for French singers like Renaud, and remixed the song ‘Polaris’ by Bailieborough’s Sons of Southern Ulster on their Turf Accountant Schemes E.P.
So how does it feel being, with all due respect, being the biggest name in rock history to come out of Cavan?
Pete greets the idea with laughter.
“The pond can’t be that big, can it?” he asks. “A couple of years ago I did a calendar, a charity thing for cancer, and it was of famous Cavan people. So there was 12 people chosen and I didn’t know anyone except for myself on the calendar. Hopefully things have changed.”
He’s curious to know more about what music is coming out of Cavan.
The Celt points Pete in the direction of folk singer Lisa O’Neill, new act Dirty Marmalade, and The Spiritual Leaders.
He’s already aware of the legacy left by The Strypes, with ex drummer Evan Walsh’s new band Eddie Cruizer and The Savage Hearts set to support the Rats when they play Cavan later this month.
“I really like those guys,” says Pete of The Savage Hearts, who now often finds himself looking to his son for musical recommendations.
Casting an eye back across the Irish Sea from his West London pad, Pete reassesses Ireland as a “brilliant place” and “different” to the country he left behind as a young man.
Though his familial connection to Ballyjamesduff has waned since, the Cusack siblings scattered to different corners of Ireland, Pete still loves coming “home”.
“I love Ireland. So it’s a real full circle coming back, and for me personally, to be coming back to play Cavan, it’s completing that circle which is really good I feel.”
So how did this gig in Cavan come about? And how did the conversation with Geldof go when Pete mentioned the Rats' next gig would be in a car park celebrating a part of Ireland the singer has never visited before?
“‘You must be f**kin’ joking’ he said. So I said ‘Hang on, you’re just afraid to do it because it’ll be all about me and not you’,” says Pete laughing again.
The truth is someplace around the halfway point in that tale.
In reality, the Rats did have some reservations. How could they not? Before Cavan they play three dates on the Let’s Rock festival circuit, and in October fly for a show in Seoul, South Korea.
The Cavan show is a “one off” for the Rats on tour.
“We did ask a lot of questions at the beginning,” admits Pete. “Is there going to be this? Can it be this? That kind of thing.”
To their credit, Pete details, Cavan Calling came back with all the answers. It was “’Yeah. Yeah. Yeah’. It was all positive. They were really professional about it, and so we said yes, why not? I mean give us a reason not to.”
Pete begins to laugh again: “I think Bob did it because he’s afraid I’d be pissed off if he didn’t do it. But he’s now up for it. Like, he’s now very, very up for it, and he’s looking forward to it. I can definitely say that about all the band.”
He concludes with confidence that the upcoming Rats show will “be a great gig, a f**kin great gig. The band is really cooking at the moment. We’re all so long in the tooth now, and have been doing it so long now that it becomes second nature almost. Geldof is in good form, he’s just crossed the Pacific on a yacht. So it’s all coming together nicely.”