I Don't Like Mondays

 

According to Bob Geldof, he wrote the song after reading a telex report at Georgia State University's campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. 

Spencer showed no remorse for her crime; her explanation for her actions was "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day".

 Geldof had been contacted by Steve Jobs to play a gig for Apple, inspiring the opening line about a "silicon chip".

 The song was first performed less than a month later.

Geldof explained how he wrote the song:

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 had originally intended the song as a B-side, but changed his mind after the song was successful with audiences on the Rats' US tour. Spencer's family tried to prevent the single from being released in the United States, but were unsuccessful.

In later years, Geldof admitted that he regretted writing the song because he "made Brenda Spencer famous".