Mondo Bongo by Boomtown Rats

Mondo Bongo, the Boomtown Rats' fourth album, arrived on Mercury in 1980 with Tony Visconti producing, and it finds the Dublin band pulling their new wave in stranger, more tropical directions. It was the final record by the full six-piece of Bob Geldof, Garry Roberts, Gerry Cott, Johnnie Fingers, Pete Briquette and Simon Crowe, since Cott quit not long after it came out.

"Banana Republic" is the barbed centrepiece, a sardonic reggae-tinged swipe that climbed to number 3 in Britain, and "The Elephant's Graveyard (Guilty)" followed it into the charts with its lurching, heavy-lidded groove. Geldof's sneer is still front and centre, but the arrangements drift further from punk, with Fingers' keyboards and loping rhythms doing a lot of the talking. It reached number 6 on the UK albums chart in February 1981.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.