B-side "Late Last Night" Format 7" vinyl Length 3:54 | Released December 1979 (UK) Genre New wave | |
Label Ensign Records (UK)
Columbia Records (USA) | ||
"Diamond Smiles" was the second single from The Boomtown Rats' album The Fine Art of Surfacing. It was the follow-up to their successful single "I Don't Like Mondays" and also peaked at Number 13 in the UK Charts. The band has suggested that it might have fared better had it not been for a strike of lighting technicians on the powerful UK TV programme Top of The Pops at the time that the record was released and rising in the charts.
Dealing with death, as had "I Don't Like Mondays", the song tells the story of a glamorous debutante ('Diamond') who commits suicide and is remembered only for her low-cut dress. Some of the staff of Duke Street Hospital, in Glasgow, filed a petition with the IBA and the BBC demanding that the song be banned due to the lyrics exploiting a real life suicide.
The song also featured as one of four songs on an Australian EP called Surface Down Under that also featured past hits "Rat Trap", "Looking After No.1" and "Like Clockwork".
The song was covered by Jay Bennett (of Wilco) on his posthumous album Kicking at the Perfumed Air, with the album's title also being derived from the song's lyrics.
The girl in the video, is the same girl as the one in the '' I don't like Mondays video '' she was called Michelle Gibbons-Price
Reception
In a review of the album The Fine Art of Surfacing, critic Mike DeGagne said "'Diamond Smiles' jaunts along on a hiccup-like rhythm".