A Tonic for the Troops was The Boomtown Rats' second album and included the hit singles "She's So Modern", "Like Clockwork" and "Rat Trap".
The album featured dark themes in an often upbeat, pop-punk style. One of the album's tracks, "(I Never Loved) Eva Braun" was described by one critic as "the happiest, cheeriest, best upbeat song about Hitler ever written." Other tracks featured subject matter including suicide ("Living in an Island") and euthanasia ("Can't Stop").
"She's So Modern" reached number 12 on the British pop charts. The album's title was taken from a line in this song: "And Charlie ain't no Nazi/ she likes to wear her leather boots/ 'cuz it's exciting for the veterans and/it's a tonic for the troops."
The most commercially successful track on the album is "Rat Trap," which made it to Number 1 on the British pop charts. "Rat Trap" was the final cut on the UK version of the album and the opening cut on the US version.
Read more about A Tonic For The Troops: Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words tonic and/or troops:
“We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)