In 2022, Elvis Costello announced that he would no longer be playing arguably his best-known song, Oliver's Army, during concerts. Asked about his stance during a 2024 interview with The Times, the singer/songwriter said, "It’s a complicated story." But now the song is back in his concert setlists, following a lyrical tweak, as he explains in a new interview with The Times.
Costello's most successful UK single, Oliver's Army was written as a commentary on 'The Troubles' in the North of Ireland, following the musician's first trip to Belfast in 1978. In sleeve-notes written for a 2002 reissue of Armed Forces, its parent album, Costello recalled being taken aback by the sight of “mere boys walking around in battle dress with automatic weapons”, adding “They were no longer just on the evening news.”
Titled in reference to English politician and statesman Oliver Cromwell, despised throughout Ireland for the brutality inflicted by his soldiers during military campaigns in the country, the song also touches upon Britain's colonial wars in other overseas territory, and alludes to the idea that the British ruling class always relies on young working class men and women - “boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” - to fight its battles and safeguard its elite status.
The song's most contentious lyric “Only takes one itchy trigger, One more widow, one less white n****r”, is a reference to a slur used against Irish Catholics and to racist attitudes which underpinned British military campaigns across the world in centuries past, and which permeates sections of the British Army to this day. Costello's Irish grandfather, Pat McManus, had served in the British Army during World War 1.
In 2013, BBC radio station 6Music took the decision to censor the aforementioned lyric, a spokesman for the station later explaining, “We take into consideration a number of factors including the nature of the language, the station and its audience, the time of day, editorial justification and the wider context of the program.”
Now Costello has tweaked the lyric.
"I’ve rewritten it," he tells The Times, the lyric now running, "One more widow, another pallbearer."
"I no longer use words that go off like alarm clocks, because indignation about that word stops people hearing what the song is about," he explains."That is my position. People went, 'That’s woke.' Well, go f*** yourself."
Costello’s 'Radio Soul! The Early Songs of Elvis Costello' tour begins on June 12 in Brighton.
