It is 27 years since Jamie Oliver first appeared on TV as The Naked Chef, bish-bash-boshing his way to cultural ubiquity thanks in part to his rock’n’roll credentials: his band Scarlet Division provided the show’s theme tune, and his love of Toploader made their cover of Dancing in the Moonlight a monumental hit. Since then, music has, for better or worse, dwindled in Oliver’s now-global brand – an unwieldy commercial force that inadvertently inspired one of 2025’s best songs.
Last year, Irish pop star CMAT put out her third album, Euro-Country, whose highlight was an ecstatic indie epic called The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, released just before her standout set at Glastonbury. The lyrics recall the singer being at one of the Shell garages that sell Oliver’s line of salads and sandwiches, and losing the plot at the sight of the chef’s face. “I needed deli, but God, I hate him,” sings CMAT (AKA Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson), though it is less a weird diss track, and more about her relationship with irrational hatred in a confusing world: critic Dorian Lynskey praised it as a “tragicomedy of misdirected anger”.
