I Could Talk All Night

That’s how Elvis Costello introduces “Oliver’s Army” in the earliest live recording of it I own, from April 1979 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Since 1978, Costello has performed “Oliver’s Army” live 727 times, according to the canonical Elvis Costello Wiki. 

In 1979, he’d released the song on his Armed Forces album just a few months before. You can hear his glee at digging into this full meal of a pop gem, full of bile and bounce. The recording puts EC’s guitar front and center, with keyboardist Steve Nieve prioritizing an insane electric organ synth sound over his piano riffs from the record. 

That’s how Elvis Costello introduces “Oliver’s Army,” in a May 1980 concert appearance in London. He then absolutely eviscerates the song in a style almost never heard again; with Attractions keyboardist Steve Nieve absent due to an accident, guitarist Martin Belmont from Graham Parker’s Rumor sits in with the band. The descending piano riffs that have defined “Oliver’s Army” are replaced by cutting guitar; the song barrels to its inevitable conclusion with the intensity and speed of a freight train whose conductor has given up entirely. 

So in the span of a year, he’s used “Oliver’s Army” to connect the dots between Oliver Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland in 1649 (which inspires the song’s title), King George’s occupation of America in the Revolutionary War, and Margaret Thatcher’s own attachment to imperialism in conflicts like the Falklands War. Occupation and domination are one of the song’s thrulines; the other involves the people usually doing the occupying. As Costello described it in his 2002 liner notes to the reissue of the Armed Forces album: 

Preying upon the young and impoverished to build out an occupation isn’t restricted to the UK, by any means. With around 1200 years ruled by monarchy and more than 300 years as a fully-ratified republic, it’s possible England has a more highly evolved palette for invasion and conscription than other nations. Then again, those same kids in 1978 Belfast could have been transplanted across the ocean and a decade to fight in Vietnam for the United States. The working class boys span the globe, sleepwalking and putting the world to right. 

Costello’s most recent performance of “Oliver’s Army” happened in March 2020, also in London, just ten days before the COVID lockdown began in that city. For that performance, like others in 2020, he rewrote the second verse completely: 

The rewrite omits a use of the term “white n*****” from the original recording; the last two lines above reference the BBC playing the song with an obvious edit or bleep where that term lives in the song. As he was promoting his most recent album, The Boy Named If, Costello went so far as to suggest that radio stations stop playing “Oliver’s Army” rather than bleep the word, which just draws more attention to it. 

I can understand Costello’s reluctance to return to the song; it’s been played plenty, and maybe the years have dulled its edge. It definitely needs the rewrite Costello provided. But its central themes haven’t gone away; there are kids in Putin’s army on the streets of Ukraine that would have fit in alongside those kids back in Belfast. Protest songs may fade into the mists of time and opinion; it’s the insatiable hunger for war that’s the real top of the pops.