way to our show at the Queen's Hall we saw soldiers on patrol. They looked like little kids, but they were little kids holding machine guns.

"You knew they had come from towns that really looked no different from Belfast. It was all so normal, except for the barbed wire, observation towers, the armed cars and the tangle of old hatreds and grievances that you could never imagine being reconciled."

Costello also describes how a man ran on stage and grabbed the microphone during the show. "I thought it was a political statement and left him to it. It turned out it was just a local punk rocker trying to make a name for his band," he said.

"I had written the words of Oliver's Army by the time our planelanded back in our own little safe European home in London. Seeing the youth of the British soldiers patrolling the streets of Belfast with my own eyes had triggered lyrics about the military career opportunity that I thankfully never had to take up."

The musician added that Oliver's Army, which was aired on MTV's first US broadcast day in 1981, was filled with contradictions.

He wrote: "The song was a jumble of ever-shifting allegiances and imperial misadventures, and about how they always get a working-class boy to do the killing, some of them Irishmen who, like my grandfather, wore a British Army uniform.

"It wasn't supposed to read like a coherent political argument, it was pop music."

Belfast Telegraph