Stop The Cavalry – The Best of Jona Lewie

1980 turned out to be a bumper year for Christmas singles that doubled as anti-war songs, but for tragic and unexpected reasons.

Following the top 20 success that summer of his single You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties, Jona Lewie’s unusual Christmas offering Stop The Cavalry, with all its homespun, new wave-meets-Dad’s Army charm, was released on Nov 21.

Rising quickly through the UK singles chart, Lewie’s only competition for the prized Christmas number one spot seemed to be from a troupe of Catholic school girls, in the form of St. Winifred’s School Choir and their unstoppable schmaltzfest There’s No One Quite Like Grandma.

Then, on the evening of Dec 8, John Lennon was assassinated in New York.

Happy Xmas (War Is Over), a Vietnam War protest song originally released by Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1972, started receiving radio airplay, sending the song up the chart. Landing at no. 2 it pushed Lewie to no. 3, but was powerless to overcome the commercial behemoth that was St. Winifred’s. (Lennon did eventually hit no. 1 in the new year.)

Interestingly Lewie never intended Stop The Cavalry to be a Christmas single. Dismissed by Stiff Records founder Dave Robinson as “just another anti-war song”, STC needed a little something “extra”. Lewie added the famous brass section – demoed on kazoo and later performed by a Salvation Army brass band – and a hit song was born.

The only seasonal reference in the song’s lyric comes in the line “Wish I was at home for Christmas”, seized upon by the record label as a way into the lucrative Christmas market. Producer Bob Andrews added a tubular bell and, 4 million sales later, STC joined the pantheon of yuletide radio staples. To this day it generates more royalties for Lewie than all of his other songs combined.

Fun but little-known fact making Jona Lewie even more synonymous with that most British of obsessions – the Christmas single – than most people realise: his real name is John Lewis!