Stop the Cavalry is an anti-war song written and performed by Jona Lewie. In an interview, Lewie said that the song was never intended as a Christmas hit and that it was more of a protest song. The line Wish I was at home for Christmas, as well as the brass band arrangements made it an appropriately styled song to play around Christmas time.
Stop the Cavalry's promotional video is set in the trenches of the First World War. The lyrics of the song mention cavalry and Winston Churchill, who served as the First Lord of the Admiralty in the first year of the war, but it also breaks with the First World War theme with references to nuclear fallout and the line I have had to fight, almost every night, down throughout these centuries. Lewie described the song's soldier as being a bit like the eternal soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Jona Lewie is an English singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, best known for both his 1980 UK hits You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties and Stop the Cavalry. Lewie joined his first group, the Johnston City Jazz Band, while still at school in 1963, and by 1968 had become a blues and boogie singer and piano player. Despite Lewie's continuing development as a song writer and recording artist, he did not forget his early roots as a blues and boogie-woogie pianist evidenced by his providing blues piano playing for albums by American blues singer-guitarists Arthur Big Boy Crudup andJuke Boy Bonner in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
