Songfacts®:

• Jamie Oliver is a British celebrity chef, restaurateur, and TV personality who rose to fame in the late 1990s with the BBC series The Naked Chef. He is known internationally for his accessible cooking style, cookbooks, and food activism campaigns, particularly his efforts to improve school meals in the UK. This song is rooted in CMAT's frustration at repeatedly encountering posters of Oliver at his branded deli counters in Shell petrol stations while on tour.
• "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" is CMAT's self-critical meditation on irrational hatred and the futility of petty grievances. "It is not a diss song about Jamie Oliver," explained the singer. "It's about how my annoyance and intolerance and hatred of other people serves absolutely no purpose in my life."
• The bridge is a stream-of-consciousness section where CMAT interrogates her own backstory to understand how she became so quick to judge. "I'm going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch," she told Apple Music. "I think it's good to be self-critical. I don't think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder."
• Despite the self-flagellating theme, the song is also playful. "It's a fun song because it's going after Jamie Oliver, which is quite a funny thing to say," CMAT explained to Mojo magazine. "Then there's a singalongy bit: 'OK, don't be a bitch,' But ultimately, it is about how I dislike myself and the world around me and how I'm always trying to fight back against the most hateful parts of myself. And weirdly the abstract nature of it and the stream of consciousness seems to be more relatable to people."
• CMAT wrote the song with her producer Oli Deakin. The pair discussed the song's creation in detail for BBC Radio 6 Music's Artist in Residence series, where CMAT revealed that the song began life as a C-list fragment on her cork pinboard system, the board she uses to categorize song ideas into A (ready to record), B (finished but uncertain), and C (promising fragments unlikely to make the album). Deakin spotted the intriguingly titled Post-it and asked to hear it. At that stage, CMAT only had the first verse and chorus conceived in a much groovier, more Beyoncé-influenced style, with the key lyric, "OK, don't be a bitch, the man's got kids," before landing in the "indie-krauty-campy-stomp," version that made the album.
• So what does Jamie Oliver think of the song? His initial reaction was bafflement. "What have I done wrong?" he asked The Guardian. "I couldn't really figure it out."
  
  His phone soon began buzzing, not with condemnation, but with messages from his daughters and their friends, who thoroughly enjoyed it.
  
  When asked by Mojo whether Oliver had made contact, CMAT replied: "No. I find that really funny. I think he might have maybe listened to the top line, and me bringing his kids into it, it's obviously a bit touchy. But if he'd listened to the whole song, I think he'll actually appreciate it."
  
  Oliver has since grasped the song's message. "We all navigate a world where we make assumptions without seeing the full context," he said, adding that he hopes "she finds me less bothersome now."
• CMAT recorded "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" for her third album, Euro-Country. It reached #1 on the Irish Albums Chart and #2 on the UK Albums Chart and was shortlisted for the 2025 Mercury Prize.
• Eilis Doherty (who also served as creative director for the Euro-Country album) directed the music video. It stars Jamie Oliver, who agreed to appear after coming to understand that the song was not an attack on him. Doherty revealed that she had attempted - without success - to get Oliver to appear visibly angry during the shoot.
• Mojo magazine named "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" as their 2025 Track of the Year.