The song was a combination of political satire and sexual humour, using nursery rhyme-style lyrics. The protagonist, John Wayne, is having sexual intercourse with a Native American female. When Wayne's bandolier restricts their intimacy, she suggests he remove it. He refuses and suggests he sodomize her instead. This surreal image is intended as a comment on the treatment of Indigenous people during the European colonization and was written after Jeremy Healy read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by historian Dee Brown. Wayne represents the European colonists, while his partner is the Native American people. Unusually for a song with explicit sexual content in the 1980s, the song escaped being banned from broadcast by the BBC, was playlisted on BBC Radio 1, and the band performed the song twice on Top of the Pops and on Saturday morning children's television. The song, with its "Shotgun, gimme gimme lowdown fun, boy! Okay, yeah, showdown!" intro, was taken to be a nonsensical novelty song about cowboys.
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