Songfacts®:

• "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" is Elvis Costello at his most surreal and satirical, a kind of end-of-the-world hoedown where the horsemen of the apocalypse arrive on six legs, antennae twitching. Insects have long been literary shorthand for doom, and Costello, with his dark comic streak, made them harbingers of cultural collapse.
• In the Mighty Like A Rose liner notes, Costello explained that he wrote the song for those days "when the mortal sins of the advertising world and the venal sins of the trash culture become unbearable."
  
  He cites the sort of news cycle where grieving parents make tearful appeals for their missing child, only for it to emerge that they were the perpetrators all along. Small wonder the song shrugs and says: fine, let the world end.
• The "Hurry Down Doomsday" tune was built in an unusual way. Costello's co-writer, legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, told Uncut magazine that his contribution amounted to a "crazy little groove" that Costello then wrapped the song around. "El is probably one of the smartest people I've ever met," Keltner added, "and musically so amazingly fertile."
  
  Costello composed the piece using Keltner's drum loops and tuned percussion - a technique he didn't revisit for another decade until his 2002 album When I Was Cruel.
• Costello contributes both vocals and rhythm guitar. The musicians include Benmont Tench on piano, James Burton on solo guitar, Marc Ribot on percussion and Nick Lowe on bass.
  
  Costello singled out two moments: "Nick Lowe's thumping bass entrance in the third verse and a dazzling James Burton guitar solo that is right on the edge of impossible."
• Costello cut the track for his 13th album, Mighty Like A Rose, recorded at Ocean Way in Hollywood with Mitchell Froom and Kevin Killen co-producing. Orchestral and vocal overdubs were later added at Westside Studios in London. The whole record, which Costello called "angry," was made in the uneasy aftermath of the Gulf War, a time when, as he saw it, the bugs were very much taking over.