"When I wrote that song it was right before Dookie came out, and I was really at odds with myself," frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said of "Armatage Shanks" in an interview with Spin. "I was like, man, do I really want to do this? A lot of the time I was thinking about suicide, how it's so easy to kill yourself, but so hard to stay alive. I was in a breakup with my then-girlfriend, a total, raving punk rocker who didn't approve of me being on a major label. She moved down to Ecuador, saying she couldn't live in a world with McDonald's and such. It was f--king me up pretty bad." Armstrong wrote about the same girl (Amanda) on Green Day's 1997 hit "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)."
This song had its debut far ahead of its release on the 1995 album Insomniac. At the height of the Dookie tour, the band was asked to perform at the MTV Music Awards on September 8, 1994. MTV asked them to perform "Basket Case," but when it came time to perform, the band played "Armatage Shanks" without telling anyone beforehand. For many months the song's title was not even known. That live version even got tagged onto many international live bootleg CDs under the title "Lost Inside Myself."
The phrase "armatage shanks" never shows up in the lyric. Rumor has it that Armstrong borrowed it from a British brand of toilets, Armitage Shanks, but altered the spelling to avoid trademark issues.
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