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Abstract We consider perturbative gauge theory on a fixed Yang-Mills plane wave background, describing its Feynman rules in detail. Using these rules, the tree-level 4-point gluon amplitude is computed. As an application, we investigate whether some notion of colour-kinematics duality — a relation between the colour and kinematic constituents of the amplitude — holds on the plane wave background. Although the duality is obstructed, the obstruction has an interesting and highly-constrained structure. This plane wave version of colour-kinematics duality reduces on a flat background to the well-known identities underpinning the BCJ relations for colour-ordered partial amplitudes, and constrains representations of tree-level amplitudes beyond 4-points.