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Today we take a look at The Cranberries biggest hit song 'Zombie' from their sophomore record and the true events that inspired the track.
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By 1994, grunge was in its last throes as nirvana was done, alice in chains were on hiatus, pearl jam was growing more uncomfortable with success and fighting with ticketmaster and punk rock was all of a sudden becoming fashionable. One band who got their start just as rock music was changing was the Irish band The Cranberries who achieved international fame with their multi-platinum debut record 1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We?, The album featured several hit songs including Linger and Dreams, but in 1994 the band would release the biggest song of their career as they readied to release their sophomore record 1994’s No Need to Argue. In September of 1994 the band dropped the song Zombie the first single from the new record and This is the dark history of the song.
Released in September of 1994, Zombie was an anti-war anthem that took aim at the religious violence in Northern Ireland also known as “The Troubles”. It was a far cry from the music heard on the band’s debut record, but by this point in time the violence in Northern Ireland was relentless and occurring almost on a weekly basis. Up until this point almost 3,500 died and tens of thousands were injured in more than 30 years of conflict. There would be one incident in particular which inspired the creation of the song and that occured On March 20, 1993. Explosives hidden under a garbage can in the city of Warrington in Northwestern England took the lives of a 3 year old and 12 year old boy and injured dozens of others. The two boys had gone shopping to buy Mother's Day cards on one of the town's busiest shopping streets and the same point in time The Cranberries were on tour in the UK and frontwoman Deloris O’Rierdon was on the band’s tour bus in London when she heard the news. It was something that would stick with her for the next little while. And almost 2.5 decads after writing the song O’ Rierdon would look back on the song saying
“I remember at the time there were a lot of bombs going off in London and the Troubles were pretty bad,”. “I remember being on tour and being in the UK at the time when the child died, and just being really sad about it all. These bombs are going off in random places. It could have been anyone, you know? So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.
“It’s a tough thing to sing about, but when you’re young you don’t think twice about things, you just grab it and do it. As you get older you develop more fear and you get more apprehensive, but when you’re young you’ve got no fear.”
And the song was written by O’Riordan originally on acoustic guitar late one night by herself on the groups UK tour. When O'Riordan took it into rehearsals they played the song on electric guitar.
“It was extremely busy and we were working all the time around the clock,” she said. “That song came to me when I was in Limerick, and I wrote it initially on an acoustic guitar, late at night. I remember being in my flat, coming up with the chorus, which was catchy and anthemic. So I took it into rehearsals, and I picked up the electric guitar. Then I kicked in distortion on the chorus, and I said to Ferg [Fergal Lawler, drums]: ‘Maybe you could beat the drums pretty hard.’ Even though it was written on an acoustic, it became a bit of a rocker.
“That was the most aggressive song we’d written. Zombie was quite different to what we’d done before.”
The band would record the song in Dublin with producer Stephen Street, who spent a fair deal of time getting the guitars to sound like other alternative music that was popular at the time. However, O’Rierdon would push back against the assertion that the band was capitalizing off the popualrity of grunge music revealing
“It came organically because we were using our live instruments, we were plugging in a lot, and we started to mess around with feedback and distortion. When you’re on tour you start to mess around a bit more with the live side of things. There were a lot of bands around that were part of the grunge thing, and this wasn’t grunge, but the timing was good. We couldn’t have really fitted in with grunge, because we were just a different type of a band. We were Irish and from Limerick,
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