What’s going on my fellow rock n’ rollers. Don’t forget to hit the bell notification
icon to be notified everytime i put out a new video on my channel. 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,
and we had a lot of our own ideas. A lot of the grunge bands were very similar to each
other.” she’d say The Cranberries' former manager Allen Kovac
revealed to Rolling Stone magazine that the group’s label Island Records urged them
not to release the "politically urgent" song as a single. The label offered O’Riordan
one million dollars do work on a different song, but she ripped up the cheque with Kovac
remembering "Dolores was a very small, fragile person, but very opinionated,". "Her belief
was that she was an international artist and she wanted to break the rest of the world,
and ‘Zombie’ was part of that evolution. She felt the need to expand beyond ‘I love
you, you love me’ and write about what was happening in Ireland at the time",
While the band was already famous from their first album, Zombie catapulted them to a new
level of popularity. Also helping the band make a lasting mark was the music video in
which footage of the conflict in Northern Ireland is spliced with O’Rierdan who was
painted gold and in the company of silver painted cherubs. The band would turn to Samuel
Bayer to direct the video. And he had a pretty impressive list of credits including working
on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video and Blind Melon’s video for No Rain. Bayer,
flew to Belfast shortly before the ceasefire to get footage of the area - and those are
real British soldiers and local children you see in the video
O’Riordan for her part would praise Bayer saying
“I actually thought the director was very brave,”. “When he got back, he was pretty
pumped – there was a lot of adrenalin pumping through him. He was telling me how tense it
was and how he was blown away by the whole thing. He got footage of the kids jumping
from one building to another, and he got a lot of footage of the army. He was a very
good director.” she’d say. Upon it’s release as the first single form
the band’s sophomore record zombie hit number 1 in several countries on the rock charts
and would be certified platinum in Germany and Australia.
At the MTV Awards, the band beat out both Michael Jackson and TLC to win the Best Song
award but that award paled in when The band also got the opportunity to perform the song
live at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony to honor those who brought a peaceful solution
to the conflict in Northern Ireland. No Need To Argue would go on to sell almost
20 million copies on the strength of Zombie. O’Riordan looked back on the success of
the single and album saying. “I wouldn’t change anything about it, because it did so
well,” she said. “It was well-written and it was well-composed. I think it did so
well because it’s hard to categorise it. And I still like singing it.”
And the band would end up re-releasing the song with an acoustic version that was played
alongside the Irish chamber orchestra for the band’ record titled “Something Else.”
The song of course got another boost when modern rock band Bad Wolves covered the song
in early 2018. O’Rierdon was originally supposed to sing on the cover but she sadly
passed away before she could contribute to the cover. In response Bad wolves mulled releasing
the cover but went through with it and it topped the rock charts and peaked at number
18 on the top 40 charts. The band donated 250K to O’ Rierdon’s 3 children. And In
2020 The Cranberries became the first irish band to hit one billion views on youtube with
their song Zombie. That does it for today’s video guys. Thanks for watching. Be sure to
hit the like button and subscribe and if you have suggestions for future topics let me
know in the comments section below. Take care.