"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish alternative rock[1] band the Cranberries, written about the 1993 IRA bombing in Warrington,[5] and in memory of two young victims, Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry. It was released in September 1994 as the lead single from their second studio album, No Need to Argue, two weeks ahead of the album's release.
The song was written by the band's lead singer Dolores O'Riordan and reached No. 1 on the charts of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and Iceland, as well as on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. It won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards.[6] The song was voted by Triple J listeners as No. 1 on the Triple J Hottest 100, 1994 chart.[7][8]
In 2017, the song was released as an acoustic, stripped-down version on the band's Something Else album.[9] In April 2020 it became the first song by an Irish band to surpass one billion views on YouTube.[10][11] As of April 2020, Zombie has been streamed 472 million times on Spotify and has sold 778,942 copies in United Kingdom.
During The Troubles, more than 3,500 died and tens of thousands were injured in more than 30 years of brutality and complexity.[13][14][15] The IRA, which are devoted both to removing British forces from Northern Ireland and to unifying Ireland, killed more than 2,000 people.[16][17] There were over 10,000 bomb attacks at that time, in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, in an armed conflict between the Provisional IRA, Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, and the British security forces, which can be thought of as a struggle for identity.[18][19]
The song was written in response to the death of Johnathan Ball, 3, and Tim Parry, 12, who had been killed in the IRA bombing in Warrington, northwestern England, when two devices hidden in litter bins were detonated.[20][21] Johnathan Ball died at the scene of the bombing as a result of his shrapnel inflicted injuries and, five days later, Tim Parry lost his life as a result of fatal head injuries. Fifty-four others were injured, some seriously.[22][23] The two boys had gone shopping to buy Mother's Day cards on one of the town's busiest shopping streets. There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that’s why there’s that line in the song, ‘A child is slowly taken’. [ ... ] We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. 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.
— Dolores O'Riordan, speaking of the songwriting of the classic 90s rock song, "Zombie
