Dolores O'Riordan

The Irish band had already enjoyed success with their sweet ballads, but this storming left-turn, an incendiary, furious track about the bombings in ...

He got footage of the kids jumping from one building to another, and he got a lot of footage of the army. 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. It was inter-cut with documentary footage of soldiers and children on the streets of Northern Ireland, filmed by director Samuel Bayer, who also made the videos for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Blind Melon’s No Rain. There were a lot of bands around that were part of the grunge thing, and this wasn’t grunge, but the timing was good. A lot of the grunge bands were very similar to each other.” We were Irish and from Limerick, and we had a lot of our own ideas. It was recorded in Dublin with producer Stephen Street, who spent a long time working on getting the guitar settings right to give a suitably expansive sound. “I remember at the time there were a lot of bombs going off in London and the Troubles were pretty bad,” she said, 24 years later. Rather than being a collaborative effort, it was written by O’Riordan alone, in the calm of her own flat, and it began life as a much gentler proposition than it ended up as. “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. “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. When it exploded, 12-year-old Tim Parry and three-year-old Jonathan Ball were killed, and dozens of people injured, in an attack that shocked and appalled the public in the UK and Ireland alike.