A Different Gun

Album: Call The Comet (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song was written about the Nice lorry attack on evening of Bastille Day 2016, when a cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France by an ISIS terrorist. It resulted in the deaths of 86 people. Johnny Marr told Uncut:

    "I didn't want to sing about the actual event because that would be wrong and inappropriate. But I saw the palm trees, and I know what it's like to walk down a beautiful seafront with the warm wind, with children around you and families around you, watching fireworks go off. We all know that feeling when you're on holiday. It's a very evocative, sensuous experience. The sultry night-time seafront.

    But there are bodies strewn in the road. And the shock of seeing dead bodies in that environment, caused by another member of the human race, is something that stayed with me. I just tried to depict some human kind of story in it, and make the music slightly woozy and otherwordly. I hope there's a sense of humanity in it, a sense of hope. But also: what next? There's always a different gun, a different bomb."
  • Marr told the BBC he was recording the song when news started to break of the terrorist attack that killed 22 concertgoers outside of an Ariana Grande show at the Manchester Arena. He initially had second thoughts about including it on Call The Comet but "something in me said that I was being a bit of a chicken if I didn't tackle it."

    "I was trying to musically create a song that paid tribute to this feeling that I couldn't quite shake off," Marr added. "So I did what I've done all my life really, since I was able to play, I just tried to turn it into music."

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