On 13 March 1996, unemployed former shopkeeper and former Scout leader Thomas Hamilton (born Thomas Watt, Jr. 10 May 1952) walked into the Dunblane Primary School armed with two 9 mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers, all legally held. He was carrying 743 cartridges, and fired his weapons 109 times. The subsequent police investigation revealed that Hamilton had loaded the magazines for his Browning with an alternating combination of full-metal-jacket and hollow-point ammunition.
After gaining entry to the school, Hamilton made his way to the gymnasium and opened fire on a Primary One class of five- and six-year-olds, killing or wounding all but one person. Fifteen children died together with their class teacher, Gwen Mayor, who was killed trying to protect the children. Hamilton then left the gymnasium through the emergency exit. In the playground outside he began shooting into a mobile classroom.
A teacher in the mobile classroom had previously realised that something was seriously wrong and told the children to hide under the tables. Most of the bullets became embedded in books and equipment, though "one passed through a chair which seconds before had been used by a child." He also fired at a group of children walking in a corridor, injuring one teacher. Hamilton returned into the gym and with one of his two revolvers fired one shot pointing upwards into his mouth, killing himself instantly. A further eleven children and three adults were rushed to the hospital as soon as the emergency services arrived. One child, Mhairi Isabel MacBeath, was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
So reads the Wikipedia entry on the Dunblane massacre. I remember the events first hand as if they happened yesterday and as I can't improve on the above synopsis, I'm not going to try - the facts speak for themselves. This version of Bob Dylan's 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' was recorded and released as a result of the events set out above with all proceeds going to children's charities, and in many ways it's the most troubling single on these pages. Charity records are nothing new, but whereas those in the past tended to be all star affairs, 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' is largely the work of Scottish musician Ted Christopher and a band made up of local musicians. The only 'star turn' was Mark Knopfler who played lead guitar on it.
It's a questionable choice of song in the circumstances; Dylan wrote 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' for Sam Peckinpah's 1973 film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and in that film it's sung from the point of view of a lawman dying from a gunshot wound . "Mama, put my guns in the ground. I can't shoot them anymore. That long black cloud is coming down, I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door" - these lyrics would have been an eyebrow raiser in this context and bad (or misunderstood at least) taste personified, but Christopher, with Dylan's blessing, re-wrote the lyrics to the more generally anti-gun message of "Lord put all these guns in the ground. We just can't shoot them anymore. It's time that we spread some love around, before we're knockin' on heaven's door". Even so the appropriateness remains questionable; the re-write may shift Dylan's first person commentary to a third person observation, but the pro-active angle of the chorus remains. Only in this case, sixteen people were not knocking on heaven's door at all; they'd already passed through it.
And yes I know that looks like a pithy and picky cheap shot comment, and I probably would not have raised it had that chorus not actually had Dunblane schoolchildren singing it. Emotive certainly, and mixed in a way that renders them almost as voices calling from the afterlife, but whether this was intentional or not I nevertheless can't help but sense an aura of exploitation in hearing voices so young singing such an 'adult themed' lyric in the aftermath of an horrific event that touched all their lives. Am I being too sensitive about this? Maybe. But nevertheless I can't deny that it gives me the same sense of outrage that others felt when Marcus Harvey unveiled his infamous portrait of Myra Hindley in 1997. A reproduction of the stock police photograph of the scowling, peroxide Hindley, it was built up from thousands of individual dabs made by a cast of a child's hand into an artwork that was demonised and physically attacked so often that it had to be hung behind Perspex with security guards on standby.
Is there any real difference between both statements? Harvey's painting came with the 'serious art' veneer that's the usual defence against the outrageous and the unacceptable (in this case the "sick exploitation of dead children"*) and which itself is usually met with a sneer at the pretension of it all. Christopher's recording made no claims to high art and satisfied itself by being on the side of the angels, a homespun outpouring of grief and redemption with a message of hope. And though the "This town will never be the same, so for the bairns of Dunblane we ask please never again" and Christopher's bizarre mid song recitation of Psalm23 could themselves bring sneers at their sheer mawkish clumsiness, it would take a harder heart than mine to do so.
Dunblane's 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' stands as a unique entry into the canon of UK number ones. Recordings such as the Band Aid, Ferry Aid, the song for the Hillsborough appeal were all generated as reaction to an event and, although designed solely to raise money, they also provided a song that at least attempted to stand by itself for the pleasure of anybody who (for example) was itching to hear 'Let It Be' sung by a roster of disparate A and B listers. 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' raised money for charity too, but the end product is less a song and more a public outpouring of grief and attempt at rationalisation by people directly affected by the tragedy. Hillsborough survivors played no part in the recording of "Ferry Cross The Mersey", Zebrugge survivors played no part in the recording of "Let It Be" - it would have been bad taste to invite them and I doubt they would have anyway; they didn't need to - the 'stars' did the work on their behalf.
By citing themselves collectively as 'Dunblane', the artists behind 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' remain insular, enclosed and work within a context that goes beyond 'doing their bit' for the victims. It's not a 'I Don't Like Mondays' attempt at cod analysis (now how inappropriate would that have been?) but neither is it a song I can imagine anybody ever wanting to listen to more than once. There's simply no need to - only the ghoulish would find replay value here and that's why I find it such a difficult recording to get a handle on. It had the full support of all affected parents and its content went unquestioned in the media at the time, so maybe I'm an audience of one when I say that, for me, 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' is a well meaning single created with nothing but the best of intentions but in its knee-jerk reaction it borders on the theatrical in a way that made my skin crawl then as much as it makes my skin crawl now.
* Comment by the charity 'Kidscape'.
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