Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Lennon and Yoko Ono song) government into removing its troops from Northern Ireland, shortly before Lennon moved to New York. On 30 January 1972 at a protest march in Derry, 13 marchers were killed by members of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment. The killing was quickly dubbed "Bloody Sunday". Lennon, who was living in New York at the time, was enraged by the massacre and wrote "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as an angry response. The lyrics of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" express Lennon's anger. Ben Urish and Ken Bielen explain that the lyrics "start off with some nice rhetorical spins and a modicum of insight" but eventually
Sunday Bloody Sunday and machine-gun drumming [is] crisscrossed by skipping violin." Denise Sullivan commented for "Allmusic" that Mullen's opening drumwork "helps set the tone for the unforgiving, take-no-prisoners feel of the song, as well as for the rest of the album." In 2010, "Rolling Stone" ranked "Sunday Bloody Sunday" 272nd on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time." In 2006, "Q" named "Sunday Bloody Sunday" the 18th-greatest song of the 1980s. The staff of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame selected "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as one of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. The "New Statesman" listed it