Written by:

Mark E Smith/Marcia Schofield

Initial release:

White Lightning/The Dredger EP, Cog Sinister/Fontana SINX612 12″ (Zagreb Movement II); SIN612 Limited 12″ (Zagreb Movements I+II+III); SINCD6 CD (Zagreb Movements I+II+III)

Date:

13 August 1990

Subsequent releases:

Listening In, Cog Sinister/Voiceprint COGVP132 CD; 11 November 2002 (Zagreb Movements I & II & III)
Shiftwork, Fontana/Mercury 9847464 CD; 7 May 2007 (Zagreb
The Fontana Years, Fontana CD574265/; August 2017; box set contains Shift-Work extended CD)
The Fontana Years, Fontana CD574265/6; Zagreb Movements I & II & III; August 2017; box set contains Shift-Work extended CD)

Officially released live versions:

Live In Zagreb, Cog Sinister/Voiceprint COGVP109 CD; 4 June 2001 (recorded at Dom Sportova, Zagreb, 15 April 1990; version here is incomplete)

Group on initial release:

Mark E Smith – vocals;Craig Scanlon – guitar; Martin Bramah – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Marcia Schofield – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Commentary:

Marcia Schofield in The Pseud Mag no. 9 (April/May 2006): “Zagreb started out as me and Simon jamming to Higher Ground because I hated the Chilis’ version of it. Simon and I always played funk and soul stuff in soundcheck for fun – the lads would sort of humour it and put more rocky stuff on top of it.”

MES quoted in Frieze Magazine, 5 September 1992: It’s just precog,’says Smith. ‘You write things down and you don’t know what they mean but you know they’re true and they come true later. It’s not prophecy as such. It makes me laugh actually. I see things happening and I think,”Oh,that reminds me of something.” Turns out it’s something I wrote five years ago. l wrote a song called, Zagreb Daylight [sic] two years ago. We were playing in Zagreb and l could feel this horrible, murderous shit in the air. l had a feeling that yobs were going to rule the earth. I’m half one myself you see. Anyway, I wrote this thing about a man in a shop with a dwarf behind the counter. It didn’t go down well at all. If it came out a month from now, people would say it’s topical.

MES again, from an article entitled “Prole Art Threat On The Internet” : “I said everything about Yugoslavia in ‘Free Range’ and ‘Zagreb Day'[sic] a year before it all happened, so I’ve said my bit. We played Yugoslavia just before it went off and you could feel the tension.

Zagreb shares the lyric “Behind The Counter” with the same-titled track which debuted three years later.