U2 - Running to Stand Still. How to play the song. Cover, chords, lyrics video free download

How to play the song. Cover, chords, lyrics. album Achtung Baby. Acoustic guitar cover. Lesson video.

"Running to Stand Still" was written by U2 in the context of the heroin addiction epidemic in Dublin of the 1980s, much like "Bad" (and to some extent "Wire") had been from their 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. Bassist Adam Clayton has referred to the song as "Bad Part II". Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott's decline and death from addiction also resonated with Clayton at the time.

Eleven storeys of a gray residential tower, with a spiked fence and a lamp in the foreground.

One of the seven towers in Ballymun Flats

U2 has written relatively few songs directly related to their growing up in Dublin, often giving higher priority to works about The Troubles in Northern Ireland or to international concerns. When they have written about Dublin, allusions to it have often been disguised. But "Running to Stand Still" was one of those with specific Dublin connections:

“ I see seven towers

But I only see one way out ”

This lyric was a reference to the Ballymun flats, a group of seven local authority, high-rise residential tower blocks built in the Ballymun neighborhood of Dublin during the 1960s. Paul Hewson (later known as U2's lead vocalist Bono) had grown up on Cedarwood Road in the adjacent Glasnevin neighborhood, in a house across fields behind the towers, near his friends and future artists Fionán Hanvey (later known as Gavin Friday) and Derek Rowan (later known as Guggi). Bono had played in the towers' foundations as they were being built, then traveled in their elevators for the novel experience. Over time, poor maintenance, lack of facilities for children, transient tenancies, and other factors caused social conditions and communal ties to break down in the flats. The place began to stink of urine and vomit, and glue sniffers and used needles were common sights, as were appearances of the Garda Síochána. Guggi later lived in the towers during years that he was struggling personally with drugs. It was through his exposure to people without hope in the flats that Bono began to develop his social consciousness.

Bono may have used Ballymun as the inspiration (without any explicit lyrical references to it) for the 1980 U2 song "Shadows and Tall Trees", and later likened living in the area to some of the scenes portrayed in the 1992 Mike Newell film Into the West. Driving by there in 1987, Bono said, "See the seven tall buildings there? They're 'the seven towers.' They have the highest suicide rate in Ireland. After they discovered everywhere else in the world that you don't put people living on top of each other, we built them here." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_to_Stand_Still

And so she woke up

Woke up from where she was

Lying still

Said I gotta do something

About where we're going

Step on a steam train

Step out of the driving rain, maybe

Run from the darkness in the night

Singing ha, ah la la la de day

Ah da da da de day

Ah la la de day

Sweet the sin

Bitter taste in my mouth

I see seven towers

But I only see one way out

You got to cry without weeping

Talk without speaking

Scream without raising your voice

You know I took the poison

From the poison stream

Then I floated out of here

Singing ha la la la de day

Ha la la la de day

Ha la la de day

She runs through the streets

With eyes painted red

Under a black belly of cloud in the rain

In through a doorway she brings me

White gold and pearls stolen from the sea

She is raging

She is raging

And the storm blows up in her eyes

She will

Suffer the needle chill

She's running to stand

Still.