Streets

[CKONE]

Where is the town/country that inspired this song?

 

[craigp]

a place in africa that bono visited before the jt was written. i think it was somewhere in ethiopia

 

[DreamOutLoud13]

From U2 by U2 (page 337):

And I was standing on stage the night before we opened in San Diego in March with all these African flags coming down, singing 'Where the Streets Have No Name', when I was reminded of something I had long ago forgotten - that I had written the lyrics for this song in a small village in northern Ethiopia on a scrap of paper, an Air India sick bag, I think. And here it was, nearly twenty years later, coming back to Africa, all the stuff about parched lands and deserts making sense for the first time. The hairs just stood up on the back of my neck. I could barely sing the song. And it was like that every night of the tour.

 

[CKONE]

Ta for that. Researching further finds the mention of Managua in Nicaragua where the streets literally have no name and Belfat according to the man himself - "'Where the Streets Have No Name' is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it’s a sketch — I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling. I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don’t hold you down. An interesting story that someone told me once is that in Belfast, by what street someone lives on you can tell not only their religion but tell how much money they're making — literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further up the hill the more expensive the houses become. You can almost tell what the people are earning by the name of the street they live on and what side of that street they live on. That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place where the streets have no name..."