Songfacts®:

• Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal, who go by the name Eldar & Nigar, is an Azeri pop duo. Gasimov and Jamal took part separately in the Azerbaijani national selection to choose who would represent the country in the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest. Jamal won the overall voting with 23.4%, while Eldar Gasimov ended up 4th with 17.2%. In the end it was decided that both of them would take part as a duo named Ell & Nikki, singing "Running Scared." Their entry were the overall winners of the Eurovision final, the first time Azerbaijan had been victorious in the contest.
• British songwriter Iain Farquharson wrote the song with the Swedish duo of Stefan Örn and Sandra Bjurman. The two Swedes were also the authors of the song "Drip Drop," which represented Azerbaijan at the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest.
• Farquharson told the story of the song in an interview with M Magazine: "I work quite a lot in Scandinavia as there is a great market over there with producers and writers and I've been going there for almost ten years now. Originally, the bones of the song were written by a friend of mine Stefan Örn and Sandra Bjurman who are both Swedish. They had the rough idea and I was over there working on another song with Stefan and he brought it up. Stefan and Sandra worked with Azerbaijan last year on their Eurovision song so they had the connection there already.
  
  Stefan and Sandra played it to me and it really was kind of bare – it wasn't ticking any boxes so we practically re-wrote it. They had the title 'Running Scared,' I did my thing on it, we re-wrote the melody and made the chorus sound more contemporary and worked on the lyrics with them. So it all happened really naturally, it was just one of those songs you write and you think: 'that's really solid, there's nothing wrong with that'.
  
  It was done specifically for Eurovision so we just put it to one side. Then a few months on it all went a bit crazy, the Azerbaijanis really loved it and I flew out to Kiev in the Ukraine. We recorded the song with Ell and Nikki as I do vocal production. It felt really great as I followed it through to the end in the way songs used to be written. Obviously I write a lot of songs and often you don't meet the artists they are for, so it made it all the more special when the song won, especially as Ell and Nikki are lovely people and they work very hard. They were so excited to represent their country as Eurovision is a really big deal in (continental) Europe – people aspire to write and perform songs for the competition. Ell and Nikki's excitement got us excited about it."
• Farquharson explained how they constructed the song in the same interview: "I'm what is called a 'topliner' these days – which means melody and lyrics. I used to be a performing artist myself so what I bring to a session is melody, lyrical content and concepts – basically topline means 'on top of the track'. With 'Running Scared' I just felt we could make it stronger, I felt it was very important that we had a chorus which would stick out and was catchy, so we brought it out a bit more and made it more melodic. I play keys – I wouldn't say I'm a pianist, I bring more of a singing kind of thing to it. Stephan is an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist so we worked around a piano. We worked out the song by using trial and error – the real old fashioned way, just jamming I suppose. 'This works, that doesn't work' etc. What they had started had potential, I just felt I could bring my flavour to it and turn it into a contemporary song, which is what I feel we did. We had our roles – Stefan and I worked out the chord structure of the song and the melody and Sandra was mainly working on lyrics and I helped her as well – a real team effort. It was pretty much one of the easiest song writing sessions you could have – no egos, which is another reason why I love working with Scandinavians so much – it is pretty much just making music, there's none of this 'I've had this many hits in this many countries etc'.The over-riding memory of writing that song is that it was enjoyable, which is what it should be when you're writing a song for Eurovision!"