Songfacts®:

• The title refers to Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), which was a popular treatment in Irish mental hospitals, but one that the band felt was inhumane.
  
  There was a real mental institution in Dublin that inspired the song. It's was called Grangegorman District Mental Hospital (or "The Grangegorman"), and later renamed St. Brendan's Psychiatric Hospital. A school friend of the band was confined to the institution, and when Bono visited him, this friend talked about killing himself as a way out of the place.
• A live favorite, this was first released on U2's debut album, Boy, in 1980, but found a much larger audience when it was included on their 1983 live album Under A Blood Red Sky, released after their breakthrough album War. On that version, recorded at the Rockpalast festival in Germany, Bono sang 27 seconds of Stephen Sondheim's "Send In The Clowns." Because they did not get permission, they had to pay Sondheim $50,000 and edit it out of US releases. It remains on non-US releases because the US copyright law does not apply. The song is listed as 5:18 on US versions of Under A Blood Red Sky, but the actual length is 4:51.
• U2 included this on the set list for many of their 2005 shows.