‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’: the Elton John song that’s secretly punk
He may be a knight of the realm who has soundtracked multiple West End musicals and given himself the middle name ‘Hercules’ (yes, really). Despite all that, there’s a mile-wide gritty streak in Elton John. This is, after all, a man who had his life utterly changed by rock and roll, who spent most Saturdays of his youth at Vicarage Road stadium watching his beloved Watford and saw more than his fair share of pub brawls. It doesn’t show up much in the music he made with lyricist Bernie Taupin, though, with one notable exception.
While the ‘Rocketman‘ may have made his name in the early 1970s with ballads like ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘Your Song’, there was always a side to him that chimed with the glam rockers of the day. Perhaps his music was on the slightly more accessible end of the spectrum than the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan and had more to do with his predilection for shades that look like ornaments you’d find in pre-revolutionary Versaille, but it was in the music too.
1972’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ was exactly the same kind of glittered-up, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll that Mott the Hoople and Slade were peddling, but it was still, at its core, a pop song. It wouldn’t be until a year later that ‘The Great Dame’ would really turn up the thermostat. Setting a lyric Taupin had written about his misspent youth in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, to a thunderous, Rolling Stones-esque boogie, he made a track about 12 times faster than anything Jagger and co. had done at that point.
Thus, one of John’s most celebrated tracks, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’, was born, and The Stones’ comparison is an apt one. Inspired by their then-recent album, Goats Head Soup, being made in Jamaica, John decided that the record ‘Saturday Night…’ would call the same home and would be recorded there. Unfortunately, they arrived in a Kingston that resembled that classic song a bit too much for their liking.
John elaborated on this in the liner notes for the box set To Be Continued…, noting, “We arrived, I think, the day after the George Foreman-Joe Frazier fight, and the place was swarming with people. I was afraid to go out of the room because it was pretty funky in downtown Kingston.” This seemed to give them a kind of inspiration, though, as John wrote, “When we actually got into the studio, the only thing recorded was a really frantic version of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’.”
Disappointingly, the studio they were using was a far more low-rent one than The Stones had used. The version of ‘Saturday Night…’ they cut there “sounded like it had been recorded on the worst transistor radio”. While I maintain this could have worked for the song, the decision to pull the plug and return to Château d’Hérouville in France was absolutely the right one. They managed to record a version that retained the anarchic spirit they were going for as well, despite the stately surroundings.
John said that the key was to approach the song backwards from their usual process. Previously, his studio sessions began with a recording of him at the piano and then the band recording around him. This time, he said, “The only way we could record it in the end was for the band to play it, and then I put the piano in and sang afterwards.” He also claimed it was “the first time I’d ever recorded standing up, singing and leaping around the studio, going crazy. It was also hard because it’s not a typical piano number.”
This makes sense, as only the best would do for an album as beloved as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. An album versatile enough to have the likes of ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Bennie and the Jets’, ‘Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’ and, at the centre of this stately piano-pop record, a raucous proto-punk jam like ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’—the man really can do it all!
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