Photo Credit:
Writers: Elton John and Bernie Taupin
Producer: Gus Dudgeon
Recorded: May 1973 at Strawberry Studios, France
Released: Fall 1973
Players: | Elton John — vocals, piano Davey Johnstone — guitar, vocals Dee Murray — bass, vocals Nigel Olsson — drums, vocals |
Album: | Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (MCA, 1973) |
“Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting” is one of — if not the — hardest-rocking numbers in Elton John's catalogue.
John and his band were unhappy with the sound they were getting in the studio, as well as with the facilities in town, so they decided to move the recording sessions for Goodbye Yellow Brick Roadfrom Kingston, Jamaica, to France. John remembered that in Kingston, “We stayed at a hotel called the Pink Flamingo or something like that. I was afraid to go out of the room, because it was pretty funky in downtown Kingston.” Lyricist Bernie Taupin added, “If I remember rightly, the studio was surrounded by barbed wire, and there were guys with machine guns.”
The studio was also the subject of a strike by technicians, who would assault John and company as they arrived each day.
John said that once they all got to France, the album was recorded in about fifteen days. “The amount of work we did… We used to record three, four, five tracks a day.”
Recording “Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting,” however, was difficult. “'Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting' was the weirdest one,” John said. “That was so hard to record. 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. (It was) the first time I've ever recorded standing up, singing and leaping around the studio, going crazy. It was also hard because it's not a typical piano number.”
The double-album spent eight weeks at Number One on the Billboard 200 and in the U.K. It's sold well over six million copies since its release.