Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting by Elton John

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting is a 1973 rock song by Elton John, with lyrics by Bernie Taupin. It was the first single from the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, reached No. 7 in the UK and No. 12 in the US, and has stayed in his concert set ever since.

Taupin built the words around his own teenage years in Lincolnshire. On weekend nights he drank at the Aston Arms, a pub in the market town of Market Rasen, and the evenings there often ended with punches thrown. He later said he had spent too long writing about American subjects, and he described this song as his first try at a rock and roll number that was completely English. The narrator is a young man getting ready for a night out, counting on drink, girls and a brawl in roughly equal measure. Elton John set the lyric to a fast, loud arrangement built on guitar rather than piano.

John and his band planned to record the whole album in Jamaica, but the studio they booked had substandard equipment, and Taupin later recalled barbed wire around the building and armed guards on site. Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting was the only track the band attempted there. John said the result sounded like something captured on the worst transistor radio, and Taupin called the session an aborted effort. The group left Jamaica and went back to the Château d'Hérouville, the converted manor house outside Paris where they had already made Honky Château and Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player.

At the Château, Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums recorded the backing track on their own, and John added his piano and vocal afterward. He normally recorded his piano first or played live with the band, and he said this was the only way they could get the song recorded. Engineer David Hentschel recalled that the backing track was done in one take. John also said it was the first time he had sung a vocal standing up, moving around the studio instead of sitting at the keyboard, and he called it a hard song to record because it is not a typical piano number. Gus Dudgeon produced the session, as he did the rest of the album.

The single was released in the summer of 1973, about three months ahead of the album, with Jack Rabbit and Whenever You're Ready (We'll Go Steady Again) on the flip side. Trade papers liked it: Billboard heard a cross between Crocodile Rock and the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man and called it a great fun record, while Record World described it as a rip-snortin' rocker. In Britain it entered the chart in early July and spent nine weeks there, peaking at No. 7. In the US it reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and also hit No. 12 in Canada.

Between Rocket Man in 1972 and Island Girl in 1975, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting was the only Elton John single that missed the US top ten, even as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road became one of the biggest albums of the decade. It has since earned sales certifications in the UK, the US and New Zealand.

By December 2015 John had played it on stage more than 1,800 times, and it remained part of the set on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. For years he let fans climb onto the stage and gather around his piano during the song. That ended at a Las Vegas show on March 1, 2018, when an audience member kept touching him; John stopped playing and announced that there would be no more coming on stage for this one. A live version recorded with Anastacia appeared on his 2000 album One Night Only.

Other artists have taken it on many times. The Who recorded a version for Two Rooms, the 1991 tribute album to John and Taupin, with Roger Daltrey on lead vocal and a stretch of Take Me to the Pilot folded in at the end. The thrash band Flotsam and Jetsam covered it in 1988, and W.A.S.P. released their own take later. Nickelback teamed up with Kid Rock in 2003 for a version used on the soundtrack of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Fall Out Boy recorded it for the 40th anniversary edition of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in 2014. The Italian singer Umberto Tozzi borrowed from it for his 1979 hit Gloria.

On screen, it plays under the opening of Ricky Gervais's 2010 film Cemetery Junction, which Gervais said fit the movie's mood and themes perfectly. The cast of the 2019 biopic Rocketman performed it. Since 2023 it has opened AEW Collision, a professional wrestling show that airs on Saturday nights.

Musically it is a straight rock song driven by Johnstone's guitar chords, which Taupin praised as strident and blistering. Its tempo and key are listed on the Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting key and BPM page. The song still gets regular play on classic rock radio.