Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting
by Elton John
- 152
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Bernie Taupin wrote the words as an American rock and roll song set in Britain. He drew on his raucous teenage days, and in particular the fistfights in his local pub, the Aston Arms in Market Rasen. The narrator of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" plans to get "about as oiled as a diesel train". Elton John wrote the music.
Recording was awkward. John and his band had first planned to make the whole of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in Jamaica, but the equipment was poor. This was the only song they cut there. John said it sounded as if it had been recorded on the worst transistor radio. The band went back to France to finish the album. The method was backward too. The band put their tracks down first and John overdubbed his piano afterward, where he usually recorded the piano first or played along with the band. He called it hard to record.
It came out in 1973 as the album's first single and rose to No. 7 in the UK and No. 12 in the US. It was the only John single to miss the American top ten between "Rocket Man" in May 1972 and "Island Girl" in October 1975. By December 2015 he had played it more than 1,800 times live.
Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting runs at 152 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.58 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 395 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.