"Sultans Of Swing" lyrics
"Sultans Of Swing"
You get a shiver in the dark
It's raining in the park, but meantime
South of the river, you stop, and you hold everything
A band is blowing Dixie, double-four time
You feel alright when you hear the music ring
Well, now you step inside
But you don't see too many faces
Coming in out of the rain to hear the jazz go down
Competition in other places
Ah, but the horns, they're blowing that sound
Way on down south
Way on down south, London town
Check out guitar George
He knows all the chords
Mind, it's strictly rhythm
He doesn't wanna make it cry or sing
Yes and an old guitar is all he can afford
When he gets up under the lights to play his thing
And Harry doesn't mind if he doesn't make the scene
He's got a daytime job, he's doing alright
He can play the honky tonk like anything
Saving it up for Friday night
With the Sultans
With the Sultans of Swing
Yeah
And a crowd of young boys
They're fooling around in the corner
Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies
And their platform soles
They don't give a damn
About any trumpet-playing band
It ain't what they call "Rock and Roll"
And the Sultans
Yeah, the Sultans, they play Creole
Creole
And then the man, he steps right up to the microphone
And says at last, just as the time bell rings
"Goodnight, now it's time to go home"
Then he makes it fast with one more thing
"We are the Sultans—
We are the Sultans of Swing"
Thanks to digvijay, Ninad, Ananth, martin mc namara for correcting these lyrics.
Writer(s): Mark Knopfler
The idea to write this song came to Mark Knopfler one rainy evening, when he hid in a bar somewhere in Ipswich and heard the last song of a band played there. Knopfler recalled, "When the guys said, 'Thank you very much. We are the Sultans of Swing', there was something really funny about it to me because sultans: they absolutely weren't. You know, they were rather tired little blokes in pullovers."
This was the band's first single recorded on a demo tape they made to get a record deal. The popularity of the song on radio led to a contract with Phonogram Records.
Mark Knopfler recalled how this song began to sound after he had switched from a National Steel guitar, "I thought it was dull, but as soon as I bought my first Strat in 1977, the whole thing changed, though the lyrics remained the same. It just came alive as soon as I played it on that '61 Strat which remained my main guitar for many years and was basically the only thing I played on the first album, and the new chord changes just presented themselves and fell into place."
The "Guitar George" and "Harry" who are mentioned in the lyrics are George Young and Harry Vander, guitarists of the band The Easybeats. George Young is Angus Young's (
AC/DC) older brother.
The lyrics "They don't give a damn about any trumpet-playing band. It ain't what they call rock and roll" is a bit ironic because there was a band called Sultans of Swing where Alan Freed played trombone, that Freed who invented the term "rock 'n' roll" on his radio show in Cleveland in the early '50s.
- AZLyrics
- D
- Dire Straits Lyrics
album:
"Dire Straits" (1978)
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