As well as writ­ing about art and cul­ture, your blog­ger has also been known to wield a mean gui­tar (by “mean”, I mean “aver­age”) and, although fame failed to beck­on after the van­i­ty-fund­ed release of the damn fine album Sara­ban­da by The Mavis Trains in 1999, I still know my approx­i­mate way around a fret­board and con­tin­ue to play from time to time in the com­fort of my home. Recent­ly, for a bit of fun, I videoed myself per­form­ing an acoustic ver­sion of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to mild­ly amuse some select­ed friends. As a result, I was chal­lenged by the son of one of those friends to have a go at that Dire Straits’ clas­sic, Sul­tans Of Swing.

I sus­pect, giv­en Mark Knopfler’s obvi­ous tech­ni­cal prowess, that the chal­lenge was deliv­ered with some­thing of an inter­nal chuck­le and the thought “good luck with that!”. And so, the ensu­ing weeks have seen me watch­ing online tuto­ri­als, scru­ti­n­is­ing line after line of tab­la­ture, and furi­ous­ly prac­tic­ing with a view to bam­boo­zling my imag­ined detrac­tors’ assump­tion of fail­ure. Curse them, and curse Mark Knopfler’s super-fast dex­ter­i­ty and total com­mand of his instru­ment!

In all seri­ous­ness though, Hugo (for it was he), Sul­tans Of Swing is a great shout; it’s a tremen­dous song. It was inspired appar­ent­ly by a real-life encounter with a jazz band in an almost emp­ty pub in Dept­ford on a rainy night in 1977. Amused by the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the band’s non­de­script and shab­by appear­ance (I’m imag­in­ing Chas and Dave types) with their grandiose name (“we are the Sul­tans of Swing!”), Knopfler began to pen what would become his band’s debut sin­gle in the fol­low­ing year.

Knopfler wrote the song on a Nation­al Steel gui­tar (a spe­cial kind of res­onator gui­tar used by the Blues­men of old before the days of elec­tron­ic ampli­fi­ca­tion) but it wasn’t until he played it on a Stra­to­cast­er that the song took on the vibran­cy with which we asso­ciate with it today: “It just came alive as soon as I played it on that ’61 Strat … the new chord changes just pre­sent­ed them­selves and fell into place”.  It cer­tain­ly came alive: let’s hear it again in all its glo­ry, below.