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.
