Sultans of Swing

About the song

«Sultans of Swing» is the song that launched Dire Straits. The band had formed in 1977 in Deptford, in south-east London, around the brothers Mark and David Knopfler, the bassist John Illsley and the drummer Pick Withers. At the time Mark Knopfler was working as an English teacher, Illsley was a student at Goldsmiths’ College and David was a social worker. None of them had a record deal, and the song that would change that had been written almost by accident.

Knopfler first composed it on a National Steel guitar in an open tuning, and he found the result dull. That changed when he bought a 1961 Fender Stratocaster in 1977: on the new instrument, he later explained, the chord changes seemed to arrange themselves. The words came from a real evening. Knopfler walked into a nearly empty pub in Deptford where a small Dixieland jazz band was playing to almost nobody. The musicians were ordinary men in ordinary clothes, and at the end of the night the singer announced them with a grand, royal-sounding name. The contrast between that proud name and the modest scene stayed with him and became the heart of the song.

In July 1977 the band paid for a five-song demo at Pathway Studios, in north London. After a rejection from MCA, they took the tape to Charlie Gillett, who presented a programme called «Honky Tonk» on BBC Radio London. Gillett liked what he heard and put «Sultans of Swing» on the air. Record companies were listening, and two months later Dire Straits signed with Phonogram, which released their music on its Vertigo label.

The version most people know was recorded again in February 1978 at Basing Street Studios in London, with Muff Winwood as producer, for the band’s first album, «Dire Straits». The whole album cost about £12,500 to make, a small budget even then. The single came out in the United Kingdom on 19 May 1978, and at first nothing happened: it did not enter the charts. The breakthrough came from abroad. The song caught on in the Netherlands and Belgium in the autumn of 1978, then in the United States in early 1979, and a British re-release in February 1979 finally took it into the UK top ten.

The lyric is a small portrait of a night out, told in the second person, as if the listener were walking into the bar. It is raining outside, there are few customers, and the band plays traditional jazz while the fashionable world is elsewhere. Knopfler introduces the musicians one by one: a guitarist who sticks to rhythm and owns an old instrument, a player who has a normal day job and does not care about fame, and a group of young men in the corner, dressed in the fashion of the late seventies, who are not interested in anything that is not rock. The song admires the players for doing it for love, not money, and the final announcement gives the modest band its moment of glory.