Sire Sounds

Inspired by the rock & roll and rhythm & blues records that groundbreaking DJ Alan Freed was introducing to a new generation of American white teenagers in the 1950s, the young Richard Gottehrer developed early ambitions as a songwriter. “You had this whole group of post-war kids, born from the late ’30s through to the early ’50s, that had some disposable income, and the world really was opening up. Alan Freed brought all this music, which was being made for the black community, to this new generation of white teenagers by playing it all on the radio. These were things we’d never heard before and it all had a tremendous influence on me. I was a piano player and I would play boogie-woogie and traditional swing like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Louis Jordan, but also some of the music Alan Freed was playing. It made me think, ‘Maybe I’ll try to write some songs,’ so I did, trying to copy my heroes, and I had this little band called Sultans Of Swing, which of course predates Dire Straits, but we were both referencing Benny Goodman, who was called the Sultan of Swing. We’d play standards at weddings, school dances and bar mitzvahs, but we’d also drop in a rock song every now and again. I went to university and I continued writing songs but didn’t get very far. After university, I started going down to midtown Manhattan in the area that used to be Tin Pan Alley: the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway. There were all these small offices where people could go and knock on doors. You’d have a song, a publisher or record company would listen to it and, with any sort of luck, someone would say, ‘I think I can get someone to record that!’”