"Bennie and the Jets" (Elton John)

"Bennie and the Jets" from the classic album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) might be the weirdest song Elton John ever recorded.  The Frankie Valli-esque falsetto.  The sci-fi/glam imagery over plastic funk.  The crowd noises and on-the-beat clapping.  Totally bizarre, and totally infectious.
It was a huge favorite of mine as a little kid.  (And not just because he'd performed the song on The Muppet Show.)  My mother owned his Greatest Hits album (the one from 1974), and she played it constantly.  Every time it was on the turntable, I'd impatiently wait for "Bennie" to come on and then go crazy when he hit that first block chord on piano—mainly because I knew that easy singalong hook was imminent: Bennie!  Bennie!  Bennie!  Bennie and the Jets!  I drove my mom nuts more than once, screeching that line ad nauseam.
Basically, the song is about a fictitious band of android musicians that John's lyricist Bernie Taupin dreamed up.
As Taupin told Rolling Stone in March 2014, "I saw Bennie and the Jets as a sort of proto-sci-fi punk band, fronted by an androgynous woman, who looks like something out of a Helmut Newton photograph."

As for the sound of the track, John's producer Gus Dudgeon was the mastermind behind making it a "live" recording.  Truth is, it's a studio recording.  But when Dudgeon was at the mixing board and heard that opening splash of notes on piano, it immediately brought to mind a musician on stage, cueing up a band.

So he added copious amounts of reverb and overdubbed some crowd noise from one of John's concerts along with audio from Jimi Hendrix's 1970 show at the Isle of Wight Festival.  Then to really cinch it, he beefed up the ambient crowd noise by recording himself, engineer David Hentschel, and an assistant, whistling, clapping, and stomping "onto the wrong beat to simulate a British audience," as Dudgeon put it to Sound on Sound online.  

In the end, Dudgeon transformed John and Taupin's odd R&B number about rocking robots in mohair suits into a full-on concert spectacle.  (That huge cheer that erupts just before John launches into his falsetto immediately conjures the image that he's doing/wearing something outlandish for the grand finale of the song.  It creates intrigue.  In fact, my guess is that the single wouldn't have been half as successful without the guise of it being a "live" performance.)

"Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" (Elton John)

Although Elton John is probably best known for his ballads (can you imagine a world without "Tiny Dancer" or "Someone Saved My Life Tonight"?), I've always preferred Elton John: The Rocker.  Especially "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" from his sprawling, near-perfect album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973).
Written by John and decades-long writing partner Bernie Taupin, it's just a song about going to the pub on a Saturday night, getting blitzed (oiled as a diesel train, as Taupin's lyrics put it), and letting fists fly—pretty much for no reason other than the recreation of it.  Not an exclusively British concept; although, the vibe of the song feels pretty blue collar Brit in its rugby rivalry/courage at the bottom of a pint kind of way.
(Side note: some American radio stations refused to play it in 1973 because they thought it would incite "youth violence."  Can you even imagine that headline?  "Dateline: Kenosha, WI, July 1973 — Teenagers Burn Bob's Big Boy to Ground After Listening to Elton John Record.")
Anyway, the key to the song is guitarist Davey Johnstone's raunchy riff.  It explodes with hard rock fury that resides somewhere between Keith Richards and Mick Ronson from David Bowie's band; it's a rare sound to hear on an Elton John record.  
My favorite moment, though, comes right after the second chorus: there's suddenly this wall of overdubbed guitars, slashing their way through the riff, foreshadowing Elton's Sat-ur-day!  Sat-ur-day!  Sat-ur-day! vamp that closes the track.  I've always marveled at how producer Gus Dudgeon mixed that part to make it sound like it's right in your face—not unlike some drunken lout who's ready to throw a punch.