As drummer Nigel Olsson explained to Modern Drummer:

“After doing ‘All The Girls Love Alice’ from the Yellow Brick Road album, I got a call from Gus Dudgeon, the producer. We had come back from France where we had recorded it, and he was mixing it down in London. I was out at the farm when he called me up and said, ‘Can you get a stereo tape machine and a microphone, put the microphone at the back end of your car and record the car pulling away, then at high speed, then stopping and starting again?’ So I had my little brother hang out of the back window of my car recording these sounds while I was roaring down a country road. In ‘Alice,’ when you hear the ambulance coming and all the roaring and screaming, it’s my car that you hear.”