Dire Straits on Track

By Andrew Wild

1979 was an amazing time for post-punk pop. At the end of March, a fresh new sound entered the UK top 20. It was ‘Sultans of Swing’, a very wordy song with lots of driving guitar, a tight rhythm section and some killer musicianship. Dire Straits, unlikely pop stars led by a 29-year-old Geordie who could play guitar brilliantly, had finally arrived.
   Six years later, they were, for a time, the biggest band in the world. Brothers in Arms sold by the truckload, one of the first massive sellers on CD. Since then, however, their star has fallen. Over exposure as the safe, boring champions of the CD age has resulted in Dire Straits becoming, to many, the embodiment of a certain sort of benign, homogenised music. Mark Knopfler, their singer, guitarist, producer and songwriter, became a caricature of the middle-aged rocker in the minds of many. Their music remains stubbornly unfashionable but retains its huge fanbase.
   Dire Straits On Track revisits, re-evaluates and contextualises the band’s six studio albums and two live albums, as well as EPs and archive releases. Seven ex-members of Dire Straits have been interviewed for this book, providing fresh perspective and insight. The band made a huge amount of good music; it’s time it was reappraised.

Andrew Wild is a music collector and experienced writer with several books to his name, including Crosby, Stills & Nash (Sonicbond, 2020), The Solo Beatles (Sonicbond 2020) and Queen On Track (Sonicbond 2018).  He's been a fan of Dire Straits since seeing them perform the forgotten single 'Skateaway' on the kids’ Saturday morning TV show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop in spring 1981. He lives in Rainow, Cheshire, UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sonicbond Publishing
• Release date: Aug 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789521320

Book preview

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Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [e-mail]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2021

First Published in the United States 2021

This digital edition 2022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Andrew Wild 2020

ISBN 978-1-78952-044-6

The right of Andrew Wild to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted by him

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Graphic design and typesetting: Full Moon Media

A long time ago came a man on a track

Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back

And he put down his load where he thought it was the best

Made a home in the wilderness…

To the memories of John Prine and Dave Greenwood.

Thanks to ...

Nick Clemson, Jules Cox, Tim Sparks and Derek White.

Special thanks to Jamie Hailstone for proofreading and for allowing me to quote from his unpublished 2014 interview with John Illsley.

With gracious and grateful thanks to the following ex-members of Dire Straits who agreed to be interviewed for this book in Spring 2020: Alan Clark,

Guy Fletcher, John Illsley, David Knopfler, Tommy Mandel, Phil Palmer

and Jack Sonni. Thanks also to Hal Lindes, and to Steve Darrington and

Steve Norchi (both ex-Brewer’s Droop) for their email conversations.

With much love to Amanda, Rosie and Amy.

Also by Andrew Wild

Local History

108 Steps Around Macclesfield (Sigma Press, 1994 / 2nd edition, Rumble Strips, 2018)

Exploring Chester (Sigma Press, 1996 / re-publication, Rumble Strips, 2018)

Ever Forward (MADS, 1997)

Biographies

Play On (Twelfth Night, 2009 / 2nd edition due 2021)

One for the Record (Avalon, 2013 / 2nd edition, 2018)

Music

Pink Floyd Song by Song (Fonthill, 2017)

Queen … On Track (Sonicbond, 2018)

The Beatles: An A-Z Guide to Every Song: On Track (Sonicbond, 2019)

Solo Beatles 1969-1980 … On Track (Sonicbond, 2020)

Crosby, Stills and Nash … On Track (Sonicbond, 2020)

Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s (Sonicbond, 2021)

Films

James Bond … On Screen (Sonicbond, 2021)

Plays

The Difficult Crossing (Stagescripts, 2016)

Contents

Introduction

1977-1978: Playing the Honky Tonk

Dire Straits

Communiqué

Making Movies

Love Over Gold

Extended Dance Play

Alchemy – Dire Straits Live

Brothers In Arms

Money For Nothing

On Every Street

On the Night / Encores

Live at the BBC

Sultans Of Swing

Private Investigations

The Honky Tonk Demos

Since 1991

Appendix 1: The Rarities and Where to Find Them

Appendix 2: Live Set Evolution and Official Live Recordings

Appendix 3: Fourteen Deep Cuts

Appendix 4: Further Listening

Bibliography

Introduction

In 1979, aged 13, I lapped up every kind of music I could hear.

My transistor radio was permanently tuned to BBC Radio One for the DLT Breakfast Show and for the new charts every Tuesday lunchtime with Paul Burnett, and the subversive joys of the legendary Phil Wood on my local station, Piccadilly Radio, during my afternoon paper round.

This was an amazing time for UK post-punk pop: Squeeze. Madness, Elvis, Joe Jackson, the Police, the Jam, XTC, Tubeway Army, The Pretenders (mostly UK), Blondie (UK in spirit) and others filled the charts in 1979. At the end of March 1979, a fresh new sound entered the British top 20. ‘Sultans of Swing’, a very wordy song with lots of driving guitar, a tight-as-you like rhythm section and some killer musicianship. Dire Straits, unlikely pop stars led by a balding 29-year-old Geordie who could play a bit, had finally arrived.

I can recall buying the forgotten ‘Skateaway’ on 7" single, catalogue number Vertigo MOVIE2, in spring 1981 after seeing Dire Straits perform it on the kids’ Saturday morning TV show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, or possibly on a spin-off called Multi-Coloured Music Show.

I received Making Movies for Christmas in 1981 – the album was over a year old by then – along with Welcome to the Cruise by Judie Tzuke.

My cousin gave me a copy of the band’s debut LP around this time. He borrowed it back soon afterwards and left it on the back shelf of his car on a sunny day. 1982’s Love Over Gold saw a new maturity and ambition in the band’s writing – the opening fourteen-minute ‘Telegraph Road’ was hardly top 40 material. Perhaps surprisingly the moody ‘Private Investigations’ reached no. 2 in September 1982 despite being six minutes long, even in its edited version. This was the band’s highest-charting single at home. I have this on 10 single at home somewhere, alongside the 7 release of ‘Going Home’ that I bought in Harrod’s!

By 1985, the US number one success of Brothers in Arms, one of the first three CDs I bought in 1986, and ‘Money for Nothing’ meant that Dire Straits was for a time the biggest band in the world. Since then, their star has fallen – over-exposure as the safe, boring champions of the CD age has resulted in Dire Straits becoming, to many, the embodiment of a certain sort of benign, homogenised music. Mark Knopfler, their singer, guitarist, producer and songwriter, was turned into a caricature of the middle-aged rocker, with expensive designer jacket sleeves rolled up, sporting a single earring and wearing a headband. Their music remains stubbornly unfashionable.

The old joke ‘what would the band be called if Chris Rea joined Dire Straits?’ joke was harsh: their first four albums have lots of wonderful music, some it ground-breaking and all of it very popular at the time. Their final two have not aged as well, but sit down and listen to ‘Your Latest Trick’, ‘Why Worry’, ‘Ride Across the River’, ‘The Man’s Too Strong’, ‘On Every Street’, ‘When It Comes to You’, ‘Planet of New Orleans’, ‘You and Your Friend’, ‘Iron Hand’…

After the band’s final concert of the On Every Street tour at Estadio de la Romareda in Zaragoza, Spain on 9 October 1992 – fourteen months and 229 shows after the opening date in Dublin – Mark Knopfler switched to a low-key but successful solo career with a string of highly-crafted and enjoyable albums to his name. The other band members never quite shook off their Dire Straits legacy (pun intended).

The published oeuvre for Dire Straits is slim. Michael Oldfield’s 1984 Dire Straits was written with the band’s co-operation – Oldfield had been at Harlow Technical College with Mark Knopfler – but, as David Knopfler told me, ‘Oldfield’s book wasn’t the most accurate’. It also misses the band’s most commercially successful period. Myles Palmer’s 1991 biography of Mark Knopfler examines the early years in-depth but skims across many important periods. And there’s always an underlying suspicion that he didn’t really like his subject matter, perhaps fuelled by the threat of court action by Knopfler’s lawyers. These are seemingly the only two books to seriously document the band’s fascinating and not always smooth-running story. Both of these now command high prices on the second-hand book market.

Thankfully, many of the band have given extensive interviews over the years and much context and content have been drawn from these. Likewise, seven ex-band members agreed to be interviewed for this project, starting with a phone call with John Illsley, who is chatty and happy to recall his time in the spotlight. Alan Clark, Phil Palmer and Guy Fletcher answered my emails in varying degrees of depth. Jack Sonni was good value but is guarded about some elements of his time in the band. Tommy Mandel was initially cautious, but once the floodgates opened the stories flowed. David Knopfler, meanwhile, was helpful and generous with his answers – but only to a point. If he thinks you’re wasting his time, then expect short shrift. Hal Lindes provided links to a recent podcast in which he openly and warmly talks about his time in Dire Straits. Paul Franklin responded to my approaches but, as is his right, did not want to be interviewed. I thank them all, along with Steve Norchi and Steve Darrington, both of whom played with Mark Knopfler in 1973 and provided as much information as they could recall. I twice contacted Crockford Management, Mark Knopfler’s current management company, to request an interview. Not surprisingly, this was turned down, but I did receive an ‘all the best with the book’.

There will be errors and omissions here, no doubt. But this book is as accurate as I could make it, with no agenda other than to celebrate Dire Straits’ music and the circumstances and environments in which it emerged.

As Alan Pattinson in his always entertaining series of blog posts writes:

Dire Straits were the perfect band for their time in all the ways that really mattered: socially aware, musically adventurous and big in every way – not in terms of bank balance or hair but in terms of sound and scope.

Dire Straits … On Track revisits, re-evaluates and contextualises the band’s six studio releases and two live albums, as well as EPs, archive releases and a round-up of the ex-members’ careers since. There is lots of good music here. It’s time we remembered why.

Andrew Wild

Socially isolated, Rainow, Cheshire, 2020

1977-1978: Playing the Honky Tonk

Just after 10 pm on 9 October 1992, Mark Knopfler bid goodnight to 40,000 people and walked off stage in Zaragoza, Spain. It was the end of an immense tour, and the last time he would perform as the singer, guitarist and songwriter of Dire Straits. This concert ended a fifteen-year journey which saw the band rise from the pubs and clubs of London to the very biggest stages in the world. Over seven million people saw their final tour.

The seeds of Dire Straits’ formation can be traced to 1973, when Knopfler, then 24, moved to London from his native Newcastle. He was born in Glasgow in 1949 to Erwin Knopfler, a Hungarian Jew and socialist architect who came to the UK in 1939 and Louisa Laidler, a teacher from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In the mid-50s the Knopfler family, including Mark’s sister Ruth, two years his senior and younger brother David (born in 1953) relocated to affluent Gosforth. Erwin worked as an architect for Northumberland County Council. Mark attended Archibald Primary School, about half a mile from home, and later Gosforth Grammar School. One of his schoolmates was Ray Laidlaw, later drummer in Lindisfarne.

The Knopfler brothers still have soft Geordie accents and neither has been drawn into the celebrity world of fame for the sake of it. Mark told the Belfast Telegraph in 2015:

When you come from the North – probably it’s a similar thing in Ireland and Scotland – there’s a sort of mistrust in anything that’s not really rooted in common sense. So maybe it’s to do with that, not getting above yourself, just staying rooted and focussed.

He was originally inspired by his uncle’s harmonica and boogie-woogie piano playing. He told Guitar Player in 1984:

I heard my uncle Kingsley playing boogie-woogie on the piano when I was about eight or nine. I thought that those three chords were the most magnificent things in the world – still do. The first records I made my mum buy were Lonnie Donegan skiffle records. That was before I was ten years old. The first record Knopfler owned was Lonnie Donegan’s Hits Parade EP released in December 1956.

I’ve got it on my mantelpiece as a reminder of my childhood.

Mark was drawn to the guitar by a picture in a magazine. As he told Norwegian TV in 2008:

I said ‘Dad, I want one of those!’ And then I had to wait for about … twelve years … before I could get a guitar. My old man wanted me to appreciate it when I got it. It was a red Hofner V-2, I think they called it. Cost 50 quid. It was Strat-shaped, and it had to be red. A really powerful part of my childhood was gazing longingly at those things. I didn’t know whether it was going to be a Futurama or a Hofner or a Burns Sonic that I was going to get first. But I was desperate for something. Boy, I loved them and I still do. You never escape that.

Around this time, Knopfler was also involved in amateur theatre: he was the chairman of the Gosforth Grammar School drama club and joined the National Youth Theatre for a production of Julius Caesar which took place at the Empire Theatre in Sunderland in 1964.

His brother David recalls:

Mark got a gig at the National Youth Theatre or something like that. It was quite a big deal, anyway. He got a part in one of those sixties’ things in black polo-neck jumpers — experimental theatre.

Mark told the Hay Festival in 2007:

We had a couple of weeks off school to rehearse, which was great. But they brought in these students from RADA. The Geordies were the spear carriers and the mob.

Thirteen years later, memories of taking the train home from rehearsals would be worked into the song ‘Down to the Waterline’.

Mark formed and joined several bands during the 1960s and listened to and learned from guitarists Chet Atkins, Blind Willie McTell, James Burton, BB King, Hank Marvin, Lonnie Johnson, Scotty Moore and Django Reinhardt. He told Guitar Player in July 1979:

I’ve got R&B in me. I got into the Chicago blues and BB King when I was 16. 1 think I could call Lonnie Johnson an influence, in some ways. And the first time I heard BB King was on the record Live at the Regal. That struck me as being a really terrific thing.

I heard Live at the Regal when I was sixteen, and that was a great moment, ’cause I felt that a triangle was formed on that record: guitar, voice and audience, and it was amazing to hear. There’s also the fact that on his records the guitar seems to do some of the work of the singer – his guitar has such a clear voice. Maybe that appeals to me because I’m not much of a singer in the conventional sense, certainly not like BB King is. So my guitar becomes another, better voice I can use. It’s never been academic for me.

Knopfler, a precocious talent, was also drawn to singers such as Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters, as he told Guitar Player in 1984:

One of the biggest [influences] of all was the Everly Brothers – with Chet Atkins on guitar; but of course, I didn’t know that, and they didn’t put their names on records then. But he’s probably the greatest of all. Then there was Ricky Nelson – a record called ‘Just A Little Too Much’, which doesn’t get a lot of exposure – and I didn’t know then that that was James Burton on guitar. The sound on those records – just listen to the backing on ’Hello, Mary Lou’ – is astonishingly great. When I was a little kid, I sang Everly Brothers songs with a friend of mine. I really tried to sing well, and I think we did, for kids. But in general, I think singers absorb the influence of other singers. Eric Clapton’s one of my favourite singers. People don’t give him enough credit for his singing. As a singer, he’s the white Ray Charles. Bob Dylan’s another influence on my singing. I don’t hear it as much as other people seem to, but I know he’s in there, in my phrasing. A lot of my favourite singers, people like Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, JJ Cale, they’re not technically great. But to me, that’s what makes them special.

Mark joined the school folk club, which was run by Ram Wallace, the deputy headteacher at Gosforth Grammar. Wallace told the Newcastle Evening Chronicle in 2003:

We played very traditional English folk songs and Mark came along with his guitar. He was about fifteen or sixteen and played this long, long dirge called ‘Needle of Death’ [written by Bert Jansch and released on his debut album in 1965]. I’ll never forget it. At the interval, I found Mark and said that he’d never get anywhere with stuff like that.

Knopfler’s schoolmate Peter Brack told Myles Palmer:

Mark was in great demand with the ladies. He was physically mature for his age, smoked and drank and generally behaved more like an eighteen-year-old than a lad of fifteen. And anyone who