It is 40 years since we embraced Dire Straits’s Brothers in Arms

Mark Knopfler was Dire Straits: He wrote all the songs, broke pop music’s three-minute rule - and then broke all the records.

Dire Straits was always an albums band, with Mark Knopfler, left, at its centre. Picture: QCUA Archives/That’s Entertainment!

When it comes to recorded music, the tail has always wagged the dog; the length of songs has long been dictated by the recording format. The three-minute pop song wasn’t the idea of any artist. It came about because the early recording formats – particularly shellac 78s which exploded in affordable popularity between the wars – ran about that length.

And it stuck fast as radio formats and advertising were tailored to fit. A few longer songs – Don McLean’s American Pie, for instance – were defiantly broken in two with the first half on the A side and finishing when you flipped over the seven inch single. But they were oddities.

Arguably the Beatles’ two most creative albums were Rubber Soul and Revolver, and across them both there are just three songs that are more than three minutes long – one by two seconds, one by seven, the third by 18.

Musician guitarist Mark Knopfler in 2005.

By the time Mark Knopfler’s band Dire Straits started ­recording, longer songs were tolerated by radio, but the band’s debut single, Sultans of Swing, at 5 minutes 47 seconds, was still an exception. Not for Knopfler, though. He has never been inclined to short musical ideas.

Over the next few albums he would take full control of the Dire Straits project. He was already writing all the songs and did so on every album the band recorded and not a moment of it boxed in by commercial radio rules. The first album, produced by Steve Winwood’s brother Muff, had come out of the blue. Their second came out of Nassau in the Bahamas less than a year later. It was a planned project with the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios team of Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett in the drivers’ seat. This was their American label, Warner Bros, trying to guarantee a winner like its unexpected predecessor. And it was with its hit single, Lady Writer, assumed by many to be a leftover from the first album sessions. I­ndeed, it sounded like it might have been recorded the same day as Sultans of Swing.

Despite the laidback Bahamas seaside setting, Wexler and Beckett brought aspects of that undeniable funk and soul feeling to the sessions even if the Alabama grit didn’t travel. Knopfler’s brawny baritone barks and coaxes the ­storylines out of the music while his 1962 Fender leads its way lyrically and apparently effortlessly through unlikely melodies.

By the next album, Making Movies, Dire Straits was down to a three-piece, Knopfler’s brother David stepping away from the never-ending cycle of album-tour-album leaving bassist John Illsley and drummer Pick Withers. Knopfler co-produced Making Movies with Jimmy Iovine who had just come from making Patti Smith’s Easter album from which came the hit single Because The Night. Perhaps because of Iovine’s connections with Bruce Springsteen and his band, E Streeter Roy Bittan joined in on keyboards, cheekily reprising those first ethereal lines from the storming Jungleland that closed Springsteen’s breakthrough Born To Run album, for the cinematic single Romeo and Juliet. It could well be Knopfler’s finest and most enduring moment.

If he sounds like he means it, it’s because he did. He had just broken up with Holly Vincent, the Chicago-born lead singer of the punk rock band Holly and the Italians. The US outfit had moved to England in 1978 where punk rock was flourishing, but their shallow, derivative sounds – a flimsy mix of punk and new wave – failed to find and audience, and in any case Holly was deported.

But Knopfler’s heart was broken. Good thing, too. It led to the creation of one of the finest rock songs ever written. And it is so beautifully rendered; the arpeggios poured from his 1937 National Resonator guitar and he pulls together lyrical couplets as if he were Jimmy Webb.

When you can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold

You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold.

And then referencing West Side Story, that famous New York City retelling of Romeo and Juliet by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim:

There’s a place for us, you know the movie song.

When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

But Australians weren’t buying it. Neither, other than in the UK where it rose to No.8 on the charts, was anybody else. It is one of the mysteries of music that such wonderful songs can sometimes pass us by.

But Dire Straits was always an albums band. They have had four No.1 albums in Australia and the worst performed, which was Making Movies, came in at No.6. The other single from it, Tunnel of Love, reached only 62 on the local chart.

Musicians (L-R) Mark Knopfler, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin & Sting pose for media before the start of Music For Monserrat benefit concert at Royal Albert Hall in London in 1997

Knopfler took over production duties for 1982 Love Over Gold and it showed. Side one had just two songs: Telegraph Road at just over 14 minutes and the single Private Investigations at almost seven. Reluctantly trimmed to just less than six for the single, it must surely rate as one of the most unusual rock songs. Over a glorious guitar melody Knopfler narrates the three verses. It has no chorus. There is a musical interlude of 50 seconds and then he’s back with another line: “Scarred for life, no compensations. Private Investigations.” Knopfler then rates the pain of an untrusting relationship with distant chords until it all fades to nothing.

What could follow? What did is one of the remarkable stories in music. Australians have often defied international trends to adopt albums others overlooked. In 1972 we fell in love with Neil Diamond’s live double album Hot August Night. It had risen to No.5 in the US during a 19-week chart run, and No.32 in a fortnight placing on the UK charts. But across 1973 and 1974 it lodged at No.1 for five months in the Australian charts where it spent 224 weeks. Four years later, Australians adopted Boz Scaggs’ white soul classic Silk ­Degrees album and we were the only country in which it topped the charts staying across 1976 and beyond in a 102-week chart residency.

Guitarist-musician Mark Knopfler in 2005.

Forty years ago this month we similarly adopted Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. No great effort went into the album artwork, just a striking photo of that treasured 1937 guitar set against a beautiful sunset. But the album entered the charts at No.1 and stayed there for 22 weeks. Then the band toured here – a monster run of 55 dates for which 900,000 tickets were sold. A record broken only recently. Three singles, So Far Away, Money For Nothing and Walk Of Life, charted strongly and Brothers in Arms once again topped the charts for another consecutive 11 weeks. It was the first CD in the world to sell a million copies, and we did our bit; it was the biggest-selling record in Australia in 1985, and the second biggest-selling album the following year.

Brothers in Arms: No great effort went into the album artwork, just a striking photo of that treasured 1937 guitar set against a beautiful sunset.

It has sold 1,225,000 copies here which is 17 times Platinum. It lost out to Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required for the album of the year Grammy – a sin with which The Recording Academy must forever live. It did win Best Engineered Album and the surround sound re-release in 2006 won another. For Knopfler, that year was a whirlwind of concerts – 248 of them starting on April 25, 1985, taking in the London end of Live Aid, and finishing in Sydney with 16 consecutive nights. The tour then moved to Queensland, Perth and even Uluru before returning to Sydney for another four-night stint at the old Entertainment Centre, ending a year and a day later after it had begun.

The songs from Brothers in Arms came to Knopfler at various points, the title song arriving during the Falklands War from a comment his dad made in 1982: “My old man said ‘Isn’t it ironic that the Russians were brothers in arms with the fascist collection of generals in Argentina’. And that’s what put the phrase into my head.”

The band toured repeatedly leading up to the recording of Brothers in Arms. “We were working like trucks. It felt like a 24-hour day shift all the time,” he said, adding that he had to learn to compose songs on the road. “You’d see me walking up a hotel corridor with a chair with no arms on it. It was because there wasn’t one in my room, and I’d gone and found a chair I could play guitar on,” he said laughing at the memory.

The album was mostly recorded over an indulgent three-month stay at George Martin’s small AIR studios on Montserrat in the West Indies. It had the latest 24-track digital tape machine desks. But some of the new tapes were faulty and three tracks had errors on some channels. These were finished off at the Record Plant on Manhattan, giving Knopfler the chance to add some of the sophisticated brilliance of the Brecker brothers, Randy and the late Michael, to add trumpet and sax to Your Latest Trick. Two years before, Michael’s sax had also defined the glorious melody Knopfler wrote for Going Home, from the Local Hero soundtrack. “He’s just got New York in that sound in that sax. I don’t think he’s actually ever been equalled,” Knopfler said of the virtuoso who stood tallest in narrow canyons of Manhattan’s brass-section giants.

English rock band Dire Straits performing in concert at Football Park, South Australia, in 1986. Lead singer guitarist Mark Knopfler, right

Terence Williams, who’d replaced Withers on drums, played on all the Montserrat recording, but was uneasy about his contributions and flew home to make way for David Bowie’s drummer Omar Fakim who’d earlier made his name in Weather Report. But Williams’ fierce drum intro to Money for Nothing stayed. But not everything did: weeks after Brothers in Arms was released Knopfler and Sting performed it at Live Aid with Knopfler changing the word “faggot” to “queenie” and later “maggot”.

Knopfler remembers the Australia legs of that tour well.

“I like the smell of Australia,” he said. “I loved it there. It became a bit of a break for us. I still treasure my time there.”

Dire Straits had toured in 1981 and 1983 and Knopfler had become friends with eccentric Sydney artist Brett ­Whiteley and had seen his dramatic, 18-pannelled Alchemy work which these days can sometimes be seen at the Art Gallery of NSW in all its 16m glory. Knopfler had adapted some of the cover of his 1984 double live album of the same name.

“I think Brett was always very, very interested in what was happening in the rest of the world,” Knopfler says on a Zoom call from London. He agrees Whiteley was a bit bonkers. “Oh, yeah. Brett was Brett, bless him. He was bright, bright”, he says of the artist who died in 1992 at the age of 53 of a drug overdose. “I don’t ever think he was looking for a way out because absolutely he wasn’t.”

Sydney Entertainment Centre secret facts playing cards featuring artists, such as Dire Straits (pictured), who have played concerts at the venue. The Card set was found during the demolition of the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Picture: John Fotiadis

Just before he died, Whiteley had told Knopfler that “he was looking forward to his Paris show – which was tremendous – and he was looking forward to something else in painting and exhibitions. So he was really enthused by what he was doing. He just made a stupid mistake.”

Knopfler maintains many friends here in Australia and particularly likes Rushcutters Bay in Sydney, a short stroll down from Elizabeth Bay’s Sebel Townhouse where the band stayed for so many weeks as the city fell in love with seeing them live.

He tells me his sister, who lives in England, still buys him his favourite chocolate bar. “She goes out to a special candy sweet shop and buys those raspberry ripply things that get made in Australia and gives them to me. It’s the taste of Australia!”

I have never before heard a Cherry Ripe described in that way, but I understood.

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MAKING MAGIC WITH BOB DYLAN

Mark Knopfler’s good friend from his early days was Steve Phillips, a blues enthusiast, guitarist, instrument builder and painter. In The Gallery, a song from Dire Straits’ first album, was about Phillips’ sculptor father Harry. Phillips’s mother was a painter. Phillips is the bloke who bought that National guitar which, of course, shines like the Mississippi Delta across so many of Knopfler’s songs.

That was in the 1960s when Phillips played around Leeds pubs and at one point was interviewed by a young reporter called Knopfler. They became friends and Phillips introduced his mate to older American blues. Years later, Phillips would record some of it, including songs written by Blind Willie McTell (below). “It was a tremendous broadening of my knowledge,” said Knopfler of playing and rehearsing with Phillips. “My finger-picking became more refined and more and more bluesy. I was going forward with jazz a little bit, going forward with chords on the one hand, and on the other going backwards into the past with the National and with other string instruments.”

Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and Bob Dylan in concert

It was timely training. By 1977, Knopfler had formed Dire Straits. They recorded their debut album in a deconsecrated church in London in February the following year and by early 1979 had the single Sultans of Swing climbing charts worldwide and were performing small venues in Los Angeles where, on February 28, 1979, Bob Dylan went to see them at the late show at the Roxy.

Dylan’s concerts and records had been poorly received for a few years and, the man who believed Christ had visited him in a Tucson hotel the year before, was bent on making changes to his life – and certainly to his sound. He went backstage and asked Knopfler to help out on his next album which would be the Christian/folk/blues music shock that was Slow Train Coming.

Knopfler was back to work on Dylan’s Infidels in 1983, an album they co-produced and on which should have been perhaps Dylan’s most exquisitely perfect composition – a stark, melancholy, lyrically absolute song Dylan had just written called Blind Willie McTell. Just the two of them: Knopfler on an acoustic 12-string and Dylan on piano. The dull foot tapping throughout is Knopfler’s.

Blind Willie McTell - American Piedmont blues and ragtime singer, songwriter and guitarist.

McTell himself had been recorded by musicologist John Lomax who, apart from teaching himself ancient Greek and Latin, realised before anyone else the invaluable contribution to American music that had been made by black American cowboys. He and his sons John Jnr and Alan spent their lives recording the music that was already fading from American life and whose practitioners were dead, in jail or otherwise silenced.

McTell’s thin volume of music – he died in 1959 – is a jaunty mix of blues and country and perhaps with hints of Scott Joplin. One of his songs to survive – with that distinctive clear, penetrating vocal – is Statesboro Blues which has been recorded by Taj Mahal, David Bromberg and was famously part of most Allman Brothers’ sets. ­English folkie Ralph May recorded it before changing his surname to McTell.

Dylan’s song traces lines in American history from slavery, chain gangs, hostile Confederate “rebel yells” to the Civil War and the burning of rundown plantations after it when the cheap labour that sustained them dried up.

For Dylan, “God is in His heaven” but man proved himself untrustworthy in the Garden of Eden through “power and greed and corruptible seed”. Knopfler too was struck by this composition’s undecorated beauty. “I love that song,” he said. Indeed, they had been discussing influences with Dylan “who was big into Robert Johnson, and I said ‘do you listen to Blind Willie McTell?’. It could be that I put Blind Willie McTell into Bob’s head”.

Indeed it could. It’s not a song about McTell (pictured left), it is just a device to link the verses together, and unlike Johnson, McTell rhymes with lots of words. Dylan clearly thought he had never nailed the song he heard in his head. There are three versions of it about, the one with Knopfler that came out on the Official Bootleg Series, another with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Taylor on slide, and a third yet-to-surface version, of which Knopfler said: “I did (it) with electric guitar and piano. I don’t know what happened to that, which was really spaced out.”

On May 5, 1983, Dylan and Knopfler recorded it a final time, a hauntingly spare rendition. Still Dylan was unhappy. He never returned to that song. It sounds like another manufactured myth of Dylanology to point out that it would have been Blind Willie’s 80th birthday.

Alan Howe