DIRE STRAITS
Eyewitnesses recall the creation, impact and aftermath of Brothers In Arms – the album that invented CD – and how butane, and tennis with Sting, played a part.
Straight out of Deptford via Newcastle, MARK KNOPFLER’s journeymen avatars of gimlet-eyed rootsy rock had been successful on their own terms since 1978. Then in 1985, as the coming CD age, a computer-animated MTV hit and the most immediate album of their career aligned, they broke through to the millions. “Dire Straits had become the biggest band in the world,” they say, 35 years on. “[But] every act that’s had a huge record suffers from it.”
Mark Knopfler: You never really get used to being a recognisable person. And it really interferes with what you do. Like [1978 debut single] Sultans Of Swing, I got that idea when I was a young guy, drinking in this pub with this crap little band playing – spying, basically, watching the world and writing about it. Same with [Brothers In Arms hit] Money For Nothing – I was in a home appliances shop in New York listening to this delivery guy talking, and I hid behind a shelf of microwave ovens and spied on him, then I asked for a pen and paper and then sat down in one of the kitchen window displays and wrote it all down.
Ed Bicknell: Mark’s not very expressive sometimes, but we were in the car one night and he said in his lovely north-east accent, “Well, I’ve got some new songs – do you want to get the guys together?” I said, “Yeah all right.” And that was the start of Brothers In Arms.
John Illsley: We’d taken a break after the [1982/83] Love Over Gold tour, which was completely necessary because we hadn’t stopped. When we came back again, we knew the next album had to be good. Mark had just produced Dylan [1983’s Infidels] and I’ve no doubt the tightness of Dylan’s songwriting would have influenced Mark. The songs for Brothers In Arms had a very natural energy.
Guy Fletcher: Recording at AIR Studios on Montserrat was surreal. We flew to Antigua and then caught a little hopper over. I remember the black lava and the
black beaches. Driving up the hill to the studio was like arriving in paradise.
Alan Clark: We were there for six weeks either side of Christmas 1984 and it was the nearest thing to Shangri-La I’ve ever experienced. No crime. People waved at you smiling when you drove past.
EB: Arriving in Montserrat was catastrophic. There was a freak storm and a lot of our equipment ended up in the sea. The exchange rate was catastrophic too: one pound to one US dollar and we were paying for studio time in dollars.
GF: Neil [Dorfsman; producer] was quite a hard taskmaster, but he had to be to keep up with Mark. I remember his little buzz word was “butane”, like butane gas, which he used instead of the word beautiful. In those tight little studio units you develop your own language.
Neil Dorfsman: Mark was a very casual vocalist. He’d often be smoking a cigarette while he sang, and we’d probably do six or seven similar passes.
EB: Mark took the responsibility of being a band leader quite seriously. He knew how to lead. He was a teacher before he got into music and he ran the band rather like a teacher might run a class.
JI: Mark would bring in 10 or 15 acoustic guitars to try on one track. I couldn’t tell the difference, but he certainly could. He was always experimenting.
AC: Mark had played us the song Brothers In Arms in rehearsals, and we’d all been struck by it. The Falklands War had broken out while he was living in New York working on [1982 album] Love
Over Gold, and that’s what Brothers In Arms is about. Some of us stayed at George Martin’s house on Montserrat while we were there, and George heard an early version of that song at the studio and was really moved.
MK: Brothers in Arms is sung by a soldier who is dying on the battlefield. You can’t just write off the top of your head; you have to dig deep to get those things.
AC: He was a perfectionist. In the beginning, Money For Nothing sounded more like a Stones track and it didn’t have the iconic guitar riff. Mark developed that messing around to a click-track on his own on Montserrat.
EB: Sting was on holiday on Montserrat with [his wife] Trudie. The chef at AIR studios was the best chef on the island, and Sting, despite looking like a Greek god, liked his pies. We were having dinner one night and Mark said something like, “I’ve written this really stupid song about MTV – do you want to sing on it?” They went downstairs and came up with the idea of putting the Don’t Stand So Close To Me thing on the front [Sting sang “I want my MTV” using a melody from the aforementioned Police song]. And then we had an interesting debate about the publishing.
GF: Sting made himself known to us, let’s put it that way. We would hang out a bit playing tennis and he was very competitive (laughs).
I remember me and Malcolm, the studio manager, beat him and somebody else in a doubles match and he wasn’t happy.
There was a point where Mark didn’t want to continue working on Money For Nothing. The band had gone to dinner on the veranda, and
Neil said, “OK, let’s try something else.” I had this huge Yamaha DX1 synth, and I came up with this kind of dinosaur sound. Mark came in next morning and said, “Wow.”
JI: It was crazy to cart two very expensive Sony 33/48 digital multitrack recorders up a mountainside on the back of a flatback truck, but that was the thing that really pushed the album sonically. Then to his horror Neil Dorfsman found out during the sessions that a lot of the drum tracks had fallen off the tape, and I think he took that as a sign.
GF: [Session ace] Omar Hakim came in to replace [drummer] Terry Williams on drums. It was felt something else was needed, great as Terry was at what he did. Terry seemed to take it quite well, but I’m sure it was quite painful.
JI: For Omar Hakim these songs were like playing with Play-Doh. We stood there watching with our mouths open while he was setting up, playing a few fills.
EB: When MFN was finished, the record company started bleating for a video. Originally, we were trying to find somebody to play the narrator of the song as a classic redneck character. I approached [jazz drum legend] Buddy Rich and [US comedian] Rodney Dangerfield, both of whom I knew, but they weren’t up for it. Meanwhile, somebody from Steve Barron’s company got in touch and started going on about computer animation, which was completely new then. A crew came out to Budapest to film the live segments of the video at a soundcheck. The girl in the video was Miss Hungary or something [actually Hungarian actress/model Renáta Szatler].
“STING, DESPITE LOOKING LIKE A GREEK GOD, LIKED HIS PIES.” Ed Bicknell
GF: Yeah, Steve Barron’s animated video for Money For Nothing certainly played its part. That being on MTV kind of slotted into place with the advent of the CD, and we got a sponsorship deal with Philips. They gave us these little portable CD players which all broke.
JI: We never had any idea at all what the single should be. Dire Straits made albums. But Walk Of Life was one of the songs that really broadened the album’s appeal.
EB: Walk Of Life actually sold more worldwide than Money For Nothing, and it was going to be a B-side until I protested.
GF: I think Neil thought Walk Of Life was too cheesy, but that was the beauty of it really… that bamboo flute sound on Ride Across The River was an Emulator keyboard preset called Shakuhachi. It’s on Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, too, and it came to kind of typify the ’80s, which is probably why I now try to modify any samples I use as much as possible. The crickets on that song were recorded on Montserrat too, incidentally, though not at Musicians’ Union rates.
EB: The record came out in May and we played Live Aid in July. Commercially, it was very helpful, though that obviously wasn’t the motive. This will sound odd, but when Bob [Geldof] rang me in January 1985 I didn’t know there had been a famine in Ethiopia.
There was no regular TV on Montserrat. Anyway, I looked at our date sheet and saw we were at Wembley Arena on July 13, and said we’d do it. We literally walked over to Wembley Stadium with two guitars and a roadie, played for 20 minutes, then went back to the arena to play for the poor buggers who didn’t have a Live Aid ticket.
JI: The English press really savaged the album when it came out. We were like, “What are they listening to? Have we got this completely wrong?” America warmed to it very quickly, though, as did the rest of the world. I think the album went to Number 1 in every country where we toured it.
GF: The world tour opened in Yugoslavia. It was very basic, only chips and cheese to eat at the hotel, plus our Synclavier keyboard was impounded when we entered the country because its circuitry utilised some of the same technology as military missiles.
EB: In Eastern Europe all the phones were bugged, and you could hear people talking in the background. I said to our Hungarian translator woman, “Who is that?” She said, “It’s the Secret Police.” I said, “Well, they’re not very secret, are they?”
JI: I remember Ed Bicknell coming into our dressing room in New York and saying, “Do you want the good news or the good news? You’re Number 1 pretty much fucking everywhere.”
EB: The problem with huge records like Brothers In Arms or Dark Side Of The Moon is that they distort your core audience. Every act that’s had a huge record suffers from it. But when you’re a manager you work with what your artist gives you, and I wasn’t about to hassle Mark for a quick follow-up.
AC: Dire Straits had become the biggest band in the world and I’d have been happy leaving it at that, which Mark pretty much did for a while, although we made one more album. When I left Eric Clapton to rejoin Dire Straits for On Every Street [1991], I think I was the only person who had ever left Eric’s band voluntarily.
GF: The touring had become overwhelming, especially on the next tour, plus Mark was going through changes with his marriage, in his personal life. With the band he just said, “I don’t want to do this any more.” Which in a lot of ways was highly admirable.
MK: I detest [being famous]. It has no redeeming features at all. Once you’re on television and on the cover of all these magazines, it comes as a shock to the system that suddenly instead of watching the world, the world’s watching you. Success, I adore. Success means I can buy 1959 Gibson Les Pauls and Triumph motorcycles and I get to play music with all these wonderful people. [But] as far as I can see, fame is just a waste-product of success.
John Illsley’s Life And Times Of Dire Straits music and memories tour returns this March with accompanying new album. Full details at www.johnillsley.com. Alan Clark’s solo piano album Backstory will be released on Ponderosa Records later this year. Thanks to Sylvie Simmons.