Taken in isolation, Dire Straits is not a great record, although it’s a record with great things on it – not least their first single, ‘Sultans Of Swing’, the band’s biggest international hit until ‘Money For Nothing’ topped the US charts seven years later, and a stone cold banger that ought to get played out a lot more than it does.
(Incongruously, they also supported Talking Heads on the latter’s 1978 UK tour, because that’s the way music history actually occurs.) Which is how, in 1978, with so much British and American music surging in experimental directions both in and out of the charts, a band whose least trad aspect was their connection to a pub-rock group called Brewers Droop, a band who at their very edgiest strongly evoked the mid-1970s work of Eric Clapton and JJ Cale – and most of all, Eric Clapton covering JJ Cale his version of ‘Cocaine’ is all but a blueprint for much of Dire Straits – could become a breakout success. Whereas in reality everything happens at once, and it’s only when the waters recede and you see where they deposited their cargoes that you understand how many currents there were and which way they were flowing. But narratives tend to allow for only thing at a time. Yes, punk and post punk happened, and they mattered, a lot. And to understand why means going back to their first, self-titled album, in 1978.ĭire Straits are one of those bands whose career reminds you that the narrative of pop history is bunk. Because it is the prism through which the rest of their career is seen backwards, it may be hard to credit now that it felt as if Dire Straits had sold out but it felt as if Dire Straits had sold out. They certainly made Brothers In Arms, the first Dire Straits album I heard upon its initial release, unbearable to me. They can make things dreary or plain unbearable. Which is not to say that calculation or cynicism are irrelevant. Because if it were it would be something altogether lesser than the marvellous thing it is. Some of it celebrates this, some is at pains to conceal it, and either is fine. All pop music is by its existence synthetic. The part about who made up Dire Straits’ audience demographic may have some truth to it, but so what? There is no such thing as an authentic or an inauthentic pop act, or audience, or format. And Dire Straits were the emblematic CD band, the group nonpareil for those Ford Mondeo drivers.Īll of which was, and is, snobbery and bullshit. In 1991 CDs were still considered middlebrow, middle-class, the preserve of men with high-street suits and mid-range company cars, all shiny surface and no substance or depth (the suits, the men, and the format) somehow, in short, inauthentic. Its predecessor, Brothers In Arms (1985), was the album whose success had ensured the compact disc would become a viable commercial format. That last album came out just when I was starting to write about music, and I recall colleagues of mine laying into them thus (I paraphrase from memory): “Dire Straits – has any band ever been so aptly named? It couldn’t suit them better if they were called We’re So Boring Even Our Farts Are Odourless.” By that point, it seemed fair comment. Over time I came to realise I had loved them because there was plenty there to love.Īnd plenty to hate.
When you consider that their productive years (1978–1985 they released a final outlier of an album, On Every Street, in 1991) coincided with one of pop music’s most thrilling and inventive eras, much of which I missed while it was going on, this wasn’t an unreasonable thing to think. For years after, I hated them, or professed to, and thought I had loved them only because I knew no better.
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