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    #26
    “Once Upon A Time In The West” is a seriously great cod reggae track - almost as good as “Bed’s Too Big Without You” by The Police

    Mark Knopfler wanted to be Dylan, I think, so the reported speech in “Money For Nothing” needs to be seen in that light - sort of half caustic, half ironic, an unreliable narrator throwing ephemera at you. Problem is, Knopfler doesn’t really have any point or angle to his reportage.

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      #27
      Did he? He certainly copped his vocals, but he was far the only one. I thought he wanted to be Hendrix. Didn't he quit his job as a journo in Leeds the week JH died, because he felt someone needed to pick up the flame and might as well be him?

      (Actually that's a bit unfair, I think he said something like "Well, I guess it's now or never.)

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        #28
        How much success did Dire Straits have in the US before Brother In Arms?

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          #29
          I always felt like he was trying to channel early Springsteen's channeling of Dylan. All that consciously blue-collar stuff felt more Springsteenish in tone.

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            #30
            I like Sultans of Swing more and more the older I get. A lovely ode to South East London and the excitement of being involved in an emerging scene. It captures the time, the place and the emotions with over-the-top romanticism that tries to sell Deptford pub rock as if it's the UK's equivalent to Sunset Strip.

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              #31
              Originally posted by George View Post
              How much success did Dire Straits have in the US before Brother In Arms?
              Sultans of Swing (single) — and the first album were very big in both the US and Canada, top five in both cases.

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                #32
                Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                I always felt like he was trying to channel early Springsteen's channeling of Dylan. All that consciously blue-collar stuff felt more Springsteenish in tone.
                Perhaps. Certainly as I noted above side one of Making Movies is totally Boss driven

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                  #33
                  Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                  Sultans of Swing (single) — and the first album were very big in both the US and Canada, top five in both cases.
                  You see my angle is that Knopfler could have no idea before hand that the album would have become as big as it did (+30 million units sold) and that that single - even with a substantial video budget for it's time - would have become so omnipresent on MTV and in the wider culture. I don't care for the band really but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the criticism of anything beyond the quality of the music from that period. A generation of Hi-Fi dealers using Brothers In Arms for testing fidelity is not their fault.

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                    #34
                    As has been mentioned, Knopfler's career as a producer and session man, plus periodically as solo performer and movie soundtrack writer (The Princess Bride!), has been pretty interesting. There's a lot of good stuff he has been involved in, without much vanity.

                    He produced Aztec Camera's superb Knife album in 1984, and a few albums by Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, while Dire Straits were still a going concern. And he produced some stuff by the late Belfast singer-songwriter Bap Kennedy, which means that at least one former OTFer might have worked with Knopfler.

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                      #35
                      'Private Investigations' reached No. 2 in the UK. 'Love Over Gold' was No. 1 for 4 weeks:

                      http://www.officialcharts.com/artist.../dire-straits/

                      They also joined the trend of having biggish gaps between albums whereas The Smiths (for example) felt they had to put one out every year.
                      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 11-08-2018, 10:00.

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                        #36
                        I don't really have a dog in this fight, but it is very obvious from the syntax and vocabulary that the dialog that Knopfler took for Money for Nothing was from here, rather than any place in the UK.

                        It was long assumed among my circle that he must have been either in a Crazy Eddie or at The Wiz, as both were completely ubiquitous at the time (as well as being frequent advertisers on MTV).

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                          #37
                          Originally posted by Stumpy Pepys View Post
                          Admit it. Money for Nothing by Dire Straits is a terrific record.
                          Christ Almighty. Next thing we know, you'll be running riot in Til Schweiger's garden.

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                            #38
                            Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                            My ex was a big fan fan of M.Knop (still is apparently.) I never really disliked him or the band, in fact I rather like his guitar playing. But like many musicians who achieved fame in the early-mid 70s he was sort of thrust into early middle-age in the wake of punk. Old before his time you might say.
                            Originally posted by adams house cat View Post
                            You make a good point Amor.
                            Well, with one slight caveat - Dire Straits became big with and after punk, not before it. Their first album and Sultans of Swing dates to 1978, and their most successful releases like Making Movies and Brothers In Arms are early to mid-80s. Wikipedia claims they only formed as a band in '77. People found out about Lydon before Knopfler.

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                              #39
                              The members of Dire Straits were previously in pub rock bands most notably Brewer's Droop:

                              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewers_Droop

                              Punk owes some origins to pub rock so you could say that future punk and the future Dire Straits members were part of the same scene at one point but had diverged by 1976. Knopfler's guitar sound is distinctive and seems to go back to Delta Blues. Interesting article and video here:

                              http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/g...is-career.html

                              From the opening scenes at a music shop in Newcastle's Central Arcade, where the young Knopfler spent hours staring at guitars through windows, Illsley and Knopfler move on to the city of Leeds, where Knopfler once worked as a junior reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. There they meet up with his longtime friend and mentor Steve Phillips, a member of Knopfler's post-Dire Straits band The Notting Hillbillies. An aficionado of the Delta Blues, Phillips introduced the young Knopfler to the distinctive sound of "resonator" acoustic guitars.

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                                #40
                                I loathed Dire Straits. And still do.

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                                  #41
                                  For some strange reason, So Far Away got into my head this weekend. Didn't mind that track, tbh.

                                  So, 'Industrial Disease', 'So Far Away' and ....um....if I need a third, 'Twistin' By The Pool'.

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                                    #42
                                    Originally posted by diggedy derek View Post
                                    Mark Knopfler wanted to be Dylan, I think
                                    Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                                    Did he? He certainly copped his vocals, but he was far the only one. I thought he wanted to be Hendrix.
                                    Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                                    I always felt like he was trying to channel early Springsteen's channeling of Dylan. All that consciously blue-collar stuff felt more Springsteenish in tone.
                                    Lyrically maybe, but musically he was definitely channeling ZZ Top. Les Paul 'n' all.

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                                      #43
                                      Indeed

                                      He'd kept saying 'ZZ Top, ZZ Top'

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                                        #44
                                        Walk of life is the song they put on at the Irish country wedding, when they need the floor filled. Like Come on Eileen, or I use ta love her. Those songs are quite similar in a lot of ways. They were quite popular here, and people like that whole telling a story thing. Get a certain type of Irish man drunk and they will try to prove that they aren't drunk by loudly singing all the words of romeo and juliet on the side of a street and waking up the neighbours.

                                        I could remember the walk of life video from when I was a small child, but didn't really think all that much about Dire straits, then I bought a best of compilation for 30p in china, (complete with exciting spelling mistakes in the cd case) and gave it a listen. Divorced from whatever was happening in the 1980's, it's all basically grand. some of it is even good. They're clearly better than nearly all the bands of the eighties, however they're playing 70's music. The songs that work best for them are the ones where he's trying to be an american ray davies, like sultans of swing or romeo and juliet.

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                                          #45
                                          Yes, you always got the feeling Mark Knopfler was a man out of his time. Amor's timeline was a bit off in his earlier comment, but he felt like a '70s troubadour, a man sort of middle-aged by the early '80s. Money For Nothing is in many ways a really odd outlier on the Brothers In Arms album: its (ironically?) MTV-friendly rocky and upbeat sound, like that of Walk Of Life, is out of place on a record much more defined by its cover design: shades of blue and dusky pink taken from the evening sky and clouds through which the National Steel guitar seems to ascend. The title track's downbeat, keyboard-led lament is much more indicative of the general tenor, also found in So Far Away, Your Latest Trick, Why Worry, One World, etc.: this is a record of muted doubt, uncertainty, not the brash confidence of the protagonist of Money For Nothing.


                                          That's a great point by ursus that it had to have been an American store Knopfler overhead the guy spouting what became the MFN lyrics. As a kid first hearing the song on my dad's cassette of the dryly-named Money For Nothing compilation album in the car, I was baffled by all this stuff about "chicks", and similarly by the reference to a "faggot" in the lyrics sheet (all the more so since that verse isn't actually heard in the single/radio edit on the compilation), which to me meant merely the distasteful offal-based meatball thing you had with mashed potato and gravy. "Jet airplane" is another giveaway, for instance, as is the pronunciation of "gee-tar".
                                          Last edited by Various Artist; 13-08-2018, 15:27.

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                                            #46
                                            Originally posted by Various Artist View Post
                                            Yes, you always got the feeling Mark Knopfler was a man out of his time. Amor's timeline was a bit off in his earlier comment, but he felt like a '70s troubadour, a man sort of middle-aged by the early '80s.
                                            He wasn't helped much by the ubiquitous headband and the [let's be honest] perennially confused look he tended to wear on his face.

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                                              #47
                                              He was 28 when Sultans of Swing was released. Not old but definitely part of my generation, (I'm a year older) not the youth-quake that was happening in the UK that year. Interestingly Dire Straits early releases actually did slightly better chart-wise in the US than the UK, possibly because they didn't have quite as much to compete with over here.

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                                                #48
                                                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                                He wasn't helped much by the ubiquitous headband and the [let's be honest] perennially confused look he tended to wear on his face.
                                                Yes, it's not your straight-up 'rock star' look is it? You can't imagine Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or Michael Hutchence, say, going about looking like that.

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                                                  #49
                                                  Originally posted by Various Artist View Post
                                                  Yes, it's not your straight-up 'rock star' look is it? You can't imagine Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or Michael Hutchence, say, going about looking like that.
                                                  Three excellent examples who've never put a foot wrong.

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                                                    #50
                                                    Originally posted by Various Artist View Post
                                                    Yes, it's not your straight-up 'rock star' look is it? You can't imagine Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or Michael Hutchence, say, going about looking like that.

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