Dire Straits Had No Worlds Left to Conquer

“There was no way anybody else was going to stick their hand up and say, ‘Hey, Mark, I have a great song idea!’ There was no point. He was on a racetrack.� Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Rob Verhorst/Redferns

Even before stepping into the studio, Dire Straits sensed fairly quickly that their 1985 album, Brothers in Arms, was going to be a big deal. “I was like, Jesus Christ, we have some serious stuff here,� bassist John Illsley recalls. But they still couldn’t have dreamed up the ensuing mayhem: 30 million copies sold to listeners dying to hear the MTV-defining “Money for Nothing� and stupendously joyful “Walk of Life.� So how does a band choose the lead single between those two Corinthian columns of songs? The answer is start with the simpler “So Far Away� and the anticipation will build itself. “Since we had a big audience out there,� Illsley tells me, “we didn’t feel like we had to smack them over the head straight away with our ‘Money for Nothing’ weapon.�

Illsley and Mark Knopfler were the two members who remained in the band for its entire tenure, beginning with 1978’s Dire Straits and ending with 1991’s On Every Street. Knopfler served as the sole songwriter — a role that was never challenged by others. “There was no way anybody else was going to stick their hand up and say, ‘Hey, Mark, I have a great song idea!,’� Illsley explains. “There was no point. He was on a racetrack. He’d tell me, ‘I got a song about this, I got a song about that.’ And I’d be like, ‘Crikey, mate, when do you have time to write this stuff?’ And he’d say, ‘Usually in the middle of the bloody night.’� (The two are still “very close friends.�) A collection of these songs is now available on the new box set Dire Straits: Live 1978–1992, which showcases the euphony of Illsley and Knopfler’s musical connection. As Illsley puts it, “We made a great team.�

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The Song

I had known Mark for about six months and we lived in a council flat together. He was strumming this tune one day and singing something and I asked him, “What’s that?� He responded, “David and I went to a pub the other night in Greenwich and I saw this band called the Sultans. I’m trying to write a tune that runs well with my observations of seeing this band, in the corner of this pub, being completely ignored by everybody sitting in there and drinking their beers.� I’ll be honest, it didn’t sound like much at the time. Then the red Stratocaster arrived at the flat and Mark cracked the song. He was so happy. “I’m going to call it ‘Sultans of Swing’!� As soon as he played the riffs, I knew he had it. We recorded it shortly thereafter at a little studio in London. By this point we had a few original songs we were playing in clubs and pubs. The song is a story about a little rock band in a club probably just playing for beer. We knew that feeling, didn’t we?

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The Bet

Hand on heart, we never gave singles much thought for our albums. We often left it up to the record company to decide what they thought would make good singles. Sure, if the executives turned around and said, “Let’s put out ‘Wild West End’ as your lead single for your debut album,� we would’ve pushed back against that decision. There was a universal belief that “Sultans of Swing� was best. It was also the strongest reaction when we played it live.

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The Payoff

The song broke in America first rather than in England. It didn’t get on the radio for one simple reason: The BBC, which was in charge of pretty much everything in the U.K. with music, said, “We don’t want to play this song because there are too many words in it. Also, it’s quite long. Why is it six minutes?� That didn’t seem to matter in America and it was embraced there. There was a level of excitement amongst us that things were starting to happen. The problem is that when you get a wave, you almost don’t have time to think about it. “Sultans of Swing� was riding high everywhere. We didn’t have time to reflect about its significance, in a way, because the second album was already on the go.

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The Song

We were rushed into the studio with a bit of pressure from Warner Bros. and Jerry Wexler. I’ll talk about this now because Jerry is dead. Jerry was adamant that we get into the studio very quickly after the first album just in case we only had one hit on our hands. We weren’t keen on it, even though we had the songs to do it. “Lady Writer� possessed its own energy, but it was remarked as being similar to “Sultans of Swing.� We weren’t trying to emulate it. Communiqué was a laid-back and mellow record and we took advantage of Compass Point Studios in Nassau. If you go to the Caribbean, especially in the late ’70s, you’re surrounded by all of the temptations that exist on an island apart from the rum.

Mark wrote “Lady Writer� about someone specific. I used to know her name but I’ve forgotten it. She’s an Irish writer. Mark was watching an interview on the television with her and wrote the song about it. The thing about Mark’s writing is that he’s a great storyteller. He’s a great observer of what everybody does and doesn’t do in this world. He can make a song about pretty much anything. It’s a positive song about a character looking and falling in love with somebody on the television. We’ve all kind of done that, right? If you see a wonderful actress or person talking on a screen you’re like, Oh, wow, I’d like to meet her.

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The Bet

Jerry told us, “This will be a great follow-up to ‘Sultans.’ Just keep that momentum going.� He was correct. It was uptempo and kicked things along a bit. Singles are a marketing exercise. We realized it was an important thing at that point in time. It was a specific way of trying to sell your music.

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The Payoff

This is something that’s important to remember about Dire Straits: We made albums as albums. There had to be a significant flow, similarities, and energy among all the songs. There weren’t any comparisons made between us as band members for “Sultans of Swings� and “Lady Writer.� I find those kinds of things difficult to deal with. Every album and song is built on its own merits. But that wasn’t the case for listeners. If someone said, “This isn’t as good as ‘Sultans,’� do you know how hard it is to get anywhere close to that again? Both for the simplicity and relevance? It’s difficult to explain. Music is like a good painting. How do you know why one song captures people’s imaginations more than another, and why does everybody want to see one painting in the National Gallery and not the rest of them?

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The Song

We had a bit more time to get songs together for Making Movies. Mark wrote the song about being in his hometown of Newcastle and going to Whitley Bay in the summers. He would work at the fairground and fall in love with girls. It’s a wonderful narrative. Our music was starting to expand much more and Mark’s writing was expanding. We needed to go somewhere else. That came from making the songs longer and more orchestral. We had frequently talked about adding keyboards, so we let Jimmy Iovine, our producer, know that we wanted a keyboard player. When we met Jimmy he said, “I’ve just been working with Bruce Springsteen, so you have Roy Bittan for the whole album.� We were like, Wow, that’s pretty cool! We transformed from a little four-piece rock band to a band who got Springsteen’s piano player. As soon as he started playing those keyboards, we all looked at each other and said, “Oh boy, now we’re motoring, this is gonna go somewhere cool.� The intro for “Tunnel of Love,� sampling Rodgers and Hammerstein, wasn’t in our minds until we were in the studio with Roy.

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The Bet

That was our choice. “Tunnel of Love� and “Romeo and Juliet� both embodied the ambitious ideas we now had for the band. Some people would say “Romeo and Juliet� is a more important Dire Straits single, but they both kept Making Movies afloat for a long time. There was something about “Tunnel of Love� that felt like a proper evolution.

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The Payoff

“Tunnel of Love� made us realize we had more potential as a band. We had gone from playing in front of hundreds to tens of thousands of people very quickly. There was a learning curve. Even though the album was marred by David Knopfler leaving in fairly difficult circumstances, there was a bit more weight taken off the band and we realized we could continue being ambitious with our ideas, which is something David didn’t exactly agree on. The touring potential also changed. Recording an album is very different from playing it live. Having now had three successful albums, this opened up a big territory in terms of playing live. We couldn’t have dreamt of playing in the Juventus football stadium in Turin before Making Movies. Stadiums weren’t a possibility before the success of this album. And we absolutely went for it and had the time of our lives. For most musicians, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment. You have to embrace it and love it. You had to tour to get your music out to sell more records. You had to do the work.

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The Song

This was a difficult album and song to make. Although we prepared a lot of the ideas, in the studio we changed a lot of stuff. “Private Investigations� was part of that grouping. I believe the rough outline was half of the final running time. It wasn’t ever going to be six or seven minutes in the early stages. That’s a disaster as far as a single is considered. After having three successful albums, we felt we could do whatever we wanted to do. When we were doing the tour for Making Movies, we used the sound checks to work on “Private Investigations.� Instead of boring ourselves with the same tunes, we worked on that and “Telegraph Road.� So when we got in the studio, we had some ideas, but the instrumental ending came from “News� from Communiqué. We used to finish that song in a live setting with the same bass line. Mark told me, “Remember that bit we sometimes do live at the end of ‘News’? Why don’t we put that at the end of ‘Private Investigations’ and keep it going?� These are decisions that are literally made on the fly in the hopes of making a song better.

This was an autobiographical song for Mark. The “private investigations� are about writing and examining material. Raymond Chandler was in the back of his mind. It’s blending the personal experience of what it’s like to be a writer and putting it in a different framework. It was bloody clever and took everybody by surprise.

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The Bet

We wanted to take a risk. Love Over Gold was a risky album to make in general. We didn’t know if a seven-minute single in the U.K. would be feasible, but then we remembered what “Bohemian Rhapsody� did for Queen. They got away with it. So why not try? There was one major DJ on British radio who insisted on playing the song. He would go, “I’m going to play this song, it’s long, I’m not supposed to play it, but who cares, it’s going to be on until the very end. Stop what you’re doing and listen to it.� Then everybody went, “Wow, this is amazing.� It really did take one person to change everyone’s minds.

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The Payoff

It got to No. 2 in the English charts, which freaked everybody out. I didn’t have any expectations with this. If you have expectations, you’re only going to be dissatisfied. I think the most important thing about most art forms is the element of surprise. We were surprised how well that song was taken up. The audience went crazy for “Private Investigations� live. They loved that it was risky. They weren’t being beaten over the head by the same beats or loudness from other bands. There were certain subtleties going on with us all the time. You had to feel your way through them. This was the most humbling experience from all of our albums.

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The Song

The beauty of something like “So Far Away� is its simplicity and use of repetition. It showed a remarkable breadth of where we were musically and with Mark’s songwriting. We were expanding in an exponential way. It surprised me, to be honest, because doing pop-oriented songs wasn’t a trajectory I thought Mark was interested in. Those textures had to be dealt with carefully. Before we went to record Brothers in Arms at George Martin’s studio in Montserrat, I sensed this would be a seminal album. “So Far Away� was personal to Mark and it’s what makes it accessible to listeners. It was a simple little gem. We hadn’t done anything like it before or after. The key to the song was it being simple — less can be more. A lyric like “I’m tired of being in love and being all alone�? Come on.

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The Bet

First off, there was discussion by one of our producers if “Walk of Life� should even be on the album. He was quite adamant that it sounded too much of a pop song, and because of that, it shouldn’t be on this “serious� album. That was absolute poppycock and rubbish. Because we realized that we had a hit record here, we had a more in-depth meeting with executives about singles. They said, “There are so many singles on this record.� And we went, “Really?� We knew “Money for Nothing� and “Brothers in Arms� had a lot of potential. We were still working on the “Money for Nothing� music video and it wouldn’t have been ready in time. We knew nothing about the computer technology and the time it required. So we agreed “So Far Away� would be a good first single to let people know Dire Straits had a new album out.

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The Payoff

It was the most remarkable experience of our time as a band. You couldn’t get any higher, professionally, from where we were. When you form a band in 1977 and play in front of half a dozen people, you don’t expect to be playing a year’s worth of stadiums less than a decade later. We had no idea about success or what it could look like. Things were getting a little crazy when Brothers in Arms was released. You choose to either get on or get off. We stayed on. It was an out-of-body experience. I still sometimes think to myself, That was me. That was us. We were on world stages, playing in front of ridiculous amounts of people, and having the time of our lives. I can’t tell you how much fun was had.

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The Song

If you’ve had a very successful album, like Brothers in Arms, it’s a big thing to even consider doing something after that. You just have to say to yourself that it’s a new bunch of songs and treat it as another record. We allowed ourselves to do an awful lot of experimentation for On Every Street. Jeff Porcaro agreed to be our drummer for the full album, which was a big get. My work, physically, for that album was done in two or three weeks. “Calling Elvis� is an unusual song. I’ve always found it pretty weird. Mark and I grew up with Elvis Presley and he was one of the reasons we joined a rock and roll band. We can be like Elvis Presley! Elvis filled our world with possibilities of what it was like to be a musician or to be somebody who could capture the imagination of others. It was an apt song to create. “Calling Elvis, is anybody home? I’m here all alone.� It’s all about roots, musically and spiritually.

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The Bet

It didn’t matter what single we put out at this point. I’m not saying that from an arrogant point of view, but we didn’t feel it was necessary after how big Brothers in Arms was. We identified a few songs as potential singles, but we left that up to the public and radio stations to decide what they wanted to listen to.

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The Payoff

After we toured, the decision was made to put Dire Straits to bed. It was the best thing to do. We couldn’t keep going like that. We couldn’t play to any more people. Seven million people came to the On Every Street tour. We were tired physically and mentally. We were prone to arguments. I wanted to go and be a painter. Mark wanted to go off and examine all sorts of other things. We’re still great friends, but if we hadn’t packed it in then, all I’ll say is it would likely be a very different relationship now.