In the late 1990s/early 2000s Brothers in Arms still sold something like 1000 copies a week in the UK alone. Well, it did until people stopped buying records altogether – anywhere between 2003 and the present day. How is it then that Brothers In Arms is a classic album? It continues to sell. There’s no actual justification for it.Īnd that jazzy-schmaltz of Your Latest Trick launched a thousand cruise ship covers. You might take some comfort from it, enjoyment even, when no one else is around, but that doesn’t mean it should actually be allowed to happen. A walk to save my own life – and anyone who got in the way.īut it isn’t just that song that kills the album – though it does a pretty fucking good job (and by good job I of course also mean an awful job horrendous song, so thoroughly ghastly as to be an endurance test just sitting through it) – the treacly, trickled ballad Why Worry is an over-egged sentiment, the whispered fog of So Far Away is like trackpants. But I also respected the commitment he showed – and having now played in bands at RSA clubs where audience clap-alongs make you feel you’re on the podium at music’s Special Olympics and everyone is egging you on – in their own time, natch – I reckon I’d have taken that walk too if I were to go back in time. My buddy told me if they played it he was leaving. But, second song in, they played the fucking Walk of Life. I saw Dire Straits live, on their farewell tour – the album after this, On Every Street (arguably the first Mark Knopfler solo album, not counting his soundtrack work of course). And that’s what was lapped up by every Miami Vice-watching fuckwit of the time. It’s horrid light-blue sleeve and that giant guitar on the cover – it seemed to exist to promote a cartoon version of the band. I grew up with that record so, sadly, I know every inch of it still – even though I’ll never play it again. Have you tried listening to Brothers In Arms any time recently? I haven’t – but still I don’t advise it. No hanging in The Hague, just the perfect alibi: It weren’t me your honour, it were that bloody awful Funfair-music-gone-wrong, Walk Of Bleedin’ Life that were wot did it! And it should be totally understandable too. Hear that and off you pop, popping off at whoever you like, whoever you can. An ordinary man could kill with that keyboard riff the CIA-implanted trigger. That god-awful Walk of Life with its obnoxious keyboard line. It, too, tastes like fermented jellybeans bathed in stray-cat piss. You see Brothers In Arms, one of the biggest sellers of 1985, sounds like musical wine-cooler. You can even claim to try to like side two – it seems to have its own theme, leading up to the title track and barring the final song it’s not ruined by any monstrous, ghastly singles.
Oh, sure, you can say you like the title track (I do). Feel no shame at all for loving the first two Dire Straits albums grab the third too – it’s good for a gander shame that silly goose Knopfler killed the band with its fifth album, Brothers In Arms. And the end result is some strange utterly British version of a type of Americana Knopfler’s influences finger-picking from country and folk and hillbilly styles. And the playing on those early Straits albums is killer-good particularly the jazzy strut and bounce of drummer Pick Withers so intuitive, sympathetic, guiding while following. Cale, borrowed a warble from Dylan and others – but I’ll always argue that to do what he did, the way he did it, right at the height of punk was – in its own way – a form of rebellion a type of punk move.Īnd fuck it, even if that’s stretching the definition for utmost convenience Knopfler was good. Knopfler might have nicked licks from Richard Thompson and J.J. It’s too easy to call it silly/boring pub-rock. Communiqué is a classic that self-titled debut also. But I’ll stand by the first four Dire Straits albums – in fact if my house is going down in flames (and having just picked on the new Fat Freddy’s Drop album I should think that’ll happen anytime soon) obviously I’m going to care for my wife and child as best I can – but in that first armful I’ll also be grabbing the first two Dire Straits albums. The Knopflersauras and his dinosaur dad-rock gets chuckled on in much the same way that Phil Collins is instantly/easily reviled. It’s easy to take a pot-shot at Dire Straits and/or Mark Knopfler these days easy.
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