When life becomes slightly too challenging, I’m sure I’m not alone in leaning towards comfort music.
When life becomes slightly too challenging, I’m sure I’m not alone in leaning towards comfort music. You don’t want anything too jagged, or awkward, or dissonant, or glum. Nothing that makes the veins in your forehead throb. It needs to be something you know backwards but, ideally, haven’t played for years and years. And it might be something you will only consider playing when everyone is out, curtains are drawn and all covert listening devices have been safely neutralised. We are speaking, obviously, of Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’.
This is a generational thing, I understand. Middle-aged men are more embarrassed about liking Mark Knopfler and his old band than anyone else. Last weekend I was playing cricket and the opposing captain had to leave early to go to a Knopfler concert. His teammates jeered at him, but I’m sure most of them would happily have gone in his place. Meanwhile, my friend David announced on Facebook that he had ‘made a handy discovery today: Dire Straits make superb running music. First, they play at a nice, joggy sort of rhythm and, second, Knopfler’s solos go on so long that by the time they’re over you’ve covered half a mile without really noticing…’ Because it would obviously be too embarrassing to say straight out that you really liked their records and played them all the time.
My rediscovery of ‘Sultans’, though, came via a CD of bits and bobs another friend of mine had burnt for me. ‘But it’s Dire Straits,’ I said to her. ‘So what?’ she asked. The version she had included was a live one that may have been a B-side of an early single, and unlike their later live albums could be pleasurably listened to more than once. It sent me straight back to their first two albums, Dire Straits (1978) and Communiqué (1979), and from there into a couple of days of total Knopfler immersion. And a fascinating experience it was.
The first two albums, I think, are still the best. They were recorded in a vacuum of obscurity. Communiqué had already been recorded by the time ‘Sultans’ became a worldwide hit and propelled the band to stadium live shows, silly headbands and day-long guitar solos. It’s an intimate, introverted, wryly humorous record, full of oblique observations on British life and wonderful understated musicianship. I can still remember the terrible disappointment that was Making Movies (1980), co-produced by American rock dullard Jimmy Iovine. It still feels studied and lifeless, and the oompah closer, ‘Les Boys’, about male prostitutes, features the first genuinely embarrassing Knopfler lyric. Love Over Gold (1982) and Brothers In Arms (1985) are now, to me, unlistenable. You can admire their scope and ambition, because Knopfler now wanted the world, and happily the world wanted Knopfler too. But there’s no life to any of this music, no swing, no room to breathe. It’s perfectly constructed, but who needs perfection? On Every Street (1991) was the last group album, geared less towards the stadium, but still too carefully produced, and with another batch of abysmal, half-hearted lyrics. Knopfler seemed to have nothing more to say. Not long afterwards the band split up and he embarked on the solo career he had probably dreamt of all along.
I have written before of some of these albums, which chart a gradual, and satisfying, reversion to first principles. Golden Heart (1996) still gleamed with precision, but it also introduced a country-ish edge to his songwriting and brought together the band he has been playing with ever since. Nowadays Knopfler albums come along more frequently, every 18 months or so, and can be variable, although I think The Ragpicker’s Dream (2002) is very special. The music is simpler, more spacious and less polished, the lyrics have something to say again and the guitar solos service the songs rather than the other way round. Vast riches have enabled Knopfler to do exactly what he wants, to be a jobbing singer-songwriter with a crack band of session musicians and a dedicated fan base who buy all his records. ‘There ain’t half been some clever bastards,’ Ian Dury once sang. ‘Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders,’ sang the Blockheads behind him. They weren’t wrong.
And if people are ashamed to say they listen to your records? Their problem, not Knopfler’s. Quick! Draw the curtains! ‘And Harry doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make the scene, he’s got a daytime job, he’s doing all right…’
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