(#315: 25 May 1985, 2 weeks; 3 August 1985, 2
weeks; 18 January 1986, 10 weeks)
Track listing: So Far Away/Money For Nothing/Walk
Of Life/Your Latest Trick/Why Worry/Ride Across The River/The Man’s Too
Strong/One World/Brothers In Arms
If you wonder why so many
of these albums sound big and empty, it is down to the advent of this new thing
called the compact disc. It was a status symbol, a benchmark showing just how
far above the bench you were, reassuring you that you were far ahead of, and
superior to, the masses. Compact discs in the eighties were expensive luxury
affairs; they were typically priced at £20-25, and even in the late nineties
price tags of £16 or £17 were not uncommon.
Now, compact discs are my
preferred method of listening to music, far less bothersome to store and search
through than ancient gramophone records. I do not harbour a nostalgia for warps, jumps and
scratches. But it must be said that the success of the format prompted an awful
lot of indulgence, allowed a lot of things to pass which perhaps should never
have been let through.
Moreover, the compact disc
was essentially, in its initial stages, a deeply conservative concept. I do not
simply mean thrusting Thatcherkids blasting out nothingness from their
wall-to-wall car speakers on their way down Threadneedle Street. Like stereo
twenty years previously, it caused spectators to gawp and gasp at the
astonishing sounds that the phenomenon could produce, but these same spectators
elected to use the new system to listen to conservative music. James Last and
Ray Conniff in the sixties; Phil Collins and Brothers In Arms a generation later.
Brothers In Arms was not the first album to be released on CD, nor to be recorded on
digital rather than analogue. But it was certainly the first major album to
promote itself as primarily being a CD. The LP and cassette editions provided
an abridged first side; the CD was eight minutes longer (but even at the
abridged length of forty-seven minutes, the record still sounds as though it
needs to be edited down by half that length). In other words, if you joined the
CD revolution, you were given the whole story.
Read the Wikipedia entry
on the record, or reviews of it on Amazon, and you will get miles of prose
about studio size, microphone and speaker placements, types of keyboards used,
the superior quality of SACD. Anything, in fact, except the music that is
allegedly being listened to.
Listening to the record,
on a first generation CD which cost me £1.75 from the charity shop, I could
almost marvel at the middlebrow vacuum which it presents. It would appear that
the CD format principally allowed a lot more noodling and longer but equally
pointless fadeouts. “Why Worry” is a decent enough two-and-a-half minute Everly
Brothers-type song encased within eight-and-a-half minutes of ambient fumbling;
it labours under the illusion that it is John Martyn’s “Small Hours.”
Nothing really happens on Brothers In Arms, and happens
expensively. The darkness, worries and menace of Love Over Gold have been distilled down to a blandly blue motorway,
just as David Lean boiled down turn-of-the-century Russia to the deadening
snowscape of Doctor Zhivago. If 1985
rock were a Stanley Kubrick filmography, then if No Jacket Required is Full
Metal Jacket, Brothers In Arms
is Barry Lyndon; a gentler,
sleep-inducing bludgeoning.
As for the standard view
of Dire Straits as earth-honest pub-rockers, it should be noted that Knopfler
is the only guitarist here; there are two keyboard players, and aside from some
flourishes at the beginning of “Money For Nothing,” it is Omar Hakim, rather
than Terry Williams, who plays the drums. Moreover, the few sparks of interest
which the record ignites are usually down to outside players; “Your Latest
Trick” is musically seductive, largely because of Michael Brecker impersonating
Jan Garbarek (and a rather spiky out-of-tempo introductory duet between Randy
Brecker’s trumpet and an angry-sounding Knopfler guitar). The bouillabaisse of “Ride
Across The River” would be even more aimless without Dave Plews’ Mariachi
trumpet touches. And so on.
But there is, overall, a
terrible mixture of indolence and arrogance about this music, and how it is
played. The second and far less well-known side of the record is largely about
war, but skilfully avoids naming any names or identifying any real causes or
cures, such that, by the closing title track – Dave Gilmour covering “Bird Of
Paradise” – all that we have learned is, essentially, that war, war is
stoo-peed and pee-pul are stoo-peed. And despite the folky touches on two of these
songs, Knopfler is so far away from being Dick Gaughan, or even the Billy Bragg
of “Between The Wars.”
Mixed with this arrogance
is a world-weariness which you don’t feel Knopfler has really earned. It is a
record of entitlement, smugness and assumed superiority. On “Money” he sneers
that he shoulda learned to play the gee-tar, but on “Walk Of Life” he is
sneering even at the poor sod busking for pennies in Tottenham Court Road tube
station. He has a go at the one-night stand he bumps into on “Your Latest
Trick,” even complains at the hapless lover on the other end of the telephone
on “So Far Away” as if it were her fault that he was successful and on a world
tour.
And, of course, “Money For
Nothing” is where all of Knopfler’s worst tendencies coalesce. Getting past its
grotesquely pretentious introduction, ninety-seven seconds of warming up and
Sting humming the MTV jingle, we get some very horrid old school rock. No doubt
Knopfler identified himself with the everyman – and vice versa – but all he is doing is sneering at New Pop and their
funny ways.
Much, much worse is his
use of the “f” word – the section that is handily edited out on oldies radio –
and even if he is writing in character, he has previous form, both in terms of gay-baiting
(1980’s “Les Boys”) and cussed philistinism (1978’s “In The Gallery”). At a
time when the facts about HIV and Aids were struggling to become known, this
was, to put it VERY mildly, unhelpful. All he – with Sting, who co-wrote the
song, as well as providing vocal back-up – is doing is hammering home to the
listener how Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits are so much better than everybody
and everything else. And mumbling the words can be an especially deadly form of
arrogance.
And yet this broad expanse
of rock desert outsold every other album in eighties Britain (even Thriller), remained on top in the States
for nine weeks, has at the time of writing sold some thirty million copies
worldwide. Its success implied that “bigness” with all content evacuated was
enough. Like virtually every other number one album of 1985, there are
practically no laughs (“Money For Nothing” is certainly no laughing matter). We
were all expected to be grown-up and serious…but about what? How much direct
influence has this album of albums had on anything which has come after it – as
opposed to the indirect influence of sizeable streams of large vacuums which
the CD era has permitted? I would instead point to a far better and far more
pointed example of Northeastern technological folk music in 1985, namely Prefab
Sprout’s Steve McQueen. But Brothers In Arms is strictly prefab “class”
(pronounced with a flat “a”); music for people who don’t like music, a record
for people who don’t buy records. It looks to fill a gap which Dark Side Of The Moon had occupied in the previous decade, but the cover is ominous - Knopfler's 1937 National Style O Resonator guitar floating into the blue air, without visible means of support, as if to say, rock and roll? That's your lot; grow up.
Next: the same problem
from the opposite perspective.
