The Action and The Motion: Dire Straits’ 'Brothers in Arms' Turns 40

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The inaugural album to go Platinum 10 times in the United Kingdom wasn’t The Dark Side of the Moon, or Thriller, or a Queen greatest hits compilation. It was Brothers in Arms, an LP so beloved it sold well in CD format too, becoming the first title to move a million copies. Dire Straits, a band once called Café Racers in London, had found good local success before fully busting out in 1985. “Sultans of Swing,” their debut single seven years prior, was a Top 10 hit in England and America. “Romeo and Juliet,” “Twisted by the Pool,” and “Private Investigations” charted high in the immediate years after, the latter reaching #2 in the band’s home country.

But Brothers in Arms, lit ablaze by three uber hits, fell on displeased ears upon release. NME hated the album, as did Record Mirror. The former’s Mat Snow called bandleader Mark Knopfler’s schtick “mawkish self-pity,” “lugubriously mannered appropriation of rockin’ Americana,” and “thumpingly crass attempts at wit.” So what if it was among the earliest albums recorded on Sony’s 24-track digital tape machine? These nine songs were MOR radio fodder, the detractors clamored. The country-fried pub rock of “Sultans of Swing” had all but vanished. Knopfler’s singing interests shifted too, swapping monologues about Dixieland jazz and Creole bands in London for working-class commentary on music video innovations and wartime laments.

Brothers in Arms came together in a 20-by-25-foot room inside AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Knopfler and Neil Dorfsman produced the album, continuing their partnership after working on Love Over Gold and Local Hero together. Knopfler was fascinated with sound quality, his finger consistently on the pulse of new technology. That’s how the use of the 24-track tape machine came about, a product of his urge to record digitally. In the crammed recording space, the studio band—Knopfler, Guy Fletcher John Illsley, Jack Sonni, Alan Clark, Omar Hakim, and Terry Williams—played around with clever microphone placements, using Neumann U87s to capture ambient noise and miking different parts of Hakim’s drum kit with Sennheiser MD 421s, an Electro-Voice RE20, AKG D12, Shure SM57, 20 dB pad, and 451s. A Hammon B3 and other keyboards got a booth in the right corner, a Leslie speaker was stuffed into an airlock near the studio’s control room, where Fletcher’s synths were.

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Defective tape led to three songs being “lost,” resulting in follow-up sessions at the Power Station in New York, where Dire Straits overdubbed the songs and collected new parts from Michael and Randy Brecker, Sonni, Jimmy Maelen, Dave Plews, and Malcolm Duncan. Upon the band’s trip to NYC, Illsley broke both of his elbows while jogging in Central Park, and his basslines on six songs were re-recorded by Tony Levin and Saturday Night Live house band bassist Neil Jason, though the latter is only officially confirmed to have appeared on “One World” and “Money for Nothing.”

MTV had been on the air for nearly four years once Brothers in Arms came out, and the album became an all-time example of the channel’s heavy rotation boosting a band to unprecedented heights—the “Money for Nothing” music video was especially big on the network, which was a cosmic link, considering the song’s “I want my MTV” melody, which was sung by guest vocalist and co-writer Sting. While my parents were discovering Dire Straits through the 3-D, rotoscoped animation of the band’s nimble, neon-squiggled playing, I encountered them in The Benchwarmers 20 years later. “Walk of Life” had me so charmed then that it’s forever entangled with Happy Madison flicks. But MTV’s love for Dire Straits mirrored American audiences and critics at-large, most of whom were more generous in their opinions about the album than their English counterparts. SPIN lauded Knopfler’s playing, while Rolling Stone sang the praises of the songwriting, production, and “Knopfler’s terrific guitar work catching the best light.”

In one of my earliest fugue states, when I would waste summer days away by binging music videos on a YouTube site still in its infancy, I heard that “Money for Nothing” verse for the first time: “See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup. Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair. That little faggot got his own jet airplane. That little faggot, he’s a millionaire.” It felt taboo—off limits—to my tweener ears. By then, I hadn’t encountered the full weight of the slur. Being a young person in the late-2000s, with a vocabulary not yet infiltrated by slang or shorthands, cusses carried equal consequence in my household. But in the secrecy of my stolen library headphones, hearing Knopfler say faggot three times was like hearing my father stretch fuck into three syllables when the living room window leaked after a snowstorm. It was a doorway briefly cracked—a world you were never to fully go into.

And of course I said the word amongst friends. You probably said the word, too. Maybe our fathers said the word in jest around us, or maybe they meant it behind closed doors. Knopfler said it but then argued that it was from the perspective of a character, not himself. “Money for Nothing” stayed the same but eventually I grew up, came out, and began paying attention to the rest of the song—to how Knopfler assuming the roles of two angry, jealous blue-collar workers was meant to be a critique of fame-driven envy, not a gesture of prejudice. Perhaps Knopfer’s story-based deflections about the controversy triggered a clause to absolve him of any wrongdoing. “Money for Nothing” spawned out of a case of eavesdropping, when Knopfler heard appliance store employees talking about music videos. He quickly let the same vulgar color spill out of his pen, claiming that he wanted to use “a lot of the language that the real guy actually used.”

The verse, even in its antagonistic, ironic context, is still a shitty ear-sore. But that meant dick in 1985, of course. Brothers in Arms was an album so huge that something as minimal as a controversial 30-second part of an 8-minute hit song was never going to stifle its success. And the court of public opinion has since moved far away from Knopfler’s misguided, heteronormative creative choices; kids these days just aren’t listening to Dire Straits anymore. Maybe it’s the woke mind virus rummaging inside me, but I prefer the single edit of “Money for Nothing” anyways. The 4-minute clip of rabble-rousing MTV rock is far more exciting—less lyrically oppressive and more sonically rewarding, the kind of song you can listen to out in the open. It’s sanitized, sure, but it became a smash hit and a radio favorite, soaring to #1 on the Hot 100 and reaching the Top 10 in seven other countries. It even nabbed Dire Straits a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

“Money for Nothing” was a blockbuster song—thanks to that avalanche riff from Knopfler, which he achieved by running a Les Paul through a wah-wah pedal. The moves were over-processed and alien, unlike anything he’d done on-record prior. And, compared to Knopfler’s fretboard-scaling in “Sultans of Swing,” “Money for Nothing” is one of the most recognizable “star-making” singles I’ve ever listened to. At the very least, it proved Knopfler to be an unpredictable player—someone unafraid of taking a big swing after the magic of “Sultans of Swing” was rich enough to buy him appearances on Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming and Steely Dan’s “Time Out of Mind” by the end of the 1970s. And, if “Sultans of Swing” told us that Mark Knopfler could play the guitar, then “Money for Nothing” illustrated just how much he could fuck the instrument up without his experiments getting too obtuse.

But Brothers in Arms isn’t just “Money for Nothing.” It’s “So Far Away” and “Walk of Life” and “Why Worry.” It’s a stadium-filler, but with the jazz-rock flourishes Knopfler had executed on Love Over Gold three years prior. “Why Worry” could have been neatly tucked into the Infidels tracklist, but Knopfler’s vocals are far more plaintive and intimate than Dylan’s. The moody, night-dappled “Your Latest Trick” is Dire Straits nearly embracing the synth-pop music that tilted the mainstream and encroached upon their magnum opus. “Walk of Life” was an outlier—almost too upbeat for its own good, arena-sized and giddy yet so full-throttled in optimism that some say Johnny’s still singing oldies. And “Ride Across the River” may be titled like a Springsteen song, but its medleys of synthesized pan flute, mariachi trumpet, and reggae percussion, contrasted by Knopfler’s steam-rolling solo, are perpendicular to the grain, lending to the song a deep eclecticism.

Brothers in Arms ends in itself, in the subterranean synths of a 7-minute, anti-war title track. Knopfler wrote it during Britain’s involvement in the Falklands War in 1982 specifically, continuing the militaristic motifs from “Ride Across the River” and “The Man’s Too Strong” and chasing the tail of some of his strongest-ever verses. Lines like “Through these fields of destruction, baptisms of fire, I’ve witnessed your suffering as the battle raged higher” and “It’s written in the starlight and every line in your palm: ‘We’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms’” are immersive yet kind even as symptoms of senseless violence.

You might consider Brothers in Arms to be a “classic rock” album by now. But rock music on the wrong side of hair metal was on the outs by 1985, unless you were Bruce Springsteen. This isn’t to say that bands like AC/DC or ZZ Top were no longer selling out venues; it’s an acknowledgement that heavy, pop-agnostic songs by longtime power-chord stalwarts just weren’t hitting the mainstream as often as the work of bands like Foreigner and Starship—formerly rock-rooted bands who’d embraced poppier strategies and parlayed a surge in airplay into chart popularity. In league with Born in the U.S.A., Brothers in Arms is, undoubtedly, one of the best rock albums of its kind, released during a calendar year that especially pushed post-punk and jangle titles like Psychocandy, Meat is Murder, Low-Life, and The Head on the Door to the moon. And then there were bands like Tears for Fears and a-ha, both of whom amplified their New Wave tones into a more commercialized shape, a move rewarded with #1 hits (“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Shout,” and “Take On Me”).

Dire Straits weren’t ever straight-and-narrow, rarely inclined to produce a song like “I Want to Know What Love Is” just to make a quick buck. Knopfler himself was something of a reluctant rockstar. Between Love Over Gold and Brothers in Arms, he spent his time playing in Dylan’s backing band and scoring films like Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. He even wrote “Private Dancer” for Tina Turner’s comeback album and played lead guitar parts on Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls. When punk and disco were the talk of the town, Dire Straits made a blues-and-roots album. And when synth-pop was the flavor of the month and rap was on the rise, Dire Straits made a swaggering, everyman’s rock album. Even the Jimmy Iovine-produced Making Movies in 1980 was more romantic and macho-wacho than the gothic sounds coming out of UK bands like the Cure and Joy Division. “Romeo and Juliet” was a sentimental, gooey antithesis to anything on an album like Seventeen Seconds or Closer.

Knopfler was never going to capitalize on any of-the-moment trends. His music was always paradoxical—10 years out of phase yet astoundingly innovative. And he always seemed to be rebelling against the rebellions that sought to make his style of guitar-playing obsolete. He was a finger-picker who could play metallic, rauncy, and loose on “Tunnel of Love” and deep in the pocket during “Once Upon a Time in the West,” only to then flip the switch on distortion for “Money for Nothing.” He was nothing short of a genius—a headband-wearing talent so unbothered by conventionality that even his most academic performances felt somewhat off-kilter. Take the greatest song on Brothers in Arms, for example: The Heartlandish, plucky “So Far Away” is so without bells and whistles that the mellow buzz of a synclavier melody sounds odd.

But it’s no surprise that Dire Straits’ best-selling album played it safer than any of the eccentric leaps the band took on Communiqué or Making Movies. They filled radio stations and flashed their instruments on young-adult programming, constructing a bridge between generations unlike the ones built by any of their peers. Dire Straits toed the line separating finesse and stridence—their multiplicity sharpened in the side-one sequence between “Walk of Life” and “Your Latest Trick”—and resisted becoming a poster band for anything but their own gleam of beguiling, artsy songcraft. It’s hard to not get sentimental about Brothers in Arms, as few AOR majesties and digital marvels rarely endure without corrosion from whatever pop monoliths linger nearby. The album should’ve marked the moment Dire Straits sold out, but Mark Knopfler was never going to be like Guitar George and simply “know all the chords.” He was always going to make his Stratocaster cry and sing. It was a language one man spoke but a million learned.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

The Action and The Motion: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms Turns 40

In 1985, when synth-pop was the flavor of the month and rap was on the rise, Dire Straits made a swaggering, everyman’s rock album.