The part about who made up Dire Straits’ audience demographic may have some truth to it, but so what? There is no such thing as an authentic or an inauthentic pop act, or audience, or format. And Dire Straits were the emblematic CD band, the group nonpareil for those Ford Mondeo drivers.Īll of which was, and is, snobbery and bullshit.
In 1991 CDs were still considered middlebrow, middle-class, the preserve of men with high-street suits and mid-range company cars, all shiny surface and no substance or depth (the suits, the men, and the format) somehow, in short, inauthentic. Its predecessor, Brothers In Arms (1985), was the album whose success had ensured the compact disc would become a viable commercial format. That last album came out just when I was starting to write about music, and I recall colleagues of mine laying into them thus (I paraphrase from memory): “Dire Straits – has any band ever been so aptly named? It couldn’t suit them better if they were called We’re So Boring Even Our Farts Are Odourless.” By that point, it seemed fair comment. Over time I came to realise I had loved them because there was plenty there to love.Īnd plenty to hate. When you consider that their productive years (1978–1985 they released a final outlier of an album, On Every Street, in 1991) coincided with one of pop music’s most thrilling and inventive eras, much of which I missed while it was going on, this wasn’t an unreasonable thing to think. For years after, I hated them, or professed to, and thought I had loved them only because I knew no better.
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