Artist: Dire Straits
Label: Vertigo Records
Release: 1978
Length: 41:34
Rating: 4.1/5
Toward the end of the seventies, with the punk revolution still at its peak and a pile of new punk and new wave acts popping up on the scene every week, a band called Café Racers emerged in 1977. They later renamed themselves Dire Straits (Slovenian translation: V Škripcu). The name came from a friend who knew the guys really well and knew that back then they couldn’t even afford a small beer. The band’s driving force Mark Knopfler (vocals, guitar and the group’s only songwriter), together with his brother David Knopfler (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), John Illsley (bass, backing vocals) and Pick Withers (drums), recorded their debut in February 1978, and nobody was exactly expecting much from it.
The scene was dominated by aggressive punk with socially charged lyrics, and right in the middle of it came the first single, Sultans Of Swing, which kicked off a proper little revolution in the music industry. Mark’s Dylan-esque vocals and lyrical guitar playing, which sounds most like JJ Cale and Chet Atkins, were the complete opposite of the high-energy punk riffs that ruled the scene at the time. Across the songs, Dire Straits wander from rock to pub rock and occasionally even to jazz, and there’s no filler on the album, with every track more or less on the same level.
The album kicks off with the energetic Down To The Waterline, moves on to Water Of Love, which went down especially well with the female part of the audience, and rolls into the aforementioned single Sultans Of Swing, which first became a huge hit in Belgrade, the capital of our former homeland, Yugoslavia.
The guys wrap up their debut with the beautifully melancholic Wild West End and the excellent Lions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkfIEZMtEhA
Dire Straits is far more than just a debut album. It’s a rock-solid cornerstone on which Dire Straits’ entire later body of work rests, and at the same time one of the strongest foundations in rock music, still sounding as fresh after all these years as it did in October 1978, when it first landed on record store shelves.
Lineup
Mark Knopfler – guitar, vocals
John Illsley – bass
Pick Withers – drums
David Knopfler – guitar
Production
Muff Winwood
Tracklist
01.Down To The Waterline
02.Water Of Love
03.Setting Me Up
04.Six Blade Knife
05.Southbound Again
06.Sultans Of Swing
07.In The Gallery
08.Wild West End
09.Lions
