I recently wrote various blog posts about ‘new’ pictures from some early Dire Straits gigs (e.g. here or here). Normally it happens only rarely that such new pictures appear – we are talking about a period more than 40 years ago, a time before digital cameras existed –  but these days again someone pointed me towards another set of nine pictures on Flickr, this time from the gig in Hamburg, Musikhalle, October 28, 1978. The photographer is Heinrich Klaffs.

Years ago I already wrote a blog post about a set of pictures from this early Dire Straits gig, in fact the first gig they did in Germany at all. However, with the help of these new pictures I must correct myself and state now that the pictures in that other blog post seem rather to be from the gig on the next day, October 29, in Berlin (in fact the photographer credtited on one of those pictures –  (Jim) Rakete – is associated with Berlin). Back then I also wrote a few words on that black Music Man guitar strap and I assumed that Mark got this strap in Hamburg (Europe’s Music Man distributor , No. 1 Music, was located in Hamburg) and used it from the Hamburg gig on. Now I still think that he got it on that day in Hamburg but did not use it before the next day. So again, all pictures with the thin brown guitar strap should be from a gig before October 29, 1978, all the ones with the wider black Music Man strap are from later gigs in 1978 or 1979.

Now, here are the nine pictures:

 

Here is a sound clip from that gig. The full concert is available on a bootleg recording, which unfortunately is in poor sound quality. It also runs way too fast so I corrected the speed of this clip. They already played some of the Communique songs on that gig (they recorded Communique about two months later). Mark’s was on a top-notch concentration level once again and the recording captures some of the magic of their sound back then.