Here are two videos from the official Bob Dylan Youtube channel, posted some months ago already. It is only a mimic session for a promotional video but it is from the original recording session at the New York Power station recording studio in April/May 1983. And it features an alternate mix of the two songs, plus various other differences from the released album version, like different vocal takes. For ‘gear-investigators’ […]
The song Portobello Belle has been played as a great ‘Irish-reggae-calypso’ version on the Love over Gold tour. An edited version has been released on the Money for nothing compilation sampler a long time ago. However, it was not included on the Alchemy video, and there is no youtube video at all of this song from that tour. For this reason we do not know much about the guitar on […]
On July 5, 1981, Dire Straits played on the Werchter festival in Belgium. The concert was broadcasted on the radio and on TV and is one of the very few soundboard recordings from the 1980/81 On Location tour. There is one thing that always strikes me about that recording: Mark’s guitar sound was what I’d call ‘strange’, and completely different from all other recordings of the same tour we have […]
This was a nice surprise: someone posted a link to a youtube video in the A Mark in Time forum showing Mark recording The Last Post for a tribute project to soldiers who died in World War I. More information about this project here: http://www.superact.org.uk/thelastpost/ Mark plays the tune on his ‘Blue Ice metallic’ Pensa. It is the guitar we could already see in the BBC Guitar Stories video from […]
Adrian Boot is one of Britain’s best-known music photographers. You might know his name from pictures in magazines (e.g. in NME or Melody Maker) or books – e.g. from the Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield which features a lot of his pictures. While searching the web for unknown Dire Straits pictures, I recently found a website – urbanimage.tv – which has about 65 pictures of Dire Straits / Mark […]
Mark’s Privateering tour has started, and they played the first 8 concerts around south-east Europe and Italy. One song that has been played on some of these – compared to previous tours they vary the setlist a lot – is Gator Blood. I saw the picture of Mark with the white Strat – it seems to be the 1964 of Sailing to Philadelphia – some days ago and was wondering […]
Recently another diamond was dug out: an uncirculated early Dire Straits recording appeared out of nothing, from the Paradiso, Amsterdam, October 23, 1978. Unfortunately it is “only” an audience recording, nevertheless the sound quality is really nice. And it is the complete show. This gig was only a few month after the release of Dire Straits’ first album. They had played some gigs in the UK in summer 1978 (e.g. […]
******************* Update: Soon after Sky Arts aired Guitar Stories, the full video appeared on youtube: ******************* As most fans will already know, Sky Arts 1 will broadcast Guitar Stories on October 16 at 10pm (some more info on Guitar Stories’ facebook page). Presented by John Illsley, Mark talks about his most important guitars. In addition to the first trailer, a few more preview clips appeared recently which I put […]
In the evening of September 6/7, Mark Knopfler and his band played a surprise performance at the Range Rover event at the Royal Ballet School in Richmond Park, where Land Rover revealed the All-New Range Rover, the fourth generation of the world’s most capable and luxurious SUV. The audience consisted of leaders from business, film, television and sport. Many of these were long-standing Range Rover owners and enthusiasts keen to […]
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, […]