You probably know the discussion started by John Suhr about the originality of Mark Knopfler red Dire Straits Stratocaster (the one with the maple neck, not the 1961 Strat with the rosewood fingerboard). John Suhr worked on Mark’s guitars in the early 80ies and stated that this guitar was not an original vintage Fender but a ‘fake’, probably a Japanese copy. I always used to be a bit uncertain what […]
Today I was just sitting around and playing bits and pieces of Setting me up from the first Dire Straits album. As the camera and recording gear was still in place from the last video, I spontanously decided to film a short sequence. It is not really a performance of the song in the sense of playing the right pieces in the proper order but rather some jamming with myself […]
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 […]
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. […]
It is always a nice surprise to see “historic” pictures or recordings appear from the very early Dire Straits era. This time no pictures but a recording from the Talking Heads tour in early 1978 – to be precise , from February 5 at the Greyhound Croydon. This was the last gig of the Talking Heads tour on which Dire Straits were the support band, 5 days after the gig […]
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, […]
The late 70ies were long before the invention of the digital camera. There would be so many more pictures of all kind of events if everyone could take pictures as easily as today. As this was not the case, the majority of all pictures of rock bands from that time were taken by professional photographers who sold them to magazines or newspapers, making their pictures public this way. For this […]
Today I found a picture showing Dire Straits live in 1977, before they recorded their first album. At this time the famous red ‘Sultans’ Strat was not refinished to red yet but still had the bare wood finish in which Mark got it (probably earlier that year). There are a few pictures around that show the guitar with this finish but all of these are of rather poor quality (and […]
I recently got a reliebable information about the guitar and the amp that Mark used for the solos in the song One World of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album (studio version, 1985). I put up a quiz with five possible question for you to find out the answer, hoping this way you have some fun and can check if your ears and general knowledge are good enough to let […]