I struggle to imagine the most popular rock group on the planet which in 2025 takes a hit and pulls it for 20 minutes. Dires Straits did it in 1985 expanding Tunnel of Love With a dramatic introduction, atmosphere sections, recapitulation of melodic themes, solos, the presentation of musicians, quotes from other compositions, but above all there and elsewhere an idea of narrative music, of instruments that tell things. And yes, they were the most popular group on the planet.
The digital turning point album Brothers in Armsdivided between consumer rock and American musical sophistications, he was at the top of the rankings. Has sold over 30 million copies in the world, more or less how much Born in the USA And The walldespite not having the same status. The 1985-86 tour lasted one year and day, 248 sold out concerts in front of over two and a half million people in the buildings and stages of 23 countries. Not in Italy, from which the band has kept away by having lived inaenarrable experiences.
Of one of the great tours at the time, probably the largest of that two -year period in terms of duration and number of concerts, the last show at the Entertainment Center in Sydney and one at the Wembley Arena in London were filmed for the TV. The audio of Cleveland, San Antonio and Houston were also professionally recorded, but beyond the bootlegs, nothing was officially published. Until today.
Yet another re -edition of Brothers in Armsthis time for the forty -year, contains San Antonio Live in 85full registration carried out for the radio program King Biscuit Flower Hour Of the concert of August 16, 1985 in the Texan city, already available on Wolfgang's Vault (I already hear the reports of superfans and collectors: give us the sessions in the studio, keep the live we know). It was preferred to the twin performance of the next day in Houston because of the best surrender of the room microphones. In other words, the audience feels better, so says Guy Fletcher, the keyboardist of the band who mixed him. There are superlative moments and others less, you would like more energy and more badness, but it is still a large group and a great concert.
In the autobiography the bassist John Illsley compares the band and the staff of 80 elements that traveled the world to a small army and recalls the tour as “inexorable and exhausting”. A confrontation with a recent metatour: the Dire Straits made 100 concerts more than those made by Taylor Swift in the Eras Tour, but they played in front of a quarter of people go and see the pop star. More concerts in smaller places, more effort. After another mastodontic tour, that of On Every StreetMark Knopfler decided that he had enough of that circus, his definition.
In the United States, the distances were such that there were two crews that traveled simultaneously. The band arrived at the concert site in the middle of the afternoon. He was soundcheck using the monitors, not the earphones because “we wanted to hear well, to spot the right levels for a large arena”. It was one of those tours in which each day is repeated almost identical, sometimes even on stage given the few changes in the sets. “It was like in the film I start again from Capo»Remember the bass player. And no divisims. The end of concert ritual included a complete team meeting in the space prepared for dinner. “There was no hierarchy, nor a place on the leader; Everyone simply grabbed a plate and a chair. I liked this ritual, its camaraderie, the solidarity that was born from being part of the same team and working together for the same cause ».
From a musical point of view, the Dire Straits were no longer those of three years earlier, let alone those of the beginning. Live have always had the tendency to expand the pieces. If already on the tour of Love over gold Mark Knopfler had extended training and instrumental parts (Tunnel of Love It lasted “only” a quarter of an hour), now on stage there were seven musicians determined to transform songs with 45 laps into long as long as half a facade of a 33. They never been incendiary, but the panache of the early years had slightly dormant, even if when they run they are still fabulous. Often, however, they took it comfortable, as if the soundtracks that Knopfler wrote for the cinema had entered the group's music, changing it. Almost all executions are enriched by new guitar and sax or flute solos, blow-and-off, blooms, parts that resemble improvisations even if they are not, fantasy exercises that cannot be contained in the standard duration of a song.
Certainly, the introductions and interludes of the atmosphere liked to say Straits. Litted today they have something kitsch, as well as certain battery sounds and keyboards of this tour are dated. But beyond this, San Antonio Live in 85 First of all, he tells us that in the 1980s he went to a concert by Dire Straits also to hear music that had never heard before, not to listen to the hits exactly as they were on a record. We did not go only to celebrate what the artist had done until then, but also to understand what he would do again that evening, where he would take the song and where he would conduct him, and then bring it home in the final. Obviously this happened because there were musicians able to do it. It was music that spoke.
The beauty is that the Dire Straits in 1985-86 were not experimenters, but champions of commercial rock, they had just released the easiest album in their history, they were accused of selling themselves. They were the Alfieri of the digitization of music and testimonial of the Compact Disc, the support that in a couple of years would have overcome the vinyl in terms of sales, opening a gold season for discography. First album in history to sell a million copies in that format, Brothers in Arms It represents a fracture in the history of the group, there are a before and after. Yet for those who have never first heard complete and decent records of that tour, the live in San Antonio reduces the distance between the first Straits and those of the two final albums. At times it is as if the songs of Brothers in Arms They were brought to the repertoire of the old Dire Straits and not vice versa.
At the height of success, Dire Straits were a group of talented musicians, but fatally devoid of charm, not only detached from musical trends, but also insensitive to the idea of rock as a social representation, less than as a counterculture. It is music for the music and that of the Dire Straits is rock without aura and demytized. It is rock as a job, for better or for worse. It is a bourgeois art, stadium musical craftsmanship, super professionalism.
“We proved at the height of expectations for a long time, always continuing to improve, instead of abandoning ourselves to a slow decline and eventually collapse, above all because we took care of us”, writes Illsley about the tour and the band's ability to remain standing despite that monstrous routine. «We have never sank the face in a bunch of coca, we never faded a bar, never launched a TV from the window, we never finished with the car inside a swimming pool and we never scarred a harem of escorts in our hotel rooms. Maybe it won't be very rock'n'roll, but at least we have been able to continue playing. “
Becoming huge and increasingly refining their songs, the Dire Straits had gained something and something had lost. Towards the end of the live album arrives Wild West End And it's a small surprise. It is not a hit and it is strange to find it slipped between two classics like Money for Nothing And Tunnel of Love. It is the almost enchanted story of a walk in Knopfler in the London West End, a list of family places and situations to the Dire Straits at the time of the beginning, the photograph of a corner of the lost and vaguely decadent world. In 1978 it was a sound postcard of four and a half minutes, in San Antonio Knopfler he did not resist the temptation to expand it until he lasts nine minutes with an introductory solo of sax, parts of the text interpreted slightly draggedly, the musicians' cores in a section in which time seems suspended.
Also in this extralarge version, a small song remains, a memory of a time when the Dire Straits were not becoming a circus, but they were still a band of after -school. There are the shop where Knopfler buys the guitar pick-up, the cafeteria, the Go-go dancersthe gambling, the approaches on the street, the driver of the 19 who has the pink enamel on the nails of the feet and the fingers blackened by the banknotes, there is the desiring male gaze. And before the great, transcendent solo addicted in the live version there are words that were not in the original. Things, Knopfler says, are no longer those of the past. This Wild West End It is sweet and bitter at the same time, it is the singing of all that the band had lost in 1985.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
