You get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the park

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

13/05/79 : Dire Straits - Dire Straits

After the disappointment of Communiqué, I feel this has to be an improvement - I've never listened to it but I very nearly bought it many times from the Our Price bargain bucket.

Yeah - there's just a bit more life to this than there was to Communiqué - I'd struggle to say most of it is massively memorable, but you do listen to it thinking "I bet these guys would be great live". And then there's "Sultans Of Swing" which is quite the song - this one is actually only 5:49 long (as opposed to 10:49 on Alchemy) but it still just sprawls with no real structure, but does so gloriously with a brilliant pairing of rhythm and lead guitar, combined with some accessible and catchy lyrics. So it stands out from the rest of the album for me (and familiarity certainly plays a part there) but the rest of it feels like it would be worth a few more listens.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on their fourteenth week of a 33 week run, with it having peaked at #5 in its ninth week - but this was actually its seventh run out of THIRTY THREE(!) in total over the years with it having spent 132 weeks in the chart in total and last being seen in '96. The top five this week were ABBA, the Leo Sayer best-of, Art Garfunkel, Supertramp and Thin Lizzy with the highest new entry being a Billie Jo Spears best-of (#15), which somehow managed 17 weeks in the chart despite her only ever having had four charting singles here.

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album other than telling us that Mark Knopfler used a couple of Fender Stratocasters, a National O Style and a Telecaster Thinline on the album - including the serial numbers, for the serious musos out there. Going down a "Sultans Of Swing" rabbit hole, I learned that it "employs the Andalusian cadence or diatonic phrygian tetrachord" - there's a surprisingly long entry on Andalusian cadence and I can assure you I learned absolutely nothing reading it. 

Back to the album, it was produced by Muff Winwood, Steve Winwood's brother who was in The Spencer Davis Group with him and it was well received commercially, with Rolling Stone making the comment "it's almost as if they were aware that their forte has nothing to do with what's currently happening in the industry, but couldn't care less" which hits home for me. And it also really hit home commercially at the time, getting to the top three in Canada, The Netherlands, Germany (where it was the best selling album of the year), New Zealand and the US, selling over three million copies globally - I had no idea it had done so well.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a copy for three quid, but if you want a white label test pressing it will set you back £380, which seems chunky money to me. I didn't love this album on first listen, but I certainly appreciated it and I'm jealous of anyone who caught them live on one of the 54 European or 51 US nights of their tour - they certainly put the effort in and I bet they were just great.

04/07/79 - Megadisco!