“Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits

This album review spotlights Dire Straits’ biggest record, an unprecedented smash on both sides of the Atlantic.

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There’s a tasty bit of irony in “Money for Nothing” being the standout track from Brothers in Arms, the record that, for a brief period, made Dire Straits one of the most popular rock acts in the world. It’s a scathing critique of MTV-era pop stardom, told from the point of view of a blue-collar technician who can’t believe these performers get paid what they do to do what they do. And yet, fueled by innovative special effects for its time, the music video for this decidedly anti-music video song is to thank for a large part of the group’s success. The widespread popularity of “Money For Nothing” helped the album go Platinum nine times in the US and 14 times in the UK. Based on the band’s previous good-but-not-spectacular AOR success, few could’ve predicted the LP would blow up like it did.

The benefit of hindsight makes understanding that phenomenon a bit easier. The album appeals equally to rock purists and modernists—those who continuously pine for the “good old days” and wish we’d shut up about the past and look ahead to the future. The new-age creation process saw the recording, mixing, and mastering completed digitally, and four decades later, you can hear that meticulous attention to detail in every note. From the warm lilt of the keyboard on “Walk of Life” to the country-fried guitar riff on “So Far Away” to the hopelessly romantic saxophone that opens “Your Latest Trick,” it’s the kind of sonic sumptuousness audiophiles salivate over.

There’s also an assured, stylistically centered quality to this album. Following the Springsteen-esque bombast of 1980’s Making Moves (the band worked with the Boss’ collaborator, Jimmy Iovine, on that LP) and the prog rock left turn of 1982’s Love Over Gold, Brothers in Arms is unapologetically aiming for radio readiness without sacrificing what most people would consider their distinctive sonic aura. In that vein, there’s a case to be made that Dire Straits never really had a hard-and-fast rock persona. Their self-titled debut, a record that became a hit on the back of the much-imitated “Sultans of Swing,” is more country and blues than the late-70s rock, with songs that seem to exist primarily as a showcase for Mark Knopfler’s talent for gliding up and down that fretboard with unparalleled ease and elegance.

But his songwriting grew by leaps and bounds following that initial success and, by the time it came to record Brothers in a cramped Monsterrat studio in late 1984, allowed the session players to make the most of their time together. Recording was completed early in 1985 but wasn’t without its mishaps. Terry Williams’ initial contributions on drums were dumped, and jazz player Omar Hakim stepped in to re-record everything in two days. After bassist John Illsley injured himself jogging in Central Park, emergency replacements were called in to lay down overdubs at the Power Station in New York. Even that signature guitar sound in “Money for Nothing” came about because of microphone setup errors.

Call it the byproduct of strong preparation. Call it serendipity in the face of a challenging recording process. It doesn’t really matter how Knopfler and company got there in the end. The fact remains that Brothers is easily their most broadly appealing work. Beyond the hits, the deeper cuts have a specific old-world appeal, freely borrowing from the 50s and 60s rock—music the group’s brain trust clearly romanticized because of its innocent, or, said another way, less cynical nature. The best example of this is “Why Worry,” a gorgeous piece of forlorn songwriting that sounds so much like an Everly Brothers song that the eponymous duo ended up covering it after Brothers became a hit. The closing title track is another slickly produced anachronism, an anti-war song that’s a straight-up blues song disguised as a mid-80s swayer. It’s since become an oft-used musical accompaniment at military funerals. Both tracks sound of their moment but also as if they were beamed in from another time period, sepia tones and fading facial contours intact.

As excellent as the record is, Brothers in Arms also clouded the group’s reputation because of an ill-advised slur repeated several times in “Money for Nothing.” Your mileage will vary on whether Knopfler was in the right to use homophobic language while supposedly writing in character or whether walking away relatively unscathed at the time was the correct outcome, but it’s certainly one of those faux pas that’s more or less been swept under the rug with the passage of time. It’s telling that when the 1998 compilation Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits was released, a censored version of the song was included instead of the original.

That switch proved two things: 1) the song loses none of its power without that infamous second verse, and 2) the powers that be at the label, if not the group, clearly wanted to atone for the misstep. The original version of the track, homophobia included, is the one you’ll find on streaming versions of Brothers. I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen because of that curious decision—the rest of the record is more than worth your time—but if I’m going to call out the dicey lyrical choices in genres like hip-hop, I think it’s only fair to hold Dire Straits to the same standard.