Fox Reviews Rock

This week’s guest writer is Lud Von K, however this week comes with a twist, in the form of a takedown!

——————

Brothers in Arms.

You almost have to feel sorry for the early adopters of Brothers in Arms. They thought they were buying something a bit niche, then, just as they were getting bored of it, another wave of listeners discovered it and they had to hear it all over again. Then another wave. And another. And you slowly realise that you’ve inflicted a monstrosity on the world. But “Brothers in Arms” was more than just aural brutalism: it marks the point when rock music stopped being something teenagers listened to on vinyl, and became something adults listened to on CDs and watched on TV.

Fittingly, it was released at the mid-point of the decade, a few weeks before Live Aid, which I must confess I rather enjoyed. I don’t mean just that I found it an inspiring and noble, which would be forgivable, but I actually liked the music. Yeah, I know. Like many bands, Dire Straits saw it as a chance to hawk their latest stuff, rather than the songs everyone knew and liked, so their two-piece setlist [1] started with Money For Nothing, which hadn’t yet troubled the charts and didn’t look likely to. They roped in Sting, on the misapprehension that they weren’t annoying enough already, and he sang the inexplicable (to British viewers) refrain “I want my MTV” over intermittent random instrumentation in a way that was meant to be atmospheric. Then the guitar kicked in. You know what I’m taking about. You could argue that was the moment when ’80s pop music went from weird and wonderful to straight and dire.

Up until then, Dire Straits had been a semi-commercial band, beloved by the sort of people that talked about things like reverb and fingerstyle, with a mumbling lead singer who didn’t trouble himself too much with tunefulness or articulacy. Before Brothers in Arms, one of their best known songs was “Telegraph Road,” a meandering 12 minuter about the dawn of civilisation or something. But they’d had enough of that now, it was time to rock out – or perhaps I should say AOR out.

A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
He made a home in the wilderness

The first single was “So Far Away.” Unlike its successors, I can say three things in its favour: no-one played it, no-one liked it and no-one bought it. It’s not a mystery to me why it flopped – the phrase “so far away from me” makes up two lines of the four-line verse and three of the four-line chorus. The tune is even less varied and interesting, with long runs on a single note before a step down at the end of each phrase. Still, it was hardly the only dull record of the era, and it wasn’t all that high profile. When the album launched, in May 1985, it barely scratched my consciousness. That would all change after Live Aid.

So far away from me.
So far you just can’t see.
So far away from me.
You’re so far away from me.

I don’t usually hate on music. Why bother, when you can just switch off? But with “Brothers in Arms” there was no escape. It was bad enough that they got 24-hour airplay on the radio –  such a big part of my life and that of every other lonely teenager in those days. But then the sales grew and the appeal broadened, and you started to hear it in the shops, walking past a building site, on a coach journey, you’d even see it advertised on TV. And it wasn’t just the usual middle-of-the-road types buying it. Brothers in Arms was never entirely shunned by the indie kids or the metal heads – in fact, they were often early buyers, fooled perhaps by Dire Straits’s muso history. Then the older generation discovered it and now my relatives, parents’ friends, teachers would all have a copy. You’d hear Mark Knopfler’s croaky warble in every public place where they wanted some music that everyone liked and no-one objected to.

Well, I objected. Especially Money for Nothing. A grating guitar riff, repeated almost practically note-for-note in the verse and then again in the chorus.  Nonsensical lyrics in a put-on whiny voice. And why were they trying to sound American? No-one in Britain had watched MTV or cared about it. That was the worst thing about the whole album:  the fake Americanisation, exemplified in that ubiquitous steel guitar on the cover, and then the kids and chicks and mean old towns of the lyrics. Everything quirky and messy and British was getting supplanted  by glossy and soulless Americana. Looking back, replacing fish and chips, tea and Doctor Who with McDonalds, filter coffee and Star Trek wasn’t really such a tragedy. But losing heavy metal to AOR was.

Here comes Johnny and he’ll tell you the story
Hand me down my walkin’ shoes
Here comes Johnny with the power and the glory
Backbeat the talkin’ blues

“Walk of Life” managed to be even more annoying than “Money For Nothing.” Keyboard riffs are always worse than guitar riffs, Knopfler’s accent had got worse, and the lyrics even more trite and inauthentic. And then there was that video: the dancing, the special effects, the American football. “Money for Nothing’s” video, with its block graphics, was ugly and brainless, but “Walk of Life” was slick and vacuous. We’d had six months of wall-to-wall Dire Straits by then but it still wasn’t enough for some.

In between those two horrors, there was the title track. At least it had some real words, even if it was the usual Disney anti-war schtick muttered _sotto voce_ as if deadened by trauma, or perhaps boredom. Still,  boring and tuneless is a big step up from invasive and brain-frying and by that stage I was grateful for small mercies.

But it’s written in the starlight
And every line in your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

By now the album had become endemic, to the extent that I was sick of an album I’d never owned. But they wanted to twist the knife a little further, so released one more single. “Your Latest Trick” had a saxophone riff – the band liked to vary their instruments of torture – but was the same one and a half note melody, the same mumble, the same American-ese (“garbage truck”, “bowery bum”) the same terrible rhyming “last call/alcohol”).

You played robbery with insolence
And I played the blues in twelve bars down Lover’s Lane
And you never did have the intelligence to use
The twelve keys hanging off from my chain

Your Latest Trick managed to be as dull as “So Far Away” and as irritating as Money For Nothing. It didn’t get much airplay, but it kept the show rolling a bit longer. By now, five out of nine songs had been released as singles. I won’t say as much about the other four tracks – three more rambling yarns from Dullsville, Arizona, plus “Why Worry?” a lullaby that Debbie Gibson, would have rejected as too insipid.

Baby, I see this world has made you sad
Some people can be bad
The things they do, the things they say
But baby, I’ll wipe away those bitter tears
I’ll chase away those restless fears
That turn your blue skies into gray
Why worry
There should be laughter after pain
There should be sunshine after rain
These things have always been the same
So why worry now

The band disappeared from the airwaves at last, but it was still a while before you stopped hearing it in public, and much longer before it left your head. It’s still one of the best-selling albums ever by a British artist, 40 million around the world, of which 4.5m were from the UK which is something like one for every ten adults.

“The last tour was utter misery. Whatever the zeitgeist was that we had been part of, it had passed.” (Manager Ed Bicknell)

And then they were gone. Mark Knopfler, the creative force beind the band, was only 35 at the time of release, and Brothers In Arms only their fifth album, but its success was too much for them. They eventually did a follow-up in 1991, “On Every Street”, but I couldn’t have named it from memory. The sales figures were good, but by now their fans kept a low profile, as did Knopfler, throughout a successful second career in solo work, production and film scores. As you can imagine, I never sought his music out. Unlike Brothers in Arms, it never sought me.

These days, Knopfler’s theme to “Local Hero” is probably better known than “Brothers in Arms” to anyone under 40. There’s been no extended afterlife, in stark contrast to Rumours, say, or Dark Side of the Moon. Even Phil Collins had a revival, but in a world where ’80s nostalgia is bigger than religion, people are more likely to want to rekindle memories of Europe or Simple Minds than celebrate the best-selling album of the era. Perhaps it reflects the fact that the band avoided the bitter disputes, legal wrangles, alcoholism and drug abuse of so many others, and so didn’t need to exploit their legacy.

Still, for two years there, they were everywhere. More universal appeal than Madonna and Michael Jackson, more credibility than Queen or U2. They had one of the shortest sets of anyone at Live Aid, but a year later, they’d have headlined, as they did for the Nelson Mandela tribute concert in 1988. It was an incredible success story. And he did it all without raising his voice.

———————-

If you’d like to read more from Lud Von D, you can check out their website here 👉 https://themanworthwhile.wordpress.com/

Fancy writing for our site? Drop me an email at rex.foxreviewsrock@gmail.com and before a guest writer!

🖤☠️