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Dire Straits "Love Over Gold" (1982)
Track Listing: Telegraph Road UK and US
We've
given the 1980s a hard times across this site despite it being the times and
sounds I grew up with. By and large, it's generally agreed, the 'decade that
taste forgot' was a mistake, with an artificial synthesiser-made soundtrack that
reflected a strangely desanitised and self-orientated period. Along with big
hair, shoulder pads and ugly sounding synthesisers, the Dire Straits are very
1980s - with the best selling act of the decade after Prince and Madonna in
many ways even more perfect for the times. Big, expansive landscapes, deep
subjects rattled off between boogie woogie rock chords, fancy well-produced
packaging and long long loooooong guitar solos; by rights the Dire Straits
should be just as much a product of their times as Spandau Ballet and Duran
Duran. But at their best - as on 'Love Over Gold', ironically their most 1980s
sounding album - their music is timeless: themes based around universal
concerns, catchy rock templates immaculately played and a mix of accessibility
and a sound all of their own making for a wholly pleasant listening experience
in any era. Most 1980s material now sounds like bad variations on Agadoo (with
exceptions of course – check the other 80s albums on this list, naturally, as
your starting point of reference) in both their charm-lessness and their
pointlessness, but Dire Straits were in truth more like a 60s band wearing
contemporary clothing, with a fun mix of the old prog rock sound and the energy
of new wave bands, with extended running times because they were a band with
plenty to say, not just an excuse to get the linn drum effects going or fill a
song with boring synthesisers.
On
paper 'Love Over Gold' should be the weakest Dire Straits album: just five
songs, with one of them an extended epic lasting twice the length of anything
else they made, with the other tracks being made up of three ballads (the
shortest of which runs a mind-boggling 6:16) and a novelty rock song about an
illness. But from the first time I heard it I fell in love with this quirky
album, which manages to unite some very 60s truths ('Love Over Gold' is 'All
You Need Is Love' merged with 'Can't Buy Me Love'),some very clever songwriting
('Telegraph Road' is Knopfler at his most philosophical and lasts 14 minutes
because it has to: a song that should have been a TV series shot in moody black
and white, not released on one side of a colourful 1980s record) and some
breath-takingly brilliant musicianship (with so many songs played live, or as
near as, this is more of a 'band' album than the other five and Knopfler's
guitar never had so much space to roar or growl like this again). Like the best
Dire Straits albums but more so, 'Love Over Gold' overcomes it's shabby
surroundings by offering up some tight near-telepathic ensemble playing, some inventive
arrangements that accurately reproduce everything from a doctor's waiting room
to an FBI agent's hut and the dead-end buzz of a closed-in community. Despite
this album’s relatively long length of 41 mins in the pre-CD age (a format the
band are about to lay down world records with in just one album releases’
time), there are only five tracks on this album – the fewest on any Dire
Straits release and incidentally the fewest of any album on this list – a fact
that has put off many would-be fans who want value for their hard-earned money.
However, each of these songs carries quite a range of styles, tempos and ideas
and Love Over Gold packs quite a punch in the way it neatly balances
primitive rock and roll bravado with epic soundscapes and complex lyrical
ideas. In truth 'Love Over Gold' still sounds a little too 1980s for my taste in
places, with a surface sheen that's even more polished and of-it's-time than
more famous younger cousin 'Brothers In Arms'. However out of the band's scant
studio records it's this one I return to again and again: a charming, poetic,
multi-layered discussion of what it meant to be alive in 1983 and with Knopfler
growing into his new role as spokesman for a generation before the pressure of
living up to that became too much for him.
While
other Dire Straits albums all have special moments (yep, even 'Communique'!),
'Love Over Gold' also has consistency on its side: every song here (well,
there's only five!) is special and most importantly takes you to places the band
have never taken you before. Mark Knopfler's latest songs that make such a
virtue out of their slow, unfolding epic ideas that far from getting bored you
want the tracks to go on for another 10 minutes each. For example, 14 minute
epic 'Telegraph Road' is the most powerful song they ever made, with Knopfler
finally getting the space to say everything he needs to say and wrapping it all
up with a fabulous guitar solo that doesn't last an iota too long despite going
for some five minutes (!) 'Private Investigations' is the bravest of all the
band's single releases, replacing look-at-me sound effects for moody atmosphere
and wordy syntax. 'Love Over Gold' features one of the greatest Knopfler lyrics
of them all, with a whole lyric that's quotable and notable. 'It Never Rain's
features a terrific riff and a recording that cleverly segues from laidback
shoulder-shrug to desperate life struggle in the blink of an eye. Even novelty
'Industrial Disease', long dismissed as a comedy song that doesn't quite work,
has a clever point to make, with a fast-stepping lyric that would have been
celebrated as a pin-point accurate reflection of modern society had it been
made recorded years later by some big name rapper.
Love
Over Gold was released at the exact halfway point
between the band’s club-pleasing early albums like Communique and Making
Movies and the stadium-pleasing anthems of Brothers In Arms and
beyond. Although this record was popular at the time and even today still
stands as the band’s third biggest seller, compared to its more famous
close-cousins Brothers In Arms and Making Movies this album often
gets short shrift from collectors who just want to dip a toe in the river
straits rather than immerse themselves completely. But all these years on from
its release, this album really does win out over its more successful partners
just as – according to the theme running throughout this album – love really
does win out over gold. This album might not have had the hit singles (well, it
had one, but Private Investigations must be one of the strangest singles
to ever make the top three in the charts, classic album track that it is), the
easy on the ear rockabilly that makes up the band’s first three albums or the
catch-all hummable mini-epics that come near the end of the band’s run, but Love
Over Gold has a longevity and shine that other Dire Straits albums are
beginning to lose slightly the further we get from the 1980s. Somehow mixing
the heavier rock style of the early years and the more prog rock excesses of
the later ones, 'Love Over Gold' is like the Goldilocks Porridge of the Dire
Straits catalogue: while 'Dire Straits' 'Makin' Movies' and especially
'Communique' were a little lightweight and content to rock out for long
passages without much to say, 'Brothers In Arms' and 'On Every Street' are
sometimes a little too po-faced, worn down with the weight of things to say.
'Love Over Gold' gets the mix about right (for me at least), with five
excellent performances of five excellent songs that feature some great driving band
performances (especially the first and last) and some thought-provoking
material. There’s also more unity among the tracks on this album than most of
Dire Straits’ output as all of these songs at least touch on our modern way of
living (well, semi-modern way of living as it is now, but socially and
politically our generation are still feeling the ripples from this decade in a
way that we don’t from the 70s or even the 90s now that Blair is out of
office). Even though this record is
filled with contemporary sounds from the 1980s (synthesisers, guitars with a
particular vibrato which sadly you never really hear again after this period
and big booming drum effects), Knopfler’s lyrics make it clear that the writer
yearns for a more traditional way of life, a million miles away from the
Thatcherist/yuppie money-making themes of the time.
There
are many late 80s/ early 90s albums that look back at this decade and scratch
their heads over why the gap between the ’haves’ and ’have nots’ of the world
has got bigger almost overnight, but arguably Knopfler got there first, crying
out for a solution from the very epicentre of the epidemic before most people
had even noticed there was one. This is a brave move for the band who, as we’ve
pointed out already, just were the 1980s for many people, when ‘big’ was the
vogue of the day and the huge-sounding epic-loving million-selling Dire Straits
fitted that image perfectly. And yet for me Love Over Gold is their best
effort because, even though there are more epics on this record than usual,
this is the record that more than the others considers the ’ordinary people’
and the problems in their lives and studies details as well as the bigger
picture. In many ways Love Over Gold is the band’s most emotional LP,
made up of Knopfler’s fieriest songs and fieriest playing and the many
characters in the songs on this album are nearly always struggling with life in
some way (which is unusual given the generally upbeat tone of most DS records).
Love Over Gold is quite an angry album too, with Knopfler starting to
take his new role as spokesman for a generation seriously, speaking out against
society’s wrongs rather than shrugging things off with a 1950s pastiche or a
dry humour ballad as he would do later in his solo work. Witness the depiction
of a town devolving into a mess before our very ears in Telegraph Road
with its residents powerless to stop it, the bewildered confusion of Private
Investigations, the sarcasm of Industrial Disease and the
fighting-back-from-rock-bottom It Never Rains.
All
of the songs on this record to some extent carry some sort of theme about how
modern life has devolved, not evolved. The romantic utopian hopes of our
pioneering ancestors who left the countryside for the towns in hope of a better
life in Telegraph Road have now been
hemmed in, with modern man stuck physically in traffic jams and
spirituality in a bunch of trappings that actually makes his life much more
complicated and stress-filled, not easier or more comfortable as intended. Telegraph
Road is the most obvious song on this theme, with a lyric about how well
order and structure can sometimes restrict us, the men who were once
free-but-poor now trapped-and-struggling, now envious of their ancestors who
founded the town on a humble dirt track and longing to join 'the birds on the
high-wires who can always fly away'. It's notable that this town is named after
a 'road', suggesting travel and movement and energy, but somewhere along the
way the intention got lost and everyone feels trapped, literally unable to move
('Six lanes of traffic, three lanes moving slow'). However this song is hardly
the only one to carry such a theme. Private Investigations might be an
atmospheric spy drama, but at its heart it’s a ‘what’s-the-point-of-it-all’
song about modern relationships that yearns for olden days when couples took
their relationship at face value (because, socially speaking, there was no real
viable alternative) instead of hiring spies to do their listening and reporting
for them (to think this song was written a good 15 years before mobile phones
and the internet!) Industrial Disease, meanwhile, cheerily attacks the whole modern
work dynamic – cheekily pointing out that relentless modern life and the
continual demand for product and consumerism doesn’t mix well with often
fragile human beings who live their lives through peaks and troughs, not
relentless 9-5 shifts. The great unspoken irony of the song is that the more
industrialised we become the less workers we will need (job opportunities were,
after all, the whole reason that the town in Telegraph Road grew from
its small beginnings in the first place) and the bosses can afford for their
employees to get sick because they're so easily replaced. Love Over Gold is
a more individual take on one of these individuals, flouting the system of the
modern industrial world for her own ends which are never quite explained in a song
that has a lovely time dancing with us without ever quite committing to what it
really means. There's a sense, though, that the character going their own way
is going to come a cropper - that there are too many bad people out there in
modern life waiting to take advantage (to go back to our anti-1980s rant,
anyone who thought in 1983 that life was about 'love over gold' was a prime
victim for a new breed of catchy advertisements, pushy salesmen, arrogant
bankers and Margaret Thatcher's society-breaking reforms: this is a universe
where money rules, not people or their feelings). It Never Rains then
closes the album on a supportive gesture from Knopfler to a friend, one of the
unluckier victims of the modern world who remains ‘a shadow in the wheel of
fortune’, working out where the promise of modern life went wrong and where he
got left out of the opportunities so many other seem to be experiencing. While
much of the song is a 'well, what can you do?' sigh that's frustrated rather
than desperate, the closing angsty attack from about the 2:30 mark is anything
but and Knopfler has never sounded madder or more outraged by the world he sees
around him ('We could have been major contenders - but we never got the money,
no breaks...we got a list of all their major mistakes'). This is a world where
it never rains, it pours and suffering is magnified by people who could do so
much to help with what to them is comparatively little.
I'd
love to know where this altruistic streak suddenly came from in Knopfler's
writing. Mark, of course, trained as a journalist and would have been a good
one too: he has an eye for observation and the ability to listen. However until
now his two careers (and his third of teaching; some of this album borders on a
lecture) have been seperate: I challenge anyone to point out any other Dire
Straits lyric that contains a similar, deeply 1960s sense of the community
spirit or spent so long sticking up on behalf of the under-dog (it is there,
sporadically, on Mark's solo albums but usually in a folky Dylanesque form of
protest, not shouted from the roof-tops as here). While Mark had always had a
strong eye for detail and people's characters (love story 'Romeo and Juliet', a
song tried by so many writers and which sounds clunky in almost everyone's
hands, Shakespeare's included, is line-perfect), something seems to have
changed the way he views his songwriting in 1983. Was it the cold war? 1983 was
another difficult year, with politics infiltrating houses who traditionally
never talked about it, along the lines of 'blooming Russian commies - let's
nuke them' and '*sigh* didn't we solve this lot of problems already in the
1960s?' Back at home Thatcher had just been re-elected to a second term and now
was in a stronger position than ever to wreak the damage that destroyed much of
Britain - especially the North and Knopfler's home town of Newcastle (a city
founded on mines and dockyards; just a few months after this album's release
fellow Geordie Alan Hull of Lindisfarne was writing the inflammatory 'Cruising
To Disaster' and 'Stormy Weather', which point to something local). The way
that Knopfler sings matter of factly 'Then came the miners, then came the poor,
then there were some hard times - then there was a war' also points to his fear
that both factors might collide: that his home-town of 1983 (and all Telegraph
Roads everywhere) were ticking time-bombs about to go off the minute a fuse was
lit. No wonder this album is so full of intrigue, of whispered voices, FBI
agents and mysterious ladies who flit in and out of life: the world isn't safe
anymore and Knopfler is anxious about what will happen next. The curious thing,
then, isn't that Knopfler should start writing here so much as why he didn't do
more of this later on: 'Brothers In Arms' has an anti-war protest as its title
track (although ironically enough many army troops regard it as a 'special'
song) but that's a bit vague and general; never again under the Dire Straits
banner does he record so much as a grumble. Reagan and Thatcher both continued
wreaking havoc until 1989 and in many ways there was a bigger audience for this
sort of album than ever. Was Knopfler scared off? Did he feel ever more
isolated after the millionaire success of the record, unable to keep in contact
with 'real' people? Or did he just regard this album as a little off-putting
for fans (if so he's wrong - this was the best selling record so far and if
anything put people off it was only getting five songs on the entire record!)
However Knopfler is not the only member of Dire
Straits with a starring role. With so many lengthy, weighty songs, Love Over
Gold needs a strong series of performances to tie
everything together and Dire Straits are never more of a 'band' than here. Alan
Clark (no, not the Hollies singer – or the politician for that matter, although
he is the same man that toured with Lindisfarne in the 80sand wrote the theme
tune for the 'Most Haunted' TV series!) has plenty to do on keyboards and does
it well, almost rivalling Knopfler’s signature guitar sound for the moments you
remember from this record. The rest of the band are on good form too, with Pick
Withers and John Illsey staking out their claim to being the band’s best and
most inventive rhythm section out of Dire Straits’ many musical-chairs line-up
changes. 'Private Investigations' for instance, features a highly memorable
bass-drum interplay that sounds simple until you try to tap along: Thud... ...
Thud... ... ... Thud...BAH-DUNN DUNN DUNN!' This is one of those songs, mumbled
and short on action, that needs to be note-perfect when the song finally comes
to life and Knopfler is well served by his colleagues here. Short-term
guitarist Hal Lindes also proves himself to be an under-rated talent,
especially his guitar-weaving with Knopfler on the fade-outs of Telegraph
Road and It Never Rains.
So
what have you got to take away? No, not a bottle of whiskey, blinds on the
winder and a pain behind the eyes: a hard-hitting Dire Straits album that at
least has the material and ideas to consistently match the superb musicianship.
Certainly it has much to offer the listener, from its fine melodies to its
wittily observant lyrics and its note-perfect performances make it sound better
every time you hear it. I can see why the follow-up 'Brothers In Arms' charmed
more people: there's lots of hummable hit singles, a spooky thought-provoking
title track and a production shine and shimmer that's both brighter than this
album and less stuck in a time-warp all at the same time. But while that album
is both a mainstream and a fan favourite, it's 'Lover Over Gold' that's the
greatest from both a songwriting and a musicianship point of view, with the
band taking the best of what they've learnt from albums one to three and trying
to go somewhere a little deeper and more different on this album. It may well
have the weirdest, strangest, most poetic lyrics of any album to ever sell so
many millions of copies (Dire Straits, though forgotten now to some extent,
really were scarily big and still fit comfortably in a list of the top 20
selling British acts of all time: no mean feat for a band who made just six
records) or to have been dressed up in so much 1980s finery. All Dire Straits
have something going for them, with several tracks and some classic musical
hooks to recommend (well, ok, it might take you a while to find the hidden gems
in Communique, but they’re there all the same) and other albums have
individual tracks that may in some cases be better than those included here.
But Love To Gold might well be the band’s most consistent work of all
and arguably is the most important: nowhere else does Knopfler reveal quite so
much about himself or his writing and sadly never again does he quite take the
world to pieces and re-assemble it again. That means that Dire Straits are for
the first and last times able to reflect the world they lived in beyond merely
the style trappings of the era and 'Love Over Gold' tells you more about the
frustration, resentment and resilience of 1983 than, say, 'On Every Street'
reflects the world from a decade later. However, unlike big hair and shoulder
pads, 25 years on its fair to say that the Dire Straits really are timeless and
'Love Over Gold' - forthright, political, poetical and bursting with songs,
ideas and solos - is one of their bigger aural treats. So great is this album
that I could even fall in love with all the 1980s trappings all over again,
provided there was another album from this era quite this god or with quite so
much to say.
The
Songs:
From the opening of the
very first song, [28] Telegraph
Road, it becomes clear that Love Over Gold will be a bit of
an epic, despite what I’ve just written about focussing on the smaller detail.
It takes a full 2:15 minutes before Knopfler starts singing and it even takes a
full 30 seconds before the song is loud enough to hear anything at all, even at
full volume. This is still a great opening though, setting the tone for the
long, long, long journey towards civilisation for the Telegraph Road (which despite
starting off as a ‘road’ rather confusingly doubles as the name of the town).
With one of his better vocals holding the track together, Knopfler grows in
stature along with the town, turning up the volume from verse to verse as the
Telegraph Road grows from a single hut on a track to a the modern day
grid-locked city with its traffic jams, cold weather, unemployment, debt and
closed-down shops. Knopfler, casting his eyes over the town’s evolution,
starts off as a detached narrator imagining the hopes and efforts of his
forefathers before singing in the first-person in the song’s last two verses
and revealing that actually he’s a struggling resident of the town too
(Amazingly the song has only four verses and no chorus, despite its 14 minute
length!) Really, of course, Knopfler is
being an early cagey critic of how the UK was being run back in the 1980s,
suggesting that modern society is growing totally against the values of the
original ‘seed that’s been sown’, a theme common to many late Thatcherite-Britain
era records. But back in 1983 the social protest movement was lying long
dormant so, rather than attack what was happening in the day and age, Knopfler
reaches back for another target, reminding us of our heritage and what we might
be throwing away in the modern era. The picture of Telegraph Road is
universal enough to stand for any modern town – the long, long build up of the
song reminding us of our history and traditions and how these are being calmly
thrown away. The history of civilisation still isn’t enough of a theme for
Knopfler, however, who adds in the splintering of the narrator’s marriage to
the tale for added human drama and hints that it’s decline is in tandem with
the loss of promise in the town as a whole, as if we’ve reached the limit of
our horizons and have nowhere to go from here except downhill. The song’s key
imagery, though, and most memorable line, come from the idea that mankind isn’t
really evolving and striding forward at all: homo sapiens, confined both
physically by traffic jams and mentally by society rules, is envious of the
simple birds who sit on the telegraph wires and “can always fly away from this
rain and this cold”, without the baggage of work and family that often tie
humans up to the same place year after year. Freedom is a key theme of many
Dire Straits songs, from the happy tale of the lovers of Romeo and Juliet who
meet against their family’s wishes to the angry controlling narrator of Where
Do You Think You’re Going?, but most Dire Straits characters usually find a
way out of their fix by the song’s end, usually by disobeying what they’ve
learnt or been told by society and following their ‘heart’. By contrast, Telegraph
Road ushers in a period of Knopfler’s songwriting where nearly all of his
characters meet unhappy, downbeat ends, simply because the society they’re
rallying against is so rigid and unmovable (just think of the forthcoming The
Man’s Too Strong from Brothers In Arms where the social protestor in
the lyrics actually apologies to us in song that he’s not strong or powerful
enough to tackle the wrongs he sees in the world around him).
The song builds to a
terrific outburst as Telegraph Road approaches the 10-minute mark, with
Knopfler letting fly with a catalogue of all the problems he wants to run away
and save his missus from. Like Simon and Garfunkel’s My Little Town (see
Breakaway, no 68 on the list) the epic nature of the arrangement only
serves to underline what a lot of imagination and drama are going on in the
mind’s of the inhabitants of this rather bleak, mundane little place and the
narrator’s frustration at being trapped in a monochrome-coloured hovel he
cannot escape from. Another key line here is ‘the anger that lives on the
streets with these names’ – social riots in Britain had (temporally) been
curbed by this point in time, but this song still resonates with many of the
songs from the early part of the decade, such as the Clash and the Jam’s two
minute bursts of weary social unrest. Neither of those groups would have known
what to do with a song this long or would ever have dreamed of writing a piece
like this which covers the whole history of a town in one go, but compare
Knopfler’s stormiest guitar playing and the sudden hurry-up the song gets
towards the end with any Jam song and there’s more than a hint of the same
energy and protest going on there. Strong as this track is when you read the
lyrics alone or enjoy the twinkling melody (one that seems to represent the
electric street lighting flickering on and off down the road), Telegraph
Road is turned into a much stronger beast than it ever deserves to be
thanks to Dire Straits’ consummate performance. The track is held together by
Alan Clark’s tinkling and ever-restless piano, plus steady long bursts of organ
which give the dual effect of the characters throwing everything at a static,
unmoving world and the consistency of what is being passed down from the
founding generations of the town to the latest inhabitants. Knopfler turns in
some of his greatest guitar-work here too, especially around the four-minute
mark, channelling the anger that’s beginning to appear in the song’s last two
verses into his most ferocious playing on record, with a guitar phrase that
keeps circling higher and higher trying to find a way of escape before
cold reality seeps in to bring him sharply down to earth again. The band pull
off a tremendous achievement here – possibly the greatest ‘group’ performance
of all their many line-ups over the 80s – making a 14 minute track with little
variety in terms of theme, key or tempo leave the listener crying out for more.
With the band on particularly sterling form towards Telegraph’ Road’s
close and Knopfler using his guitar-work to underline the strength of emotion
in the song, this track fully deserves its four-minute instrumental playout.
The town might be falling down, but Dire Straits have never sounded more like a
tower of strength than on this superlative recording.
The best known track on
the album is probably [29] Private Investigations: a dense, echoing world where muffled
sound effects go on just out of the listener’s reach and it sounds as if
there’s something lurking in the shadows to grab you by the ear, this is one of
Britain’s most atmospheric bands’ most atmospheric songs. The stifling
atmosphere is well suited to its subject matter too, mimicking the mysterious
and rather dodgy dealings going on in the world of an undercover spy. Like many
a Dire Straits song, though, this song promises musically to be glamorous and
James Bond-esque – but lyrically, its narrator is another fish out of water, an
uncomfortable spy who silently despairs over the amount of treachery going on
in everyday human life simply because people won’t talk to or put faith in one
another. More to the point, the spy thinks he should be solving mysteries—and
yet the more he uncovers about what people do, the more he starts to question
and scratch his head over the conflicting motives of human beings (‘When I find
the reason, I still can’t get used to it’). Using his best ‘LA Cop’ voice,
Knopfler again turns a good song into a great one courtesy of his fine
performance which starts off sounding husky and business-like and soon ends up
sounding confused and awestruck. He also turns in some impressive flamenco
style acoustic guitar playing – alternating it with his electric attack in the
second half - and pulls off an arranging masterstroke after the first verse
when the song neatly stops and begins all over again from the beginning, just
when the spy is going back over and over his old reports, just willing there to
be some clue to life he might have missed. After this calculated start
everything goes haywire after the third verse, however, with some carefully
controlled tension courtesy of a heartbeat-like bass, the most unnerving
xylophone riff in rock and sudden bursts of adrenalin that seem to come out of
nowhere at key parts in the song. The lyrics, although again there are
comparatively few of them, are fascinating – full of words like ‘compensation’
‘investigation’ and ‘commences’ that most songwriters wouldn’t dream of using
even if they read the dictionary religiously every night (somehow Knopfler’s
the kind of songwriter you can picture doing just that!) It’s also unclear what
investigation the narrator is working on – although the way he sighs on the
word ‘private’ suggests that it is a personal affair, possibly one involving
some scandal with his own partner given how much emotional involvement he seems
to have in the case. This reading would especially fit the third verse, where
the narrator muses about ‘what have you got to take away?’ – wondering if he
might be better off putting up with any discretion than uncovering the
embarrassing and uncomfortable truth he doesn’t actually want to find, despite
his many hours searching for clues. The song’s long running length (almost 7
minutes) and pioneering structure – two verses that are instrumentally the
same, a third that’s the same length but otherwise completely different, no
choruses at all and a long instrumental coda – makes it one of the strangest
singles ever to be released and to the best of my knowledge no one has ever
made a single anything remotely like Private Investigations again, even
25 years on. As far as this album goes, this analysis of the human psyche is
the backbone of the record, shedding light on much of the songs surrounding it,
even while the narrator of the song is still in the dark. The Dire Straits at
their pioneering best.
Onto side two already and
the sprightly [30] Industrial
Disease plunges us back into the world of early rock and roll,
albeit with some of the most wordy lyrics ever used in a rock song (think Noel
Coward transported into the future and forced to sing rap at gunpoint), plus
one of the most complicated riffs ever used for one of Knopfler’s retro songs. This track sees Knopfler
changing voices yet again, this time singing with a sarcastic shoulder-shrug,
poking fun at modern society yet again with a tale of boardroom spies, lazy
caretakers, strikes, philosophising media and free speech protests that are
quickly broken up by gun-wielding lawmen. Throughout, though, you’re unsure as
to whose side the song is on – yes the greedy hypocritical bosses get their
comeuppance as in all good new wave songs (‘somebody blew the whistle and the
walls came down’), but so too do the two-faced protestors (‘I go down to
Speaker’s corner and I’m thunderstruck – they’ve got free speech, tourists and
police in tucks’) and even the ordinary workers don’t do much better (‘sociologists
invent words that mean ‘industrial disease’
- a verse before the worker in the song goes to see the doctor about
just such an illness). Despite its worthy and all-too-often accurate references
to economic problems and religious wars, however, you’d hardly call Industrial
Disease a serious song; its lolloping bouncy gait, playful guitar phrases
and joke verse - with Knopfler as a doctor who wouldn’t be out of place in a
Carry On film - make it one of Dire Straits’ funniest tracks. But watch out for
the sudden mood change in the last verse when instead of cutting back to Alan
Clark’s joyful keyboard riff as has happened three times before, Knopfler
suddenly kicks the song back in again, now singing straight with one of his
angriest vocals, poking his finger at world leaders who start wars only to give
their ‘workers’ something else to fight besides their bosses. The curse of
‘industrial disease’ itself – the stress caused by overwork and pressure – is
clearly an important subject to former teacher Knopfler, judging by the very
real anger underlying this song, but the subject is dealt with in such an
off-hand way that Knopfler himself sounds like one of those gossiping workers
on the switchboard in the first verse, tying up the phones ‘in knots’ as he speculates
about its impact in an offhand shrug.
With all that noise going
on it’s a relief to get back to a straightforward ballad on this carefully
programmed album. Another of this album’s uncharacteristically piano-based
tracks, the title track of [31] Love Over Gold features Knopfler at his huskiest on a track
that reads more like a play than a pop song. As low key songs go, Love Over
Gold is pretty good despite being so quiet you can hardly hear it and
lacking the sort of instantly hummable melody Knopfler usually specialises in.
It tells the tale of a daredevil heroine, who keeps on pushing forward and
diving headlong into new dangers even though she knows everything she holds
most dear is fragile and can “fall or be shattered or run through your fingers
like dust”. There’s a sly suggestion that she might be a prostitute (‘you’ve
thrown your love to all the strangers’), but we never do find out what
off-the-beaten-path activity this un-named character has taken up or even what
‘sin’ she practices. Indeed we don’t actually learn much at all in this song,
which is pretty much unique in Knopfler’s Dire Straits canon but slightly more
common to his later solo work, with this low key song doing its best to stay in
the shadows and hide from illumination throughout. The tune might not be up to
much by Knopfler’s highest standards, but the lyrics more than make up for
this, being amongst Knopfler’s most poetic and most subtle works, with
fragmented almost-perfect iambic pentameter verses (For those who fell asleep
during their English lessons, I mean of course a line made up of alternating
syllables throughout a line, with one word using a short, snappy kind of
syllable words and the other a long drawn-out syllable sound (such as ‘wind’
and ‘loooove’ as in this song).There are also half-rhymes on certain lines such
as ‘forbidden’ and ‘sin’, ‘reappear’ and ‘interfere’ and ‘find’ ‘wind’ and
‘mind’. Musically, Knopfler’s electric background whine is joined by more
impressive flamenco playing, a great walking bass from long-term Dire Straits cohort
John Illsey and some intriguing marimba work from guest musician Mike Mainieri,
all adding to Love Over Gold the album’s staggering range of
instrumentation.
After a final marimba
flurry, which seems like it's never going to end, Knopfler the street poet is
back to work on album closer [32] It Never Rains - another wordy protest song whose gentle
swagger is balanced by some very bitter lyrics indeed. A fed-up
throwing-in-the-towel-song, where all things seem to be going wrong for the
narrator, Knopfler appears at first to be offering brotherly advice to a friend
or relative before a stinging riff prompts the narrator to reveal he has really
been singing about himself (Slight detour before we get back to reviewing the
song: While you’d hardly call this song autobiographical, there are one or two
interesting hints that back up the idea the narrator really is meant to be
speaking in the first-person and is indeed Knopfler himself. The line about an
‘organ grinder’ was probably just written as a cute rhyme for ‘reminder’ – but
its presence in the song suggests that the narrator is at least an amateur
musician. The reference to a ‘new romeo’ being ‘another gigolo’ also seems out
of place and might be a sly nod at the Dire Straits’ hit single Romeo And
Juliet and the flop follow-up Tunnel Of Love which is effectively
‘romeo and Juliet part two’ in its update of old courting rituals in a modern
setting (plus some Rodgers and Hammerstein music added to the beginning just to
make the generational point a bit more obvious – is it just me or is Alan
Clark’s very similar organ playing on It Never Rains more than a
coincidence here? Or have I just gone monkeynuts again?) This is pure
speculation and nothing more, but Tunnel Of Love was indeed the latest
Dire Straits single at the time Love Over Gold and there may have been
fears somewhere in group or management that the band’s reputation was slipping
after the song flopped so badly (by comparison with the song’s predecessors
anyway) and was there perhaps a bit of worry in the Dire Straits managerial
camp after the group submitted this un-commercial five-track album? (Little did
they know – as we do now – that Dire Straits were about to be bigger than ever
with a #2 hit and a #1 record and one of the best-selling records of all time
in this album’s follow-up Brothers In Arms). Like Industrial Disease,
the song quickly builds up into one of Knopfler’s
little-men-against-the-faceless-corporation rants, performed with all of the
flair and tongue-in-cheek humour you’d expect from Dire Straits. There’s no
doubting the pathos behind this composition though: It Never Rains suddenly
comes alive on an extended fourth verse (‘Oh you were just a roller-coaster
memory…’), where the narrator finds himself sucking up to people higher on the
social ladder and seems to act through gritted teeth until a near instantaneous
fifth verse finally vents his frustrations properly. Memorably, all that
remains for Knopfler’s worker, after decades supporting the same company and
doing the ‘same old rounds’, is ‘the use of your side-show tent’ – the same
people who’ve been such a big part of his life and his only means of support
don’t even know who he is and he’s just an accessory, not a main attrcation.
The album then closes on an absolutely heartbreaking guitar solo as Knopfler
tries once more to fight his way out of the oppressive repetitive riffs going
on around him, sometimes competing against them and sometimes joining in,
frantic to find some way out of his difficult situation. Despite the solo’s
length – nearly three minutes – and its increasing desperation, Knopfler’s
character never quite finds a way out of his problems and is still sighing in a
melancholy way when the song abruptly fades.
A fantastic, surprisingly tough
way to end what is in fact a fantastic and surprisingly tough LP, Love Over
Gold has everything within its five tracks – deeply serious protest, laugh
out loud humour and some fantastically good writing and playing (usually all in
the same song). Brothers In Arms might have more instantly recognisable
songs and Making Movies might be deeper and rockier, with an equal
amount of original ideas, but Love Over Gold has a bigger heart than
either of these more famous LPs, turning real life into gold and love into a
thing of beauty and awe that helps us through an often chaotic and confusing
world. Despite this album’s often downbeat tone and its fully fledged protests,
love really does win over gold in the end and the mood you take away with you
is ultimately a positive one. Casting himself as some modern-day Bob Dylan,
Mark Knopfler seemed to find new strength in the importance of his work the
more he looked to stick up for others, if only in an ambiguous sort of a way,
and writing highly individual songs about a faceless society is surely a winner
in any decade. In fact, this album alone lifts Dire Straits so far out of the
reach of their contemporaries that it might be those ‘I love the 1980s’
programmes weren’t so far wrong in their praise of the ‘me’ decade after all.
A Now Complete List
Of Dire Straits Articles Available To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
‘Dire Straits’ (1978) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/dire-straits-1978.html
‘Dire Straits’ (1978) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/dire-straits-1978.html
'Communiqué' (1979) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/dire-straits-communique-1979.html
'Makin' Movies' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-5-dire.html
'Love Over Gold' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-82-dire-straits-love-over-gold.html
‘Brothers In Arms’ (1985) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/dire-straits-brothers-in-arms-1985.html
'On Every Street' (1993) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-79-dire.html
Surviving TV Appearances
(1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/dire-straits-surviving-tv-appearances.html
Unreleased Recordings (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dire-straits-unreleased-recordings.html
Unreleased Recordings (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dire-straits-unreleased-recordings.html
Non-Album Songs 1977-1991 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dire-straits-non-album-songs-1977-1991.html
Live/Solo/Compilation/Film
Soundtrack Albums Part One (1977-1999) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dire-straits-livesolocompilation-albums.html
Live/Solo/Compilation/Film
Soundtrack Albums Part Two (2000-2014) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dire-straits-livesolocompilation-albums_25.html
Mark Knopfler’s Guest
Appearances https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/aaa-extra-mark-knopflers-guest.html
Essay: From ‘Dire Straits’
To ‘Mass Consumerism’ https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/dire-straits-essay-from-dire-straits-to.html
Five Landmark Concerts and
Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/dire-straits-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
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