You can read this review and more in 'Solid Rock - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Dire Straits' by clicking here!
Once Upon A Time In The West/News/Where Do You Think You're
Going?/Communique/Lady Writer//Angel Of Mercy/Porotbello Belle/Single Handed
Sailor/Follow Me Home
"He sticks to his guns, takes the road as it comes, even
when it takes the shine off his shoes"
Scurrilous Scandal! Single Handed Sailor! Mark Knopfler Ate
My Hamster! And More!...
CALAMITY!
Dear
readers, here is the news. Since we last left Dire Straits on their voyage to
becoming rock and roll Gods several things have changed. While the band's rise
to fame seems entirely natural and all a part of rock and roll lore today,
things weren't that smooth sailing for album number two. Vertigo were keen to
have another heavy selling hit on their hands but Dire Straits were never the
sort of band who coped well with pressure (they famously delayed following up
'Brothers In Arms' for six years in the hope that their public would have
forgotten all about them by them) and they fell out big time making this rather
rushed album, released a mere year after the first (normal rock and roll
practice but quick stuff indeed by future Dire Straits standards). The band
aren't getting on, the heavy touring and commitment needed to make it to the
big time showing itself amongst a band made up of two brothers and two local
mates they knew and with old problems and issues coming to light. Worse, Mark
Knopfler has found the might of the composing Gods deserting him, having now
calmed down and got the stress of his divorce to his first wife (the prime
influence behind most of first LP 'Dire Straits') out of his system.
Trouble!
We
often write on this site about a band's 'difficult third album', the one that
really tests them as the sheer glee of fame and fortune wears off - in Dire
Straits' case it's different: Mark is so new to writing (seriously at least)
that Dire Straits have hit their stumbling block as early as album two.
'Communique' is, from the title on down, the sound of a band who are desperate
to communicate with their fans - but have suddenly realised that they haven't
actually got very much to say. Many fans have wondered how on earth Dire
Straits could have gone so downhill so fast but in retrospect the difference
between the albums seems obvious: the debut album is by a tight band who know
their material well, have rehearsed it for a year now and know it backwards,
determined to do anything to get their message across - this second is by a
band who cracked it, instantly, in one go and then suddenly have to make a
follow-up album in a hurry, singing songs made in a hurry (Knopfler, a fairly
slow songwriter, had nothing useable spare) and rehearsed and recorded within
mere weeks, discovering in the process they didn't actually know each other as
well as they thought. While it's true that all four members of the band had
more than their fair share of bad luck trying to become 'rock stars' (or at
least make a living out of playing music), Dire Straits are one band who would
have really benefitted from having more time together as a unit before their
big breakthrough arrived. The story has long been that 'Communique' is a pale
shadow of an album, disappointing to everyone from the band down. But heard
now, in context of a six-album career, is it really that bad?
Tell
Us Your Story (And Save Us Having To Do Any Work!) Well,
Mark Knopfler has a great idea that could have been the saving of this album
had the band had more time to work on it. The first album was so good precisely
because Mark had 'lived' through those songs - in character usually (Knopfler
isn't really a 'confessional' style songwriter). Having worked through his
anger at his marriage breaking up, (bar one last moving song 'Where Do You
Think You're Going?', the highlight of this album) Mark looks back at his other
life's experiences. Sadly we never did get to hear his 'teacher' concept album,
but there's no doubting that 'Communique' is his 'journalist' album, a reflection
on what he learnt during his years as a reporter at the Yorkshire Evening Post
in Leeds (who seemed not to know about their famous protégé when I once had an
interview there). The title track is the most obvious example of this, Mark
recalling trying to get a tried and tested cagey famous name to speak to him as
a nervy inexperienced cub reporter and largely failing, the track perhaps
coming to him because of his difficulty getting his own sub-conscience to write
in a hurry. 'News', however, laughs at the idea of anyone ever being able to
'report' all angles successfully - the song was inspired by an event in Leeds
shortly after Mark left to become a full-time guitarist and which he may well
have had to cover: a man being knocked from his motorbike, the challenge being
to sum his life up in a few lines by talking to family and friends (easily the
toughest job a local reporter ever has, although trying to ignore the barbs of
the sulky photographer who secretly wants to be a writer comes a close second).
The theme of writing crops up in other songs too: 'Once Upon A Time In The
West' is a wry comment about living in the modern-age when there seem more
cowboy-outlaw cops-robbers battles going on than ever, written with all the
old-before-his-time nonchalance of a reporter whose spent so long viewing the
seedier side of his local community that some of the despair has begun to rob
off. 'Lady Writer' continues the theme, this time inspired by novelist Marina
Warner whom Mark once saw discussing her work on television (and features the
second appearance of a common Knopfler theme: falling in love with strangers
from afar without ever quite meeting them, a trick already established in
B-side 'Eastbound Train'). Even 'Single Handed Sailor', an attempt to write
about one of Mark's heroes - navigator Sir Francis Chichester- is sung with
more bounce than the rest of the album, but even here there's a reflective
stance as if Knopfler is upset that he can't write fully of what life was like
for another person. Indeed this idea that Knopfler is getting further and
further from his 'public' and the roots that made him special will become
another major theme of the Dire Straits era best heard on the 'On Every Street'
album although it crops up frequently on his solo albums too, where one-time
history student Knopfler finds a neat solution to this problem by writing about
larger-than-life characters of the part (an idea which starts with Chichester
on this very song).
Behind
The Headlines! There's another reason why 'The News'
might have been on Knopfler's mind. Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers happened
to be sharing a flat with Lindisfarne guitarist Si Cowe (struggling for work
after the band disbanded in 1972, but about to pick up again with a reunion the
same year as Dire Straits' debut) the night the rest of the band came round to
discuss 'band names'. While Mark's jokey suggestion about the band's perilous
financial situation was greeted warmly, the band had a few other ideas too,
with the band toying with calling themselves 'The News' at one stage and
ex-reporter Knopfler imagining the fun he could have with the album cover
layouts (something which sadly never happened; Cowe was so taken with the name
'The News' that he pitched it to Lindisfarne on their return, which is why
their similarly rushed 1979 album is so named - a nice bit of AAA cross-over
there!)
Back
At Mark's Pad! This record's cover is about the closest
anyone in the Vertigo art department ever came to that idea, incidentally,
although their pretty sleeve of blue with a man heading out to sea superimposed
on top of a letter (a literal 'watermark' ho ho ho!) must surely have come from
listening to the first album (which is all about travel, with a restless
narrator without anywhere to call home and walking around seeing sights -
including the band who play 'Sultans Of Swing, which in those days at least
wasn't a self-referencing song as everybody assumes it is nowadays). By
contrast this record is 'about' home - with songs about laying down roots and
feeling like you belong - 'Single Handed Sailor' is about the voyage home to
familiarity as much as it's about the voyage out to discovery; 'Once Upon A
Time In The West' gets cross at the local traffic preventing the narrator from
getting home and 'Where Do You Think You're Going?' sounds positively
apoplectic that the narrator's girl could have anywhere better to be than home
with him right now. The album even ends with Knopfler ushering us to 'follow
him home', adding that even with the 'sun going down' he knows his home
territory well enough to navigate by the 'moonlight'. There's a feeling that, after
a nasty directionless frustrating period (which saw Mark unable to settle in
his job and fall out with the childhood sweetheart he'd so longed to marry)
he's in a good place again, his bravery in holding out for a musical career
finally rewarded and the rows with his wife fading in his memory. Alas - and
not for the first or last time on this site - this wonderful development in
someone's personal life is bad news for their musical one: the single reason
this album doesn't work is that it doesn't have the attack of the first album,
being much less aggressive without yet coming up with the
keyboards/atmosphere/long slow build up of tension that will later single Mark
out as one of the best writers of the 1980s.
Scandal!
The
trouble with this album isn't that it doesn't have good ideas - it does - or that
it's badly played - it isn't - but that the band have gone about the results in
the wrong way. Many fans called this a blander version of the first album -
which it is - but not because the songs are bland per se (although nothing here
quite adds up to 'Sultans Of Swing' 'Southbound Again' or 'Six Blade Knife')
but because the band are going about recording them all wrong. Someone should
have stepped in, told Dire Straits there was no point playing with their old
drive and attack when the songs weren't the driving and attacking sort and
encouraged Knopfler to find his voice much earlier. The idea of a writer trying
to keep in touch with his public now he's been deemed to be 'different' when he
knows deep down he's as ordinary as they come is a terrific theme for a record.
Had we had more songs of that sort then Knopfler's growing reputation as a
'spokesperson' for his times would have been nicely enhanced, with a wholly
different feel to the songs on the first album. However somewhere along the way
someone seems to have panicked (perhaps everybody on all sides panicked - or
perhaps the band were simply too naive still to notice what a theme this could
have been) and simply gone about doing this album the same way because it
worked last time; that's like saying that 'Sgt Peppers' would have been better
cut the same way as 'Please Please Me' because that album was a success too -
in hindsight the single worst decision of the band's career.
Wot's
That Yoo Say?! You see there's nothing here that a
longer spell in the rehearsal room and a new set of recording sessions couldn't
have improved (and agonising as the wait must have been for poor Vertigo, a
record label short on funds who'd suddenly stumbled on one of the best-selling
bands in one go, with very little marketing effort on their part bar a 'leaked'
demo tape and an 'Old Grey Whistle Test' booking, they should have known better
and treated their new nervy and yet so obviously talented songwriter with more
support). You see, at times this album works really well with two un-sung gems
that never get the recognition they deserve. 'Portobello Belle' is a pretty
love song - arguably the band's first if love song to music 'Sultans Of Swing'
doesn't count - with a glorious tune and a swagger that's going to prove
priceless come the making of third album 'Makin' Movies'. 'Where Do You Think You're Going?' is
priceless too, a scary song with Knopfler at his evilest, sounding all the
better for the careful control and low-key tension the band come up with (the
flashes of colour on Knopfler's lead guitar have never sounded more stinging)
and not co-incidentally played with all the fire and attack of the first album.
However nothing on this album is truly bad - as opposed to, say, 'On Every
Street' where a good third is unlistenable - it just sounds undercooked, poorly
developed, rambling and coasting like a rather fat caterpillar where the first
album stung like a bee and aimlessly hurling out ideas in all directions.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of 'Communique' is that it's the channel of
communication that lets this album down: the songs are (by and large) sound,
the playing fine (if a little tired) and the production features much the same
mix of live-in-the-room-but-with-a-bit-of-polish-added-later that suited the band
so much better than the heavier, weightier sound of later years. The problem is
that the three are saying different things: spiritually this is a prog rock
album about the problems people have talking to each other, played with the
aggressive texture of the band from the first LP and with the first stirrings
of the poppy 80s coming out of the final mix. Had the band gone with the songs
and turned them into densely textualised epics of how an audience relates to
their newly chosen spokesperson (one who clearly feels inadequate at having the
spotlight thrust so squarely in his face after so many years of nothing but
dreams keeping him going) instead of trying to rave it up like a bunch of 50s
rockers told to play like a punk band it could have worked (enough to make
'Communique' a minor gem at least).
Meet
the band! Like the first album, this record is a nice
opportunity to hear Dire Straits the way they were intended to be heard, rather
than as Mark Knopfler's back-up band. Once again I'm dead impressed with David
Knopfler's rhythm guitar playing which adds the fire and fuel his elder brother
seems to have temporarily lost and driving 'Once Upon A Time In The West' and
'Single Handed Sailor' especially hard. Presumably the brother's clashes -
which started here but came to a head on next album 'Makin' Movies' - came from
the fact that David was still playing with such an aggressive style on songs
that didn't need them while his brother was trying to 'grow'. However to put
the blame on the younger Knopfler would be wrong - you can hear how hard he's
trying to get this band to fire, to sound something like they used to and the
record desperately needs...something to fill that big hole in the middle where
the commitment of the first album used to be.While coming to this album from
later LPs means you automatically yearn for Alan Clark's keyboard washes, the
pair make enough surface noise for any band. Behind them John Illsley and Pick
Withers are easily the best rhythm section the band had, keeping things simple
and sturdy, whilst flying along with the Knopflers when occasion demands.
Interestingly though the band are already best on the ballads, something they
were lacking on the first album (with 'Lions' generally agreed as the weakest
recording if by no means the weakest song on the debut) - something that will
help the band a lot in the years to come...
The
End - or is it??? Overall, 'Communique' is like the
newspaper it should have represented somewhat disposable. Knopfler hasn't yet
learnt the art of writing for characters rather than himself (though he'll
become one of the best first-person narrators in the business by the time of
'Love Over Gold' in two albums time) or the audience friendly inanities that
groove so finely as per 'Makin' Movies' (and I say that as someone who likes
that album, by the way, which is almost gloriously empty at times). It is
instead the sound of a man trying on a confessional aggressive style on an
album that's meant to be laidback - but not that as laidback as the soggier
sorrier patches of this album (almost every song ends with long slow fadeout,
clearly trying to replicate the trick of 'Sultans Of Swing' but these songs
aren't built for it - these are recordings that have already run out of ideas
and you want to end as soon as possible, not go on forever). In other words I
can see why so many fans disregard this album, which has nothing as gloriously
instant as the first album. I'm not sure either that I entirely agree with the
small core of fans who claim that if you get to know it this album is the best
thing the band ever did either: two great songs do not a classic album make and
there's way too much filler here which would have been booted off almost any
other album (made over a much longer stretch than this album). However
somewhere in the middle seems to be the best way to treat this album to me:
it's got some nice ideas and performances which isn't enough to make it one of
those 'AAA unsung classics', but neither is it a disaster - nothing goes wrong,
it's just that so little goes right. In a nutshell, it's not an album to
treasure full of magic, but enough parts of it sparkle to make it worth your
while doing some extra digging. Perhaps the best news of all is how quickly the
band learn from this lesson and put things right almost straight away - taking
their time over next album 'Makin' Movies', a record which actually features
worse material occasionally ('Les Boys', the band's first unmitigated disaster)
and certainly has less of a story to tell; however that album gets away with it
by rebuilding the band from the ground up as a good-time rockabilly band as
powerful as anyone else around and with just enough poetry and ideas to make
their music truly sing.
Correction!
By
the way Mark Knopfler never did eat my hamster, we were just trying to get you
to read this article. Well it worked for the Sun newspaper - Freddie Starr
never chomped on a rodent either but everyone still bangs on about it!
'Once
Upon A Time In The West' sounds immediately like you've put
on the 'Dire Straits' record but at a slightly slower speed. There's a sense of
laidback ease in this song that's a mile away from the attack of the first
record and yet everything here sounds eaxactly like it did before - the two
guitars locked away in their own worlds and only occasionally glancing at each
other, the steady rhythm backing, the pealed guitar solo and the slight sense
of menace in Mark Knopfler's voice. The difference this time is that Knopfler
doesn't have a problem with one woman but with an entire system and somehow his
sarcasm is less effective as a result. The central idea of the song is a good
one though: the idea that modern living is less a concrete jungle and more a
Spaghetti Western without the romance. The classic opening line about 'people
getting a cheap laugh by going over the speed limit' and a few other lines like
'heap big trouble in the land of the plenty' make it clear that when a young
Knopfler was playing Cowboys and Indians he was always the latter: the modern
capitalist world is too wrong, too corrupt, with petty laws that people break
without thinking and nobody picks up on. The world as it stood in 1980 is
divided into varying degrees of outlaws, with even the 'peace-keeping corps'
carrying guns for their own safety and where no one is safe, with even a 'hero
getting a bullet in the chest'. Knopfler's romantic vision of what the world
would be like when he grew up (with clearer distinctions between right and
wrong) is being addressed here and ought to sound sensational: the social
conscience that features in so many future Knopfler classics making its first
tentative sounds here. But the band still think they're singing updated blues
songs like 'Switchblade Knife' and instead of giving the grandiosity and
prowling menace Mark needs they simply treat this as another indifferent song
about love gone by, their slower pace obviously meant to show sly menace but
sounding more like strutting. This in turns lead Mark to horribly
over-enunciate his lyric and proving for once and for all that the acid tongue
he used so viciously on the first album came about because of a nasty period he
needed to get off his chest - not because that's who he is.
News
is
another sign of the darker side of life delivered by a man looking round for
sad subjects to get angry about in order to fill the gap his improved love life
has left him. Knopfler sounds strangely unmoved by his own tale, which is of a
man running away from an argument with his wife and getting killed through his
own carelessness and letting his own emotions get to him (the line 'He gets on
his horse' has led many fans to believe he's another cowboy, but actually Mark
was thinking about a new report in his 'old' paper The Yorkshire Evening Post
about a motorbike accident and perhaps wondering how he would have reported it.
Unfortunately newspaper articles are different to songs (well, duhh - though
see our review 'Sometime In New York City' for how even ex-Beatles made that
mistake sometimes) and Knopfler's mixture of empathy dispassion here (so useful
in local journalism) is a curse here not a blessing: Knopfler's vocal suggests
a dismissive sneer and his lyrics an 'it happens all the time' shrug of the
shoulders, but if so why should we listeners care about it either? Just look at
those lines, which in another setting could have come with a jolly cartoony
tune ('He crosses the floor, he opens the door, he takes a sniff of the street')
That's a shame because the subject matter about an unnecessary waste of life
and how we're all just one un-thinking careless mistake away from death could
have been a very poignant song - and the later, more experienced Knopfler would
have known just how to handle it too (with the sense of weary melancholy and
life lessons of 'Love Over Gold' or the fiery second side of 'Brothers In
Arms'). Here Dire Straits just play what's always worked till now, albeit with an even slower tempo and even more gaps
between the guitar phrases, while Knopfler sings in a styling that made him
sound so tough on the first album - except he shouldn't be sounding tough, he
should be sounding moved or totally removed from the whole scenario. Only one
magnificent arrangement touch (the song fading out on Pick's heavy drum
pattern, which wearily comes to a close before dramatically shutting off, as if
the narrator is fading away and dying).
'Where
Do You Think You're Going?' is a third dramatic and
angry song in a row, but for some reason this one works a lot better - perhaps
because Mark's lyrics and performance are heartfelt this time (this is one last
song about his difficult love life, a theme that won't return until final album
'On Every Street') or perhaps because the band finally try to do something
different, starting off with Mark alone summoning his inner bluesman before the
band pile in bit by bit as his emotions run out of control. The guitar riff is
also the single greatest one on the album, sounding in turns playful and
claustrophobic and making it all the harder to tell whether the narrator is a
nice guy having a rather bad day and pushed too far or a controlling psychopath.
After all, these lyrics are anything but cosy: most pop songs when they treat
the subject at all have jealousy as a mini comedy-drama, where the joke is on
the narrator for being so narrow-minded and everyone knows the story will end
happily with the lovers confessing their need for each other in the last verse.
That's not true of this song, where Knopfler's ice-cold admonition stops his
girlfriend in her tracks, as if caught mid-flight out the door. At first
Knopfler tries to sound caring ('Don't you know it's dark outside?') before
revealing just how jealous he really is ('Don't you care about my pride?') The
hint is that it's happened before, that previously it was a running gag but now
the narrator is 'sick of joking' and asks her to take sides: will she choose
him or her new lover? Like 'Once Upon A Time In The West' this is another
cowboy movie, this time a shoot-out at high noon with Knopfler laying it out on
the line: if his partner steps out that door she's never coming back again. The
most serious song on a strangely serious album (even when in the woes of
misery, the first album still managed to sound playful) it's easily the best
performance on the album the whole band sizzling with drama and revelling in
the chance to embellish such an emotionally resonant song.
Communiqué
itself is, by a second, the longest song
on the album - which is odd because it sounds the least substantial by far.
Remembering his days as a reporter, Knopfler starts to write a different kind
of song altogether: a moving one about having to interrupt a family's grieving
for some pithy quotes for an article he was running as a cub reporter - the
hardest job on a local paper, right up there with reading centuries-old
micro-film (that's the technology, by the way, not the issues themselves which
can be even older) and trying to remember who in the office takes what tea out
of which mug - Knopfler would have been given all the rotten jobs at the Yorkhire
Evening Post as the most 'junior' member of the team, fresh from university. Alas
the song then moves on to a more vague debate about the idea of mankind's
struggle to communicate, which ironically or otherwise comes with such a 'never
mind about that - let's get jolly!' chorus that the whole song suddenly likes
one long list of mistakes and how not to communicate the original feeling that
must have started the song. A second and third verse then turn the tables on
the narrator himself, a reporter living a life full of all the dirt he loves
dishing out on other people - which is better, but still pale by comparison to
the FBI informer who gets tricked by his wife on the future 'Private
Investigations'. Throughout it all Dire Straits don't so much play as noodle,
dragging the song out past it's natural 3:30 end for another two minutes of
aimless jamming. This band have never sounded more like the Grateful Dead - but
unfortunately it's the Dead on an off-day where you know exactly what note is
coming next. Most fans tend to dislike this song - I don't like it much either,
but at least it has the good grace to start with its heart in the right place,
even if everything else got a bit left behind in the sub-editing (the fourth
hardest part of being a local journalist - seeing an article you worked to the
bone, making it balanced and full of the right 'rhythm' which is then cut to
ribbons by a gorilla of a sub-editor whose never read a book in his life -
perhaps its flashbacks to this that caused Knopfler to make so many of the
songs on this album so long and rambling?!)
Lady
Writer is, in the context of the album, not a bad song:
there's lots of nice flashy guitar above one of David Knopfler's best rhythm
thrashes and a tune that you can hum along to quite easily, even if it never
quite memorable enough to remember once the record starts. Released as the
first single from the album though - and the long-awaited sequel to 'Sultans Of
Swing' it was a disaster: there's no energy here, no clever chord changes or
memorable hook and the song doesn't make you feel anything: instead it's
another whole load of nothing. Having escaped his first marriage bachelor
Knopfler was on the pull and - his sudden fame perhaps going to his head -
imagines himself going out with all sorts of unlikely people in this period he
never actually met. This is, in effect a love song to novelist and historian
Marina Warner who made a career out of looking back at 'accepted history' and
re-working it from a female perspective. Mark saw her talking about her book
'Alone Of All Here Sex' - a discussion of the portrayals of the Virgin Mary' on
a TV chat show in 1976 and her ideas
clearly struck a chord with history student Knopfler (particularly the idea
that there history tends to be made up of points of view rather than facts -
something that seems to have stayed with Knopfler down the years). In practice
then this could have been another great song, with Knopfler remarking how the
world had always got it wrong and how 'the lady writer on the TV' had changed
his mind about the way the human mind works - alas in practice it misses the
mark completely, ending up being a rather weird love song to a feminist (who
probably wouldn't have appreciated the sentiments, although as far as I know no
one has ever asked her about it). Lines like 'Talking about the Virgin Mary on
the TV, reminded me of you - yeah' plus the odd line of 'dead ringer' and 'jazz
singer' makes this song sound more like a comedy song and Dire Straits do
indeed play with a lighter touch than normal. However there's nothing really
fun or light about this song, which is just a faster version of what, yet
again, Dire Straits have always played (it's only been a year but already
seemed like longer after an album and a half all in a similar style) and Mark
sings it the same way he's sung the whole album: deep and creaky. As an album
track it's passable, thanks to the nice tune and the faster tempo - as a second
single it's a tragedy which the band will struggle to recover from (and only
averted by a last-gasp decision to release 'Romeo and Juliet' as a single in
1981 - both are love songs that are actually quite similar on a surface level
but that isn't a gap in quality between them, it's a gulf).
Angel
Of Mercy is another of Communique's songs that's pleasant but
unmemorable, weak and insipid rather than awful. Of all the songs on the album
it seems like the one that's most rushed: the band's performance needs another
couple of takes to really nail the track's twisty groove, while the lyrics
moves from the inspired ('I want my reward in heaven tonight, just like you
promised!') to the tired ('I go to dragon at noon and I won the fight!') At
least on the positive side Dire Straits are shaking things up here - if we
treat 'Sultans Of Swing' as a special case (it's a moment of escapism on a
record where the narrator has a lot to escape and who knows the momentary lift
will end as soon as the music does) then this is the first 'happy' Dire Straits
song without a sting in the tail. Interestingly, Knopfler's third love song
(his first not about lady writers on the TV or passing people he meets on a
train) isn't a mere mortal but an 'Angel Of Mercy' who 'saves' him and redeems
his lost faith in the powers of love after troubled times. Knopfler may have
been writing about a 'Six Blade' rather than the 'sword' she urges him to give
up in this song, but the sudden change in outlook will change his band's sound
forever. There's a risqué line that's rather daring for 1980 ('You don't need
protection', during a verse that takes place in her boudoir so can surely mean
one thing) and a slight cheekiness to this song - there's something about it
that suggests the narrator is simply intoxicated (whether by mod or liquor or both
we never find out) and means nothing of what he's saying and probably won't
remember it in the morning. Like many a drunk the song also goes on too long,
repeating the lengthy chorus (the least attractive part of the work) a full six
times and only then adding a guitar solo at the end. As a one off this is quite
fun, if a little gormless (Knopfler tends to be a better writer when moved by
something - having a good time isn't generally a source of his better songs)
and coming to this song straight after the debut would have been a shock at the
time, back when people thought that was 'all' this band could do.
Portobello
Belle goes one better than both of the last two tracks
and amazingly a third straight love song in a row (was this album deliberately
planned to reflect this?) While I'm not convinced this relationship is due to
last any longer than 'Angel Of Mercy', at least she 'sounds' like a real
person. To understand this song, once again we have to deal with the changes in
Mark's life: after falling out with his wife in Newcastle Upon Tyne, he moves
to Leeds for teaching/reporting work and then moves to Deptford where he
crashes with his brother while trying to make a go of music. The advance of the
first Dire Straits album, along with the sudden income from the royalties,
changed Mark's life forever: after somewhere around two years of being rootless
he can suddenly afford to live anywhere he likes: London's Portobello district
was his choice and for a writer who so often turned to his surroundings this
would have been a big change (it's not for nothing that Mark titled his
exuberant finale to the 'Local Hero' film 'Going Home' - a phrase that would
have been even more suitable to the movie). A district of Notting Hill, it's
also the 'name' of his next band 'Notting Hillbillies'. Portobello, then,
represents new beginnings and a sense of optimism after so many years of
struggling - even the girls are different to the ones he's already known: 'She
ain't no English rose!' sings Knopfler about this girl who's sexy and she knows
it. Knopfler's roving eye records perhaps a little too much detail here (the
line 'her breasts up on the offbeat', although in context that's actually the
cleverest line in the song, instantly summing up someone whose proud of who she
is and isn't about to change) but instead of the sleazy song this might have
been, Knopfler stays awed of her power throughout. After years of trying to
impress his traditionally brought up working class first wife with appearances,
Knopfler's suddenly met a person (or possibly a whole range of girls) who
'don't care about your window box or your button-hole'. Even the beggars from
Ireland Knopfler passes in the street are 'up' a class from what he knew back
home - they don't get in the way pretending to play on street corners, they
'serenade' the passers-by, while the 'wino' who leers at her from a passing
truck is instantly put down by a woman fully in control. Mark's vocal is
suitably in awe too, arguably his best on the album full of earthy grit and airy
swagger, while the rest of the backing is taken up for the first time by layers
of keyboard washes and a piano part, taking the place of most of the guitar work
(has he just had a row with David, who might not even appear here? Was this
song so close to his heart Mark insisted on getting it right and different? Or
did they try this the 'usual' way before finding the band's usual style didn't
fit?) Either way, 'Portobello Belle' is easily the album highlight and a key
song for the band's future development, proving that they could do so much more
than merely play like Sultans or snipe about ex-wives. Delightful.
Single-Handed
Sailor is a surprise return to the album's first side about
news stories. This one concerns Sir Francis Chichester, the first man to solo
circumnavigate the globe and whose ship 'The Gypsy Moth' would have been moored
at Greenwich at the same time this song was written, not all that far from
Mark's new place. The voyage took between August 27th 1966 and May 28th 1967 -
which means that poor Francis missed out on hearing 'Revolver' on original
release but did get back hoe in time to hear 'Sgt Peppers' - at the age of
sixty-five (the date most men would have started collecting their pensions in Britain
at the time). Dire Straits could have treated this story-song like a sea shanty
(it has the same 'roll', especially in the verses, suggesting this is how the
song started) but instead treat it as the most 'Sultans Of swingy' style song
the album, all uptempo and full of glittering guitar solos (again it sounds as
if Mark is playing both parts here, the slow moody solos and the finger-picking
Chet Atkins style rhythm). Interestingly Mark skips out most of the voyage
itself - which for most writers would be the 'interesting bit' - and instead
starts with a whole verse about leaving port and a final verse about getting
home again, a recurring theme of this album. Chichester is never named but
presumably that's him asking a passing seaman 'hey, what do you call this
thing?' and his leap of joy when he finds he's made it back home to the right
port. The theme of the song, though, is one of achievement against all the
odds: the most moving line in the song is about what Chichester overcame to do
what he did and Knopfler hinting that he made it for 'his' generation: all the
time thinking of a 'mother and her baby and the college of war' where he grew
up and learnt his trade (actually Chichester's eyesight was too poor for him to
join up but he wrote several RAF training manuals that arguably saved thousands
of lives). However none of the above prevents 'Single-Handed Sailor' from
sounding a little sloppy or from sticking out on the album like a sore thumb, a
complete one-off story-song that the band never tries to repeat ever again.
Follow
Me Home does however
segue nicely thanks to a burst of ocean noise and the story of another weary
traveller trying to get home. Perhaps a little too consciously styled on
'Lions', the closer of the debut record, this is another slow low-key track
about being adrift and restless and would perhaps have sounded more at home on
that first LP. While I rather like 'Lions' though, with its slow-burning
surreal lyric and refusal to throw in the towel, 'Follow Me Home' just drifts
around, looking for a tune as much as a harbour. I'd have been quite happy to
dismiss this song as a failed attempt to sound like the band did on the last
album and nothing more, but apparently the song digs deeper than that and was
close to it's author Knopfler's heart. The song was inspired by a holiday Knopfler
took a few years before when trying to forget his first wife and trying to woo
a girl to come back to his hotel. The town (Knopfler revealed in an interview
it was on an 'island' though he doesn't specify which one) happen to be having
a feast day with lots of partying and the priests have all left their church,
leaving Knopfler alone. While the narrator apparently never gets his girl to
follow him 'home' (an interesting word in context, as he presumably means the
hotel or cottage where he's staying rather than 'home' in the sense it's used
across the rest of the album), he does have something of an epiphany, claiming
to feel 'the song in my bones and I know the way'. Many songwriters, especially
those who struggle, have one sudden moment i their lies when they know what
they do in the future will 'work' : Ray Davies had it when he wrote 'You Really
Got Me', Stuart Murdoch had it when he turned to music to escape his years of
illness and confinement to bed and Pete Townshend discovered it the day he
accidentally leapt up in the air and stuck his guitar into the ceiling at a Who
gig and saw the audience re-action. 'Follow Me Home' sounds like Mark's moment
of realisation: that only here, so many miles away from home, can he understand
where he went wrong and where to go next. Perhaps the rituals going on behind
him were of more help than he thought. Alas that emotion and sense of wonder
only comes through in the lyric sheet, not the music itself, which simply sticks
to a rather dull groove of nearly six minutes. Perhaps meant to reflect the
repetitiveness of the ritual music he heard on the island, it's a shame that
the experiment doesn't really come off with this slow lazy rigid song the polar
opposite of the energy and fervour of 'Sultans Of Swing'.
Overall, then, 'Communique' is an album full of
ideas, most of them good ones, with a great concept album about what mankind treats
as 'news' and his ability to communicate on side one balanced by a more
emotional second side about various love stories (switch 'Where Do You Think
You're Going?' for 'Single Handed Sailor' and you'd have a perfect divide
between the two). What this album doesn't have is enough time to make the most
of either of these album threads and the 'news' stories in particular needed a
good sub-editor or at any rate a producer's hand stronger than Barry Beckett's
and Jerry Wexler's (the first album was such a success they seem to have
assumed the band knew what they were doing). If the first album was a trip in
the fast lane, an exciting thrilling take-no-prisoners ride, then 'Communique'
all too often sounds as if its trapped behind a slow-moving lorry - literally
if the opening track is anything to go by. However it's wrong to think that
'Communique' is simply a pale copy of the first album: it was at least at the
writing stage a sufficiently different and interesting work which should have
stretched the band's sound out further past celebrations of musicians and tough
love stories. It's the execution that lets this album down, with far too many
slow ballads and limp similar-sounding arrangements sucking all the verve and
intelligence out of this album. How ironic - an album about communication
that's let down by the communication between songwriter and band.
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
