For your enjoyment, here are a few rare pictures of Dire Straits. They are from a concert in the Zirkus Krone building, Munchen, Germany, on May 29, 1979. After February 1979, they returned to Germany in May, still on the Communiqué tour.

The gear used on this part of the tour has changed slightly against February: Mark still played the #80470 maple-neck Strat (see also this article on his two red Fender Strats) and the black Fender Telecaster on Water of Love over the Morley Volume pedal, and the MXR analog delay, but now he played two of the Music Man HD 130 amps, David played a Peavey T-60 guitar, David’s black Strat was used by Mark for Setting me up now, John played two Ampeg SVT amps.

While watching these pictures in the slide show, you might want to listen to a sound clip from this concert (date and venue are probably this concert, it is sometimes denoted as Frankfurt, Loreley, June 23, 1979, which is most likely wrong). As this recording runs at a wrong speed (many shows that were recorded on cassette recorders in those days are +/- 5% wrong speed), I corrected the speed.

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Related articles

• Pictures from Hamburg Oct. 28, 1978 (?)
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979
• Early Dire Straits radio interview from 1978
• Dire Straits – Where do you think you’re going – spontaneous cover on acoustic guitar
• Brett Whiteley – Alchemy – The picture on the Alchemy cover

Unlike these days, when each concert is not only recorded on audio or video, not to mention all pictures made by a million people it seems, there are hardly pictures from those early Dire Straits concerts. Too bad digital cams were not invented yet.

I often see pictues on bootleg CD covers people made, or on other places, but it seems many have some problems to tell if a picture is from this year or that. In fact, for probably 90% of those old pictures it is totally unknown from which concert they were.

I am meanwhile pretty good at dating such pictures and I can narrow down them to a few weeks or a particular tour. I just have to look at amps, guitars (especially David’s), and other details. I might do another post about this later.

For now, only one very easy but a 100% consistent rule how to tell if a picture is from between 77 and October 78, or later, is to look at Mark’s guitar strap: Before October 78 Mark had a rather thin brown guitar strap, after this date, up to the end of 79, he had a wide black guitar strap (with the red Strat, there were different ones for that black Telecaster).

I have the suspicion that he got the black strap, which was manufactured by Music Man, from the Hamburg concert 78 on (October 28) because Europe’s biggest Music Man dealer and distributor was located in Hamburg. (In fact they mentioned Mark as a customer in a magazine add in the early 80ies.)

He still had the brown strap on the Paris video (October 14, 1978), but then there are pictures where I know they were from late 78 with that black guitar strap. And all these were from German magazines, and Hamburg was one of their biggest gigs so far with a lot of media attention. It is not prooven, but I would bet the following pictures are from this concert. They are all not from the internet but from my collection, so probably “unseen before” (yeah, I used to collect such things when I was a teenie, have many more

BTW, there is a bootleg recording of Hamburg available but it runs at a too high speed and thus sounds really strange. If you speed it down you will notice that it is really a gem, Mark’s concentration level and spontaneity were outstanding once again.

For your enjoyment, here a few of those pics:

“Got a new guitar strap today”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

edited: I added a sound sample from this concert (Lions), click here for more info.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Pictures of Dire Straits, Live at the Zirkus Krone, Munchen, May 29, 1979
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979
• Early Dire Straits radio interview from 1978
• Dire Straits – Where do you think you’re going – spontaneous cover on acoustic guitar
• Brett Whiteley – Alchemy – The picture on the Alchemy cover