This blog post is about the 50 seconds instrumental part that bridged the two songs Expresso Love and Down to the Waterline on the Making Movies tour (aka On Location tour) of Dire Straits in 1980/81. I always admired this part, especially how it transferred the energy of the ending of Expresso Love to the ‘foggy mood’ of the Down to the Waterline intro. For all who don’t know this […]
We already knew from Guy Fletcher’s forum that on stage the band plays some songs to a click track – a metronome only the musicians (or at least drummer Danny Cummings) could hear on their inear monitors – but we could only speculate which songs these were. A click track means a steady beat at a 100% constant tempo while without there are normally little tempo changes going along with […]
This post is about two of Mark Knopfler’s Fender vintage amps, the brown Fender Vibrolux – the Sultans of Swing amp that was covered in this blog article – and the similar-sized and similar-looking brown Fender Vibroverb. The Fender Vibrolux (model 6G11a) was one of Knopfler’s earliest guitar amps. Probably it belonged to Dire Straits’ bass player John Illsley and was used for the first demo recordings of Dire Straits, […]
With this blog post I will try to compile some info on Mark Knopfler’s effect rack for his latest tours – based mainly on pictures of his 2008 tour. Probably the same rack was also used on his latest 2010 tour. Here we have a picture of the full rack: The Devices Tuner – On top we have a chromatic tuner, as it seems a Korg DTR2000. Power conditioner – […]
This blog post is not about guitar, not even about music, instead it is about a piece of art – Alchemy by Brett Whiteley, the painting that gave its name to Dire Straits’ first live album in 1984, and appeared on the cover. Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992) was an Australian artist who is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries. Paintings For your pleasure, here is […]
One of the commentators to my previous blog post (on the Rock Pop TV gig Dire Straits did on December 20, 1980) asked for Mark’s effect rack. He triggered this blog post in which I would like to put together all information I have about it. The Making Movies ( On Location) tour was the first tour on which Mark used a fully loaded 19″ effects rack. Some of the […]
The Dire Straits concert from the German Rock Pop in Concert TV show in December 1980 was indeed a very special concert for me. The reason is simple: it was the first concert of my life. I was 15 then and had been a Dire Straits fan for one and a half year. Dire Straits were still a new band at this time, but were already big. Their first two […]
I recently found this picture showing Dire Straits on one of their probably earliest gigs – I guess 1977 or early 1978 at the latest. Not the earliest picture, but I think a nice one which I at least haven’t seen before. It is only b/w, but Mark’s ’61 Stratocaster should still have the bare-wood finish it had when he got it. I am almost sure that it got the […]
The family of the loaded Schecter-style pickguard – currently available in white aluminium and brass with tapped F500T-style pick-ups – got a new member: A pickguard with a pick-up configuration just like in Mark Knopfler’s red Schecter Strat in the early 80ies – thus the name Alchemy Edition. For now it is a really limited edition of just a few – so if this is what you always wanted better […]
Have you ever noticed that some chords of News were changed in the live version that Dire Straits used to play on the On Location tour (Making Moviers tour) in 1980/81? The original chord sequence of News – as recorded on the Communiqué album – was: Em – Bm – C – Bm – Am – Am – C – C Live it was changed to: Em – Bm – […]