Song Roulette
A Vulture series in which artists share the stories and strategy behind their lead singles.
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So how does a band choose the lead single between those two Corinthian columns of songs?
The answer is start with the simpler So Far Away and the anticipation will build itself.
There was no point.
He was on a racetrack.
(The two are still very close friends.)
As Illsley puts it, We made a great team.
SultansofSwing,DireStraits(1978)
.The Song
.
I had known Mark for about six months and we lived in a council flat together.
He was strumming this tune one day and singing something and I asked him, Whats that?
Ill be honest, it didnt sound like much at the time.
Then the red Stratocaster arrived at the flat and Mark cracked the song.
He was so happy.
Im going to call it Sultans of Swing!
As soon as he played the riffs, I knew he had it.
We recorded it shortly thereafter at a little studio in London.
By this point we had a few original songs we were playing in clubs and pubs.
The song is a story about a little rock band in a club probably just playing for beer.
We knew that feeling, didnt we?
.The Bet
Hand on heart, we never gave singles much thought for our albums.
We often left it up to the record company to decide what they thought would make good singles.
There was a universal belief that Sultans of Swing was best.
It was also the strongest reaction when we played it live.
.The Payoff
The song broke in America first rather than in England.
Also, its quite long.
Why is it six minutes?
That didnt seem to matter in America and it wasembraced there.
There was a level of excitement amongst us that things were starting to happen.
The problem is that when you get a wave, you almost dont have time to think about it.
Sultans of Swing was riding high everywhere.
Ill talk about this now because Jerry is dead.
We werent keen on it, even though we had the songs to do it.
Lady Writer possessed its own energy, but it was remarked as being similar to Sultans of Swing.
Mark wrote Lady Writer about someone specific.
I used to know her name but Ive forgotten it.
Shes an Irish writer.
Mark was watching an interview on the television with her and wrote the song about it.
The thing about Marks writing is that hes a great storyteller.
Hes a great observer of what everybody does and doesnt do in this world.
He can make a song about pretty much anything.
Its a positive song about a character looking and falling in love with somebody on the television.
Weve all kind of done that, right?
Jerry told us, This will be a great follow-up to Sultans.
Just keep that momentum going.
It was uptempo and kicked things along a bit.
Singles are a marketing exercise.
We realized it was an important thing at that point in time.
It was a specific way of trying to sell your music.
This is something thats important to remember about Dire Straits: We made albums as albums.
There had to be a significant flow, similarities, and energy among all the songs.
There werent any comparisons made between us as band members for Sultans of Swings and Lady Writer.
I find those kinds of things difficult to deal with.
Every album and song is built on its own merits.
But thatwasnt the casefor listeners.
Both for the simplicity and relevance?
Its difficult to explain.
Music is like a good painting.
He would work at the fairground and fall in love with girls.
Its a wonderful narrative.
Our music was starting to expand much more and Marks writing was expanding.
We needed to go somewhere else.
That came from making the songs longer and more orchestral.
That was our choice.
Tunnel of Love and Romeo and Juliet both embodied the ambitious ideas we now had for the band.
There was something about Tunnel of Love that felt like a proper evolution.
Tunnel of Love made us realize we had more potential as a band.
We had gone from playing in front of hundreds to tens of thousands of people very quickly.
There was a learning curve.
The touring potential also changed.
Recording an album is very different from playing it live.
Having now had three successful albums, this opened up a big territory in terms of playing live.
And we absolutely went for it and had the time of our lives.
For most musicians, its a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
You have to embrace it and love it.
You had to tour to get your music out to sell more records.
You had to do the work.
PrivateInvestigations,LoveOverGold(1982)
This was a difficult album and song to make.
Although we prepared a lot of the ideas, in the studio we changed a lot of stuff.
Private Investigations was part of that grouping.
I believe the rough outline was half of the final running time.
It wasnt ever going to be six or seven minutes in the early stages.
Thats a disaster as far as a single is considered.
After having three successful albums, we felt we could do whatever we wanted to do.
When we were doing the tour forMaking Movies,we used the sound checks to work on Private Investigations.
Instead of boring ourselves with the same tunes, we worked on that and Telegraph Road.
Mark told me, Remember that bit we sometimes do live at the end of News?
This was an autobiographical song for Mark.
The private investigations are about writing and examining material.
Raymond Chandler was in the back of his mind.
It was bloody clever and took everybody by surprise.
We wanted to take a risk.Love Over Goldwas a risky album to make in general.
They got away with it.
So why not try?
There was one major DJ on British radio who insisted on playing the song.
Stop what youre doing and listen to it.
Then everybody went, Wow, this is amazing.It really did take one person to change everyones minds.
It got to No.
2 in the English charts, which freaked everybody out.
I didnt have any expectations with this.
If you have expectations, youre only going to bedissatisfied.
I think the most important thing about most art forms is the element of surprise.
We were surprised how well that song was taken up.
The audience went crazy for Private Investigations live.
They loved that it was risky.
They werent being beaten over the head by the same beats or loudness from other bands.
There were certain subtleties going on with us all the time.
You had to feel your way through them.
This was the most humbling experience from all of our albums.
It showed a remarkable breadth of where we were musically and with Marks songwriting.
We were expanding in an exponential way.
Those textures had to be dealt with carefully.
So Far Away was personal to Mark and its what makes it accessible to listeners.
It was a simple little gem.
We hadnt done anything like it before or after.
The key to the song was it being simple less can be more.
A lyric like Im tired of being in love and being all alone?
That was absolute poppycock and rubbish.
We were still working on the Money for Nothing music video and it wouldnt have been ready in time.
We knew nothing about the computer technology and the time it required.
It was the most remarkable experience of our time as a band.
You couldnt get any higher, professionally, from where we were.
We had no idea about success or what it could look like.
Things were getting a little crazy whenBrothers in Armswas released.
You choose to either get on or get off.
It was an out-of-body experience.
I still sometimes think to myself,That was me.
My work, physically, for that album was done in two or three weeks.
Calling Elvis is an unusual song.
Ive always found it pretty weird.
It was an apt song to create.
Calling Elvis, is anybody home?
Im here all alone.
Its all about roots, musically and spiritually.
It didnt matter what single we put out at this point.
After we toured, the decision was made to put Dire Straits to bed.
It was the best thing to do.
We couldnt keep going like that.
We couldnt play to any more people.
Seven million people came to theOn Every Streettour.
We were tired physically and mentally.
We were prone to arguments.
I wanted to go and be a painter.
Mark wanted to go off and examine all sorts of other things.
