Dire Straits

Dire Straits came together in Deptford, London, in 1977: Mark Knopfler on lead guitar and vocals, his brother David Knopfler on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass and Pick Withers on drums. In the year everyone else was going punk, they went the other way entirely, with a lean, stripped-down sound that came out of pub rock and borrowed from country, folk, jazz and the blues rock of J. J. Cale.

Their first single, "Sultans of Swing", from the self-titled 1978 debut, was the perfect calling card: clean, liquid guitar runs curling around a dry, half-spoken vocal, cool as a cellar on a hot afternoon. It went top ten in Britain and America, and the Grammys nominated them for Best New Artist in 1980.

David Knopfler left in 1980, Hal Lindes stepped in on guitar and Alan Clark on keyboards, and Making Movies arrived that year; "Romeo and Juliet", "Tunnel of Love" and "Skateaway" belong to that stretch, longer and more cinematic than anything on the debut. Love Over Gold and the shadowy "Private Investigations" came in 1982, the year Terry Williams took over the drums from Withers, and Guy Fletcher added more keyboards in 1984.

Brothers in Arms, in 1985, was the monster, arriving alongside "Money for Nothing", which grinds along on one of the decade's great crunching riffs, the bouncing "Walk of Life" and the slow, sorrowful title track. The album went on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide and became the first to sell a million on CD, and the world tour that followed took in Live Aid in July 1985. The band broke up in 1988, with Knopfler saying he needed a rest from all the talk of popularity, regrouped in 1990 for On Every Street in 1991, and shut it down for good in June 1995, with him and Illsley the only members who lasted the whole ride. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 2018.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.