THAT'S THE WAY YOU DO IT

After four Top 5 albums, Dire Straits were doing well but were hardly a household name. That all changed when they made Brothers In Arms. Mark Knopfler, John Illsley and Guy Fletcher take us back.

- Paul Rees

It's spring 1985 in Britain. The coal miners have ended a rancorous, year-long dispute with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. In the wake of the Heysel Stadium riot, in which 39 people died and 600 were injured, English football clubs are banned indefinitely from competing in Europe. Coca-Cola is fanfaring its New Coke brand into supermarkets — it will last a mere three months of going unloved and undrunk before being abandoned ignominiously by the company. The latest James Bond film, A View To A Kill, Roger Moore's final time as 007, is in cinemas, and the Beeb’s new soap opera EastEnders is airing twice weekly on TV...

In 1985, as a nation we still have the choice of just four TV channels. No one has a mobile phone or access to the internet. But one new device is offering to the masses the promise of a gleaming new age: Philips’s CD150 is the first budget-priced CD player to be launched onto Britain’s high streets, and by the end of the summer it will be synonymous with nothing as much as with Mark Knopfler’s wry, doleful voice and the sound of his guitar.

Released on May 17, 1985, Brothers In Arms is Knopfler’s band Dire Straits’ fifth album. In the seven years since bursting out from the South London pub circuit with Sultans Of Swing, a rollicking love letter to a fictitious jobbing pub band, the Straits have built a robustly loyal following on the back of Knopfler’s tunefully literate songs and near-constant touring. Brothers In Arms, though, is a whole other deal. In short order, it will make superstars of the balding, headband-sporting Knopfler and his bandmates.