The most famous guitar sound on Brothers in Arms came from microphones Neil Dorfsman had not finished setting up, and most of the drums on Dire Straits' fifth album were played by a jazz-fusion drummer flown in from New York after Terry Williams had already been told his parts would not be used. Sting, meanwhile, was only on it because he happened to be on holiday on the same Caribbean island.
None of that sounds like the blueprint for the first album to sell a million copies on compact disc. Yet that is what Brothers in Arms became: a full digital recording that topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, spent 34 weeks at number one in Australia and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It got there despite wiped digital tape, a departing guitarist, a dropped drummer and a bassist with a sprained wrist.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Dire Straits |
| Album | Brothers in Arms |
| Release Date | 17 May 1985 |
| Label | Vertigo (international), Warner Bros. (US) |
| Producer(s) | Mark Knopfler, Neil Dorfsman |
| Studio(s) | AIR Studios, Montserrat; Power Station, New York; mixed at AIR, London |
| Genre / Subgenre | Pop rock |
| Track Count | 9 |
| Total Runtime | 55:11 (CD and cassette); the single LP used shorter edits |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (nine weeks) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 1 (14 non-consecutive weeks) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | 1 in Australia (34 weeks), Canada, Germany, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria |
| Certifications | UK 15x Platinum; US 9x Platinum; Canada Diamond; France Diamond; Australia 17x Platinum |
| Estimated Sales | More than 30 million worldwide |
| Key Singles | So Far Away, Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Brothers in Arms, Your Latest Trick |
Cultural Context: The Compact Disc Arrives
Compact discs had only launched as a commercial format in 1982, and CD-only labels such as Rykodisc expected them to remain an audiophile speciality for years. Brothers in Arms upended that. It was one of the first major releases recorded wholly digitally, though Classic Pop points out that Heaven 17 and Haircut 100 got there first, and its timing could hardly have been better: Philips, which developed the CD, owned Phonogram, the parent company of Dire Straits' label Vertigo.
It became the first album to sell a million copies on CD and the first to outsell its own LP. Rykodisc co-founder Robert Simonds later recalled that his label struggled to get discs pressed because "the entire worldwide manufacturing capacity was overwhelmed by demand for a single rock title". Three years later, overall CD sales overtook vinyl.
The other medium that mattered was MTV. ZZ Top's videos were already staples of the channel, which is why Knopfler modelled the guitar tone of "Money for Nothing" on Billy Gibbons. At the Brit Awards in 1986 the album lost Best Album to Phil Collins' No Jacket Required, then was nominated again a year later because it was still selling, and won.
Dire Straits Before Brothers in Arms
Formed in Deptford, south-east London, in 1977, Dire Straits broke through with "Sultans of Swing", which reached number four in the US and number eight in the UK. David Knopfler left during the sessions for Making Movies, after which keyboardist Alan Clark and Californian guitarist Hal Lindes joined. Love Over Gold (September 1982) spent four weeks at number one in the UK and gave the band a number two single in "Private Investigations". Knopfler also wrote "Private Dancer" in this period, a song that ended up on Tina Turner's comeback album instead.
Drummer Pick Withers left after Love Over Gold and was replaced by Terry Williams, formerly of Rockpile and the Welsh band Man. The live double Alchemy followed in March 1984 and reached the UK top three.
Then the band took time off, three years between studio albums, which Classic Pop calls an unheard-of luxury by 1980s standards. Knopfler scored Local Hero, Cal and Comfort and Joy and produced Bob Dylan's Infidels; John Illsley made his solo debut, Never Told a Soul. On the soundtracks Knopfler worked with keyboardist Guy Fletcher, a former Roxy Music session player, who simply folded into the band. "I can't even remember being asked to join the band," Fletcher told Classic Pop. Clark stayed on piano and Hammond, and Fletcher, in his own words, covered "everything else".
Illsley was clear about the stakes: "we were given the finances to spend time on that record."
Pre-production and Songwriting
Knopfler arrived in Montserrat with every song written and rehearsed. Rehearsals took place at Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera's studio in Surrey, and according to Dorfsman, Knopfler never demoed his songs before cutting them. Dorfsman first heard the material as the band playing it live in the room.
- Brothers in Arms was written in 1982, the year of the Falklands War.
- Money for Nothing came from a New York appliance store, where Knopfler borrowed paper to write down what an employee said while watching MTV.
- Walk of Life was sparked by a photograph of a kid playing guitar in a subway, facing the wall "to get a good reverb", Knopfler told Classic Rock in 2015.
- Your Latest Trick was first played faster and jazzier until manager Ed Bicknell suggested slowing it to a bossa nova, according to Classic Rock's Paul Rees.
- Money for Nothing started out in rehearsal as a more Rolling Stones-like track, Alan Clark has said, before Knopfler found the riff improvising in the studio.
Creating Brothers in Arms at AIR Montserrat
George Martin's AIR Studios on Montserrat came recommended by Sting, Eric Clapton and Phil Collins. Illsley remembered "not many distractions apart from the local disco on a Saturday night". The first block ran from 2 November to 21 December 1984, and it rained solidly for the first six weeks.
Dorfsman had flown in directly from Holland, where he had been recording what became Def Leppard's Hysteria; those tracks were later completely redone when Mutt Lange came in to produce. He was "stunned" by how tiny AIR was. The live room measured roughly 20 by 25 feet with virtually no isolation, so he built "little rooms out of gobos and baffles and blankets" and at times put the Leslie speaker outside. What saved it was the console, a Neve 8078. "The sound of that studio was the desk," he told Sound On Sound. The island had its drawbacks too:
"When I got them in the studio they were playing with towels around their waists, white cream on their noses, sunglasses and towels on their heads, and everything was like 60 beats per minute"
Neil Dorfsman, Mix, 1999
Going digital, and losing parts
Brothers in Arms was one of the first albums recorded on a Sony 24-track digital tape machine. Dorfsman traced the decision back to Love Over Gold, when a piano sound they had spent ages on for "Private Investigations" seemed to lose something every time the tape was played back. Knopfler ended up buying one himself.
Early digital was fragile, though. A defective batch of tape at AIR cost part or all of three tracks, and Classic Pop reports that several parts were wiped, especially Williams' drums. At the Power Station a Michael Brecker sax part vanished straight after it was recorded, until Sony's chief technician recovered it "from the depths of digital hell".
Two departures and a drummer from New York
Hal Lindes left early in the sessions; Illsley put it down to social disagreements. Knopfler played most of the guitar parts himself. Then, in December, about six weeks in, Williams was dropped from the sessions. Accounts differ. Dorfsman says he and Knopfler felt the drums were not right, and that a reggae-tinged "Ride Across the River" was "laying there like lead". Williams has said he cut everything to a click track, which constrained his feel, and Illsley told Classic Pop in 2025 that the band had never used one before.
Knopfler considered Andy Newmark and Peter Erskine before sending for Omar Hakim. According to Sound On Sound, Williams was heading to the airport at about the time Hakim was flying in. Hakim's first run-through was "So Far Away", and he re-cut the tracks in about two and a half days.
"I mean, he brought his own feel to the material; a little bit more energy, a little bit more complicated playing, and I think it quite literally saved the project."
Neil Dorfsman, Sound On Sound, 2006
Williams was not sacked from the band: he played in every video and on the whole world tour. Before Christmas Knopfler recruited Jack Sonni, a New York guitarist and old friend, and a second Montserrat session ran from 3 January to 6 February 1985. In New York, Illsley was injured in a fall, so Neil Jason and Tony Levin came in on bass. The band then had six days to mix at AIR's Oxford Street studio in London on Auratones, which Dorfsman said "should have been called Horrortones", before flying to Yugoslavia for the tour.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, guitars | Mark Knopfler | Also co-producer |
| Bass, vocals | John Illsley | Wrist injury in New York |
| Piano, Hammond organ | Alan Clark | |
| Synthesisers, vocals | Guy Fletcher | Yamaha DX1, Synclavier, Roland |
| Drums | Terry Williams | Money for Nothing intro and toms; Walk of Life |
| Guitar synthesiser | Jack Sonni | The Man's Too Strong only |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Drums, tambourine, cowbell | Omar Hakim | Most of the album |
| Vocals | Sting | Money for Nothing |
| Saxophone | Michael Brecker | Your Latest Trick |
| Trumpet | Randy Brecker | Your Latest Trick |
| Saxophone | Malcolm Duncan | Average White Band |
| Bass | Neil Jason | One World |
| Chapman Stick | Tony Levin | Why Worry |
| Vibes | Mike Mainieri | Why Worry |
| Shaker, tambourine | Jimmy Maelen | |
| Trumpet | Dave Plews | Ride Across the River |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Mark Knopfler, Neil Dorfsman | Dorfsman also engineered and mixed |
| Assistant engineers | Dave Greenberg, Steve Jackson, Bruce Lampcov | |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig; John Dent | Masterdisk, New York; The Sound Clinic, London |
| Guitar tech | Ron Eve | Heard the Money for Nothing tone first |
| Artwork | ||
| Photography | Deborah Feingold | Front cover |
| Cover painting | Thomas Steyer | Back cover |
| Sleeve design | Sutton Cooper | |
Neil Jason was booked for a week and tried takes on several songs, but the only confirmed results on the record are his slap bass on "One World" and fretless slides on the extended "Money for Nothing" intro. Illsley's 2021 memoir, My Life in Dire Straits, credits Levin's Chapman Stick on "Why Worry". Sonni's sole contribution to any Dire Straits album is the guitar synth on "The Man's Too Strong". Hakim, meanwhile, met Sting at the "Money for Nothing" session and ended up drumming on The Dream of the Blue Turtles and its tour.
The Songs on Brothers in Arms
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | So Far Away | Knopfler | 5:12 | Yes | Hakim's first run-through in Montserrat |
| 2 | Money for Nothing | Knopfler, Sting | 8:25 | Yes | US number one for three weeks |
| 3 | Walk of Life | Knopfler | 4:12 | Yes | Nearly left off the album |
| 4 | Your Latest Trick | Knopfler | 6:33 | Yes | Randy Brecker's trumpet intro missing on vinyl |
| 5 | Why Worry | Knopfler | 8:31 | No | Tony Levin on Chapman Stick |
| 6 | Ride Across the River | Knopfler | 6:58 | No | Opened the tour's documented setlists |
| 7 | The Man's Too Strong | Knopfler | 4:40 | No | Sonni's only Dire Straits studio contribution |
| 8 | One World | Knopfler | 3:40 | No | Neil Jason's slap bass |
| 9 | Brothers in Arms | Knopfler | 7:00 | Yes | Written during the Falklands War |
Lengths are the full CD versions. The single LP used shorter edits of "So Far Away", "Money for Nothing", "Your Latest Trick" and "Why Worry", and the cassette carried the full versions, leaving about ten minutes of blank tape on side two.
So Far Away
The opener was the first thing Omar Hakim played on, and Dorfsman knew immediately the drummer swap had worked. It was the lead single in Europe and reached number 20 in the UK, before a North American release in February 1986 took it to number 19 on the Hot 100 and number three on the adult contemporary chart.
Money for Nothing
Knopfler wanted a ZZ Top tone and played a Les Paul Junior. Dorfsman remembers a Laney amp; in an earlier Mix interview he named a Kelly. While Dorfsman was still out in the room moving microphones, guitar tech Ron Eve came over the talkback telling him not to touch anything.
"One mic was pointing down at the floor, another was not quite on the speaker, another was somewhere else, and it wasn't how I would want to set things up"
Neil Dorfsman, Sound On Sound, 2006
No processing was added in the mix, and a later attempt to recreate the tone at the Power Station produced what Dorfsman called "a cleaner, karaoke version". Illsley tells it differently: in his version, somebody knocked a microphone over. Billy Gibbons later joked that Knopfler "didn't do a half-bad job, either, considering that I never told him a goddamned thing!"
The song nearly did not make it. "At one point, it wasn't going to be on the album," Fletcher told Classic Pop. "Mark had lost interest in it." Dorfsman asked for a synth that sounded like a dinosaur, and Fletcher found one on his Yamaha DX1. Who came up with the "I want my MTV" intro depends on who you ask: Dorfsman credits Fletcher, and Alan Clark has claimed it as his own. Williams' wild tom intro was recorded as a separate piece and kept.
Sting was on holiday on Montserrat and came up for supper. He sang his part in three passes, in about an hour, to the tune of the Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me", which earned him a co-writing credit. Sting later said his publisher Virgin had insisted on a share. Fletcher recalls Sting walking into the studio and asking: "What's wrong? Nobody is arguing."
Walk of Life
The lyric follows Johnny, a busker playing oldies like "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and "Mack the Knife" in the subway. There are two accounts of how close it came to being a B-side. One says Knopfler meant it for a flip side until manager Ed Bicknell heard the mix and talked him round; the other says the band out-voted Dorfsman. Illsley called it "an antidote to the other serious songs on the album", and it equalled "Private Investigations" as the band's best UK chart placing, at number two.
Your Latest Trick and Why Worry
Randy Brecker's trumpet opens the CD version of "Your Latest Trick" before Michael Brecker's saxophone takes over; the trumpet intro is missing from the vinyl. "I love the sound of Michael Brecker's sax on this track," Illsley said in 2020. He described "Why Worry" as "a kind of lovely duet Mark had with himself".
Ride Across the River, The Man's Too Strong and Brothers in Arms
Side two turns to war. "Ride Across the River" uses a synthesised pan flute, a mariachi-style trumpet from Dave Plews and a reggae-influenced groove. Some accounts describe its crickets as synthesised; Fletcher says they were Montserrat's own.
"'Ride Across the River' was about the murky mercenary business. I liked the courage in the writing of this song, a difficult subject."
John Illsley, uDiscover Music, 2020
"The Man's Too Strong" is sung in the voice of an ancient soldier, or perhaps a war criminal. The title track closes the album. Neither keyboard player could play the accordion part, so they tossed a coin: Fletcher squeezed the bellows while Clark played the melody on the keys.
The Brothers in Arms Cover
The sleeve is a pale blue square. "DIRE STRAITS" and "BROTHERS IN ARMS" run across the top in salmon-pink capitals, above a photograph framed by a thin pink border. The picture is shot from below and at a tilt: a metal resonator guitar hanging in a blue sky streaked with pink cloud, its neck cut off by the top of the frame and its perforated coverplate catching the light.
The guitar is Knopfler's own 1937 14-fret National Style "O" resonator, a model made only between 1930 and 1941. Deborah Feingold took the photograph, Sutton Cooper designed the sleeve, and the German artist Thomas Steyer painted the same guitar for the back cover. In 1996 the journalist Robert Sandall called the image "a shiny 6 stringed rocket devoid of any obvious means of propulsion", a fair summary of what happened next. A similar image turned up in 1989 on The Booze Brothers by Brewers Droop, the pub-rock band Knopfler had played in around 1973.
Release and Reception
Brothers in Arms went straight in at number one in the UK. It spent 14 non-consecutive weeks there, including ten in a row from January to March 1986, and finished as the UK's best-selling album of 1985. It also managed nine weeks at the top of the Billboard 200. Initial reviews in the British music press were mostly negative:
- NME: Mat Snow attacked Knopfler's "mawkish self-pity".
- Record Mirror: Eleanor Levy heard "West Coast guitars reeking of mega bucks".
- Sounds: Jack Barron called it "only a halfway decent album because it has only halfway decent songs".
- Melody Maker: Barry McIlheney called it "something very like the same old story".
American critics were warmer. Spin's E. Brooks wrote of returning to certain cuts "the way one might come back to a favorite chair". Rolling Stone's Debby Bull called it "beautifully produced", but felt "the music lacks the ache" of Knopfler's soundtracks. Over time the reviews got kinder. Q gave the 1996 remaster five stars and called it "a singularly melancholic collection", while AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said the band had "never been so concise or pop-oriented".
The album won the 1986 Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, the first of Dorfsman's three Grammys, and Best British Album at the 1987 Brits. "Money for Nothing" won Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | UK | US Hot 100 | B-sides |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| So Far Away | 12 April 1985 (UK/Europe) | 20 | 19 | Walk of Life (Europe); If I Had You (US) |
| Money for Nothing | 28 June 1985 | 4 | 1 | |
| Walk of Life | 14 October 1985 (US); 3 January 1986 (UK) | 2 | 7 | One World; Two Young Lovers (live); Sultans of Swing (live) |
| Brothers in Arms | 18 October 1985 (UK) | 16 | Going Home (live); Why Worry (instrumental segment) | |
| Your Latest Trick | 25 April 1986 | 26 | No US release | Irish Boy; The Long Road (Knopfler solo pieces) |
"Money for Nothing" reached number one in the US on 21 September 1985. Knopfler was against videos, so director Steve Barron flew to Budapest to pitch him a computer-animated one. According to Barron, it was Knopfler's girlfriend who backed the idea. Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair animated it on a Bosch FGS-4000 and a Quantel Paintbox, making it one of the first videos to use computer-animated human characters. It got 11 nominations at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards and won Video of the Year and Best Group Video.
"Walk of Life" got two videos: one cuts between the band and Johnny busking in the Tyne pedestrian tunnel, the other between the band and sports bloopers. Bill Mather's rotoscoped black-and-white clip for "Brothers in Arms", set against First World War imagery, won the Grammy for Best Music Video on 24 February 1987.
The Brothers in Arms Tour
The tour started before the album was even out, on 25 April 1985 in Split, Yugoslavia, and ended a year later on 26 April 1986 in Sydney. It ran to 248 concerts in 23 countries and 118 cities, and more than 2.5 million people saw it. Sonni was now on rhythm guitar, Williams was back on drums and Chris White joined on saxophone. The documented setlists all open with "Ride Across the River".
- Sultan's Pool, Jerusalem, on 30 April 1985.
- A 13-night Wembley Arena residency in July 1985.
- 10 July at Wembley Arena: Nils Lofgren on "Solid Rock" and Hank Marvin on "Going Home", partly shown on Channel 4's The Tube in January 1986.
- Live Aid, 13 July: "Money for Nothing" with Sting, then "Sultans of Swing", at around 6pm.
- 21 straight nights at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, still a record there.
The 900,000 tickets sold in Australia and New Zealand made it the biggest tour in Australasian history until Ed Sheeran overtook it in 2017 and 2018. Soundboard tapes from San Antonio, Houston and Ohio have circulated as bootlegs.
The Money for Nothing Lyric Controversy
The second verse's slur drew accusations of homophobia. In late 1985 Knopfler told Rolling Stone he had received an objection from the editor of a London gay newspaper, and argued that the narrator was "a real ignoramus, hard hat mentality". At Wembley on 10 July 1985 he sang "queenie" instead, and the 1998 compilation used a radio edit without the second verse. In January 2011 the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled the unedited version unacceptable for private radio. Some stations responded by playing it for an hour straight, and in August 2011 the council left the decision to individual broadcasters.
In TV, Film and Media
- "Brothers in Arms" in The West Wing's second-season finale, Miami Vice and the last episode of The Grand Tour.
- "Brothers in Arms" has become a favourite at military funerals.
- "Walk of Life" in the first and final scenes of Young Sheldon, and in a 2025 British Gas advert.
- Sting's "MTV" from the intro was MTV Entertainment Studios' title-card sound until 2026.
Covers and Reworkings
"Weird Al" Yankovic parodied "Money for Nothing" as "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*". Knopfler recorded "So Far Away" as a duet with Emmylou Harris on Real Live Roadrunning in 2006, and in 2007, for the war's 25th anniversary, he re-recorded "Brothers in Arms" at Abbey Road to raise money for British veterans. In Hong Kong, a cover of the saxophone intro to "Your Latest Trick" became the theme for TVB's File of Justice.
Reissues and Anniversary Editions
| Year | Edition | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 / 2000 | Remaster | Bob Ludwig at Gateway; US release September 2000 |
| 2005 | 20th anniversary SACD | Chuck Ainlay 5.1 mix; the 3000th SACD title; Grammy for Best Surround Sound Album |
| 2006 | Half-speed vinyl | Stan Ricker; full-length songs on vinyl |
| 2013 | Mobile Fidelity hybrid SACD | Original stereo mix, mastered by Shawn R. Britton |
| 2014 | Double 180g vinyl | Ludwig, Bernie Grundman and Chris Bellman |
| 2021 | Half-speed 45rpm double LP | Miles Showell at Abbey Road |
| 2025 | 40th anniversary | Dolby Atmos Blu-ray; 3CD and 5LP sets with San Antonio, 16 August 1985 |
The 40th anniversary edition of Brothers In Arms (the capitalisation Classic Pop and many other outlets use), released on 16 May 2025, was the first official release of a full concert from the 1985 to 1986 tour. It came with a 28-page booklet with new liner notes and interview segments with Knopfler, Illsley and Fletcher. In 2015 a discounted digital price had already sent the album back into the UK top ten at number eight.
Legacy of Brothers in Arms
The success left the band exhausted. Knopfler dissolved Dire Straits in September 1988 and told Rolling Stone: "There's not an accent then on the music, there's an accent on popularity. I needed a rest." Illsley remembers thinking after the tour: "Can anything be better than that?" Dire Straits made only one more studio album, On Every Street, in 1991.
Classic Rock argued in 2018 that the album "made Dire Straits superstars" but turned them into "a byword for a certain sort of safe, homogenised music", even though the record itself was "a sigh rather than a roar". The lists have been kinder:
- Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums: 351 (2003), 352 (2012), 418 (2020).
- Q's 100 Greatest British Albums Ever: number 51 (2000).
- The eighth-best-selling album in UK chart history, and the first to go ten-times platinum there.
- The longest-running number one album in Australian chart history.
Commenting on the 2010 Brits shortlist for best British album of the previous 30 years, Paul Gambaccini said "Brothers in Arms runs away with it for the quality of songwriting and musicianship." Forty years on, What Hi-Fi? says there is still a strong chance of hearing a Dire Straits track in any hi-fi showroom, and its own team still tests equipment with them.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The free CD players | Fletcher says Philips gave the band a batch of CD players and "all broke within a week"; he has never owned a hi-fi. |
| Smoke on the vocals | Dorfsman says Knopfler would often be smoking a cigarette while he sang, cutting six or seven similar passes for Dorfsman to compile. |
| The good news | When the single and album were both US number ones, Ed Bicknell greeted the band with: "Do you want the good news or the good news?" |
| MTV Europe's first video | "Money for Nothing" was the first video aired when MTV Europe launched on 1 August 1987. |
| The Dutch record | The album spent 269 non-consecutive weeks on the Dutch chart, a record until Adele's 21 passed it in 2016. |
| A disc for walkers | Dire Straits gave a Brothers in Arms gold disc to "The Walk of Life", a 1985 charity walk from London to Khartoum. |
| Who the song was about | Nikki Sixx told Blender in 2007 that the TVs in the store were all playing Motley Crue. |
| The animators' next act | Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair went on to found Mainframe Entertainment and nodded to the video in ReBoot. |
Listen to the Riffology Podcast
For more stories like the Montserrat sessions and the drummer who arrived as another left, the Riffology podcast covers classic albums one record at a time. It is available on all major podcast platforms, so pick an episode and press play.
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