Thought I’d start a good old-fashioned ‘vs’ thread, just for fun.
I’ve always found Chris Rea and Mark Knopfler to be sonically very similar, particularly in their eighties heyday. I bet a lot of casual listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
So who’s better?
I say the Dire Straits frontman has the edge. Love Over Gold and Brothers In Arms were genuine masterpieces that I still listen to. Mr Rea always had a whiff of kitsch about him (although I still love Nothing To Fear).
Fight!
*makes the Dire Rea joke*
What joke’s that then, Min?
Well, you see, once upon a time Chris Rea was asked to….. oh I see what you did there, you scamp!
Why is the thread called Dire Straits vs Mark Knopfler?
Wow. Typo a go go. Obviously I meant to say Chris Rea vs Mark Knopfler. For shame.
Can I edit that??
you can try probs too late
have to ask admin
I expect @tim_admin2-2 can help.
Looks like your wish has come true, Mr Slip.
Oh it seeems to have changed now. All good!
Both are pretty snoozeworthy, but if you put a gun to my head I’d go for Knopfler. He’s a fine guitarist (although not much of it finds its way onto his records) and he’s always good value when discussing vintage guitars.
As for Chris Rea, I reviewed a Birmingham show of his for the blog a few years ago and it was dull beyond words. The lack of anything approaching excitement was something to behold.
obvious question Conch- what the fuck were you doing there?
I was visiting friends in Milton Keynes of all places and a mate happened to have spare tix for Chris Rea in Birmingham (only an hour or so from MK). We left during the encore. Still, it was a night out with a great mate and there was wall to wall music chat on the car journey. I’ll see if I still have the review on file
Milton Keynes and Chris Rea in one visit. That is living the dream!
That’s what you call a walk on the wild side!
What JC said. Plus I read an interview where CR, after years of striving, bleated about the strain of stardom and how he were ‘appier back in ‘Boro. I can’t bear rock stars moaning. The first Dires album still sounds great. I could almost forgive him “The walk of life”.
Privateering is pretty good
Chris Rea: On The Beach
Dire Straits: first album
Nothing else.
…is of course the correct Rock Snob view! And one I mostly share. I used to quite like the odd DS tune, but like most, the sweatbands, the rawk, the sound and fury signifying nothing, Walk of Life…
Still fond of this one tho – perfect for that there movie. Guitar wise, it’s the Knopf for me…
Goosebumps ahoy!
Up.
Up.
I prefer MK`s solo music to his DS music which I don`t dislike. The first album is very good as is a lot of the music on later DS albums.
Now CR is new to me, yes I was/am aware of his `80`s output which I never bothered with but it was his blues stuff which I found to be good. Yes he ain`t from the Mississippi delta or wherever you have to do your bluesman apprenticeship but I like what he does.
MK vs DS, it`s MK for me.
MK vs CR, once again it`s MK.
I have to add that I don`t listen to them a lot but only because of other listening preferences.
MK has put out a lot of good stuff since he got his inner rockstar out the way. CR had a greatest hits sorted by about 1995 and that’s all I need. In fact, Stainsby Girls and On the Beach are probably enough. Later stuff dull dull dull.
‘Since he got his inner rock star out the way’.
Love that phrase! A pithy summary of any musician’s movement from youth to maturity.
I picked up all the Dire Straits studio LPs at various boot sales last year, and after a recent clearout only the the first album and BIA (the latter for semimental reasons) survived the cull. The others are still languishing in the local chazza, the snoozesome buggers.
Mr B persuaded me to get a Chris Rea LP at a car boot one time. That got snuck into the chuck pile too.
I think you’d like On The Beach, thoughbut. Great for cocktails on the waterbed with Mr Breakfast.
Yeah, the one I had was Auberge. Okay, but not enough to warrant precious shelf space.
On The Beach was one of Mr B’s go-to skiing soundtracks back in the days of the Walkman. The other was Legend. God knows how he didn’t nod off and fall down a crevasse.
The only On The Beach worth listening to is Neil’s, of course.
And Cliff’s.
French for ‘pub’.
Funnily enough, I just started listening to my Dire Straits albums last week after a 30+ year hiatus. They were so uncool and reviled by the late 80s that I was genuinely curious at what I’d find.
Some observations:
– they definitely peaked at Making Movies and Love over Gold, but even these have a couple of duff tracks each
– the first two albums are OK but bland. Very little textural variation.
– their long-form songs have weathered better than the rest (Tunnel of Love, Telegraph Rd etc) as Knopfler works best with a bit of narrative space around him
– they got hit badly by the 80s ugly stick around Alchemy and BIA. The sound of the latter is horrendous. I used to love the former as a 13 year-old, but the production (I.e. synths) have aged badly.
– he really was a fantastic guitar player, and like most of the greats, the giveaway is in his rhythm playing- effortless but intricate.
– I’ve never listened to their last studio album. Calling Elvis seemed monochromatic and uninviting.
All in all, a typical double-disc greatest hits band.
Rea, on the other hand, bores the shit out of me.
Brothers In Arms was the album that virtually launched the CD revolution. Look what happened to that.
Still, despite the 80s headless guitar and headband, I like Money For Nothing. Knopfler should do a bit more stuff like that.
The title track is lovely, and in a nice bit of cross-thread wotsit was once used to moving effect in an episode of Due South (with the Mountie chap).
Well all right, not as moving as I remember, but who wants to see a police shoot ’em up in the woods with a brief bit of Mountie mud wrestling thrown in for good measure? Me too!
It was used to good effect in The West Wing. Not on Youtube, but here’s a Vimeo link
https://vimeo.com/56378248
Seems suited to rain!
I’d like to see this supercut with On The Beach instead.
Eeeek! it’s that song that epitomised the worst in the DS trope, still trotted out in facsimile form on most of his records since, even the solo ones, regrettably.
Alchemy is one of the greatest live albums.
Chris Rea went up somewhat in my estimation recently when, during an interview in one of the Guitar magazines, he admitted that he started playing slide solely because of Ry Cooder. He appears curious detached from the rock scene in general though and I’ve never seen him mentioned in the same breath as any other musician.
As for Dire Straits, over Christmas 1978 my (future) brother-in-law came from Australia to stay with my (future) wife and I in London. He brought with him a copy of the first Dire Straits LP which he told us was number one in Perth at that time. Puzzled, I asked if this was the same little-known band who were playing pubs around London at that time. It was indeed. Turns out that, thanks to some heavy FM radio play, the debut DS LP had taken off in Western Australia before anywhere else in the world.
I enjoyed the early albums, but it was a case of the bigger they got, the worse their albums became, until towards the end Dire Straits had almost become an ambient music band.
I’ve still got the first LP but otherwise all you need is the best of CD.
Still guilty pleasure like the Eagles.
Weren’t ever on a yacht were they ?
There were a few bands like that Abba were huge down here before anywhere else.
Likewise Kiss were bigger in Australia than anywhere outside America I reckon.
Also the Village People
Chris Rea seems to be getting a bit of a shoeing, but he did give us one of the top five greatest Christmas songs.
True dat.
Yes – “Christmas On The Beach”
And he’s a big fan of Ferraris and Deltic locomotives, so he can’t be all bad.
He never wrote Mr Blobby, did he?
A friend of mine has the CR history of the blues set in which our man goes from the cotton fields through delta to the city through all the blues sub-genres, accompanied by a book and original paintings. Whilst it’s clearly a labour of love, it was hard to get through it all. Didn’t he do another one of early 60s stuff – I vaguely remember a competition in Word to win it on vinyl together with a reissue Dansette record player ? I think there was a film too? I’m not hating on him but none of this moves me at all. OOAA.
The friend mentioned above who took me to see Chris Rea in Birmingham had the multi disc set you speak of (11 or 13 CDs I think), but as you say it was hard to listen to. There wasn’t much spark there.
Something like that. And he loved it so I had to listen to it all in order to comment. I was reducing it to 20 seconds per track by the end.
I remember both those sets coming out. At the time they were creatively marketed as an artistic rebirth. I’ve browsed them both, and been disappointed with the blandness and lack of the promised ‘authenticity’ – same old slow-tempo, synth-laden noodlery as always.
Likewise when Dire Straits Alchemy double LP appeared in 1984 it was a huge deal. It was pre-CD so there was a lot of taping going among friends if one person managed to buy a copy.
Hard to imagine now, but DS were about to become the biggest band in the world.
I was 11 when Brothers In Arms came out, and it made an impact on me even then. It seemed like proper grown up music (my uncle had one of those new CD player things in his car). They definitely touched an MOR nerve in the mid eighties. Rea must have been kicking himself to have missed that boat!
I went to a teenage party that summer. Took my Roy Harper/Jimmy Page ‘Whatever Happened To Jugula’ cassette with me, resplendent with actually Rizla pack design that I had added for extra cool. Only one other dude listened to it with me in the kitchen,as the rest of the eejits boogied to Walk Of Life in the sitting room. I knew then that there was no hope for them.
Orange rizla pack sel customised design home made tape no less, eh ? Exactly. Huzzah !
‘Hangman’ and a sixteenth of leb was our party. That and half a bottle of Pernod.
Oh that takes me back. Pernod chosen because you could use the big red plastic cap as a makeshift cup to pass around the bus stop.
Not much love for Chris Rea! I think I overestimated the loyal cult following which I assumed might be hidden in these ranks.
I also feel duty bound to defend Brothers In Arms. Sure, it’s overplayed, but the lesser known tracks (or as ‘lesser known’ as it’s possible to be with such a ubiquitous album) like The Man’s Too Strong and Your Latest Trick are still capable of giving me a shiver.
I remember The Tube did a film to go with the title track which was filmed in Israel with lots of footage of the troubled times there in the mid 80s which was tremendously affecting (I’d just spent 3 months there). Probably on YouTube somewhere.
No love for Shamrock Diaries here..? He got everything right on that album, it has a lovely elegiac feel. The one after was On The Beach, where he consolidated the sound, then after that was doomed to repeat it forever.
The Dire Straits song On Every Street is a beautiful composition, as is the Local Hero soundtrack.
Oh I forgot about that one. Yeah On Every Street is terrific, especially the instrumental coda.
That the saxy one, with trumpet introducing the 12inch version? Brecker brothers, no less. Class.
(Answer? No, not that one, this one is the one I’m thinking of, Your Latest Trick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YTh1Wsqo2c
Now that’s what I call coda!)
I’m with you on Shamrock Diaries, Mavis.
Mark Knopfler’s solo work is actually very good. He’s delivered a series of low key folk-ish albums which, while they are never going to set the world alight on originality, are examples of sturdy songcraft, and there’s nowt wrong with that. Tunnel Of Love is still one of my favourite Dire Straits songs, and I do think they were essentially a singles band, as most of their albums contained quite a lot of filler. Knopfler’s solo work, on the other hand, works better on whole albums which often create a tone or mood. As for Chris Rea, er Stainsby Girls, that’s about it.
Re: “a lot of casual listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference..”
The ladies of my acquaintance used to go all aquiver at the sound of Mr Rea’s voice whereas headband guy had exactly zero effect in the downstairs moistening department..
In terms of number of listens, I would estimate the score to be (at least) 20 to 1 in favour of Dire Straits.
Dire Staits spent a long time being (unfairly) maligned (Twisting By The Pool and Walk Of Life were perhaps contractual aberrations) and have a catalogue of genuine greatness. Alchemy would/should make any list of “Best Live Albums”
I find Chris Rea to be very patchy, and from about 1987 very samey and safe.
I’ll admit to having that CR Blue Guitars box and it’s hard to disagree with the comments above. A heroic effort made in the aftermath of serious, life threatening illness but that doesn’t justify the sameness of so much of it. However, it is very different from On The Beach and its ilk and there are a few standout tracks. Law of averages, I guess.
I was never a DS fan, but have grown to like MK’s later work – Sailing to Philadelphia – and his collaboration with Emmy Lou Harris – All The Roadrunning – is sublime. Far, far better than the roughly concurrent, truly dirge laden Raising Sand.
For me, the result is a score draw.
I vote MK. I only know two songs by Rea (Fool If You Think It’s Over and Josephine) whereas there’s loads of Knopfler tunes I rate: the whole of Dire Straits’ first, Romeo & Juliet, Tunnel Of Love, Telegraph Road, Private Investigations, The Fizzy And The Still and this:
Alan Partidge on Chris Rea
“Do you mind if I bring my guitar”
“I’d rather you didn’t”
“Oh forget it! You People!”
Both superb guitarists in their respective interests. I really don’t understand the OP’s and subsequent posts to conflate/compare one with the other. One bases their career on a singular finger picking technique the other on a slide technique.
Enjoy both for their unique strengths.
….having said all that….Chris Rea did like tennis…..something for those who only know Auberge….
Communique and makin movies for me – then privateering
This thread is like watching the blog die 😉
DS & Knopfler never wrote anything as good as this: