I know it can be a somewhat divisive album, but I like it. Anyway, I found the sheet music book in a charity shop and it has several band photos in the centre pages. Goodness knows exactly whom they were supposed to appeal to, but I thought they deserved a wider airing if only so you could appreciate the extraordinarily 80s aesthetic:
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It certainly was in terms of leather jackets!
Awful looking thing that first one. …
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Good job HH isn’t around! 
@Svetty I Don’t think it’s the sort of thing that Herbie Hancock would listen to but I could be wrong!
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I like the Brothers in Arms album and most of the Dire Straits albums.
Check out the new remastered Money for Nothing on Quobuz HiRes. It is a lot of fun, especially if you have heard them all already.
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One of my favourite albums.
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I love their music generally but a 50% (at most) album in my view. Title track superb, The Man’s Too Strong and Ride Across the River all brilliant the rest largely disposable. Dire Straits, Lover Over Gold, On Every Street far superior to these ears.
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Why are there six people in the various photos? Dire Straits were a classic four-piece band, surely?
Also, Dire Straits were very heavily used by Philips to promote and market the launch the Compact Disc.
Unless I’m very wrong, ‘Brothers In Arms’ was the first ever release (along with a Karajan Beethoven symphony and no doubt a few others). I think that there were ten CDs at the initial launch.
(Apologies to any diehard vinyl addicts who are spluttering over their breakfast corn flakes at reading of the hateful CD reference!)
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I thought Abba had the first cd launched? Brothers in Arms was the first cd single?
That’s not my recollection, Bruss.
I don’t think that CD singles were even on the radar when the first players and discs were launched (in 1983 or '84). I recall that one of the original CD selling points was that you could get the complete Beethoven Ninth Symphony on one disc (provided that the conductor kept up a good pace in all four movements). This was apparently important to the head of Sony (whose name I can’t remember), who loved that particular symphony.
They’d expanded a little by ‘85. In order (I think) they are:
- Mark Knopfler (erm, obviously)
- Terry Williams (drums, although almost all of his drumming on BiA was replaced by Omar Hakim)
- John Illsley (bass, erm, obviously from the picture)
- Jack Sonni (guitar - but not credited as playing on BiA)
- Alan Clark (keyboards)
- Guy Fletcher (more keyboards)
Mark
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You could be right as my first cd album was Brothers in Arms, but I wasn’t an early adopter even in 1986.
Looked up on the net and Abba gets a mention here.
The song BiA was released as a single in late ‘85 and is often reported on the web as being the first CD single. Given the close identification of the band with CD at that point, it’s far from impossible. Discogs seems to agree with the idea:
The Beethoven 9 CD running time story has been questioned as an urban myth for some years, but it’s impossible to prove it conclusively wrong. However, I believe the slowest recording in the catalogue in the early 80s took a lot less time than 74 minutes, so I’ve always been disinclined to believe it!
Mark
You may wish to term it an urban myth, but I remember very clearly that it was a story put out at the time of the launch! Other older Members may wish to say whether they remember back to those days.
Another catchphrase used at the time of the launch was Herbert von Karajan being quoted as saying that ‘all else is gaslight’. He may or may not have said this, but it was widely quoted at the time.
Well, this is how Greg Milner describes it in Perfecting Sound Forever (2009):
(with apologies for the photography of a paperback book!)
I think I’d find it easier to believe the story if there were lots of recordings of Beethoven 9 that were 70+ minutes long. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case (and wasn’t at the time).
Just because the story was common currency at the time doesn’t make it any more or less likely to be true.
Mark
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I’m pretty sure there were CD’s before BIA. Or did you mean it was one of the first released by Phillips?
I first heard a CD in a Norwich Hi-Fi dealer in late 1982/early 1983. BIA wasn’t released until 1985.
Apologies if I have misunderstood the gist of your original post.
Either way I have always understood that BIA was the CD that, more than any other, really ushered in the CD era & made the format acceptable & popular to the public & sold in hither-to far greater numbers than an previous CD.
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The question is whether the single release of Brothers in Arms (the song) was the first CD single released.
The album of BiA definitely wasn’t the first CD album released even though, as you say, it was a big factor in increasing the popularity of CDs.
Mark
Thanks, as half suspected, I obviously misunderstood the original post.
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