Set to celebrate its 40th anniversary on Saturday 17 May, Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms is many things - not least the album that’s viewed as the one that turned the world on to the compact disc. A synth record, though? Surely not.
This after all, was a band helmed by Mark Knopfler, who in 1985 was one of the most famous guitarists in the world (though not quite as famous as Marty McFly, obviously). And just look at that Brothers In Arms album cover - it’s got a photo of a guitar on it, for crying out loud!
Dig a little deeper, though, and you discover that there was another sheriff in town - Guy Fletcher - and he was packing a rather different kind of music-making pistol.
Then an up-and-coming keyboard player, Fletcher had worked with Knopfler on his two most recent soundtrack albums, Cal and Comfort and Joy. Taken from the films of the same name, these were both released in 1984.
"Guy had turned up at my house one day in a Hillman Hunter," Knopfler tells Paul Sexton in the liner notes for the new 40th anniversary edition of Brothers In Arms. "He knocked on the door with a synthesizer under his arm and we started working together."
It was around this time that Knopfler got his hands on a New England Digital Synclavier, the digital synth/sampler/workstation keyboard that was taking the music industry by storm. Its sounds came to define the ‘80s, being used on huge albums by Michael Jackson (Thriller, Bad), Genesis (Invisible Touch) and - thanks to Trevor Horn - Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Yes and Grace Jones.
Owning it was one thing, though: mastering it was quite another. "I used to look at it dubiously and wonder if I'd ever learn how to use it," says Knopfler. Dire Straits bassist John Illsley, meanwhile, remembers that "Everybody was going 'Does anybody know how to work this thing?'”
Help, though, was at hand. “Guy had joined by then,” says Illsley. “Without him there, we would have probably been completely lost."
"It was part and parcel of what Guy was doing, and he managed to get it to make sense,” confirms Knopfler.
Fletcher, meanwhile, suggests that it was partly his technological know-how that got him into the band.
"I guess I sort of proved to Mark that I could handle something that was like an airbus manual," he says. "It was a quite a complicated thing, but we did those two films together, with a few other musicians, so joining the band wasn't really even talked about. It was just 'We're going into rehearsals next week, see you there' and next thing we know, we're in Montserrat."
It was here, on a Caribbean island, that Brothers In Arms was recorded. The location was George Martin’s Air Studios, which later fell victim to both a hurricane and volcano eruption, and now lies derelict.
Back then, though, it was state of the art, with a Sony 24-track digital tape machine providing the opportunity to make pristine recordings. As Fletcher, explains, though, this presented another potential problem.
"We had digital, and it was a new format at the time,” he remembers. “We were, like everybody, a bit blown away by what digital can do, but it also had its difficulties in reining it in, because it was very easy to get carried away. Neil Dorfsman [producer] did an amazing job in retaining the analogue feel of the album, and being faithful to the songs."
Those songs, though, definitely sound of their time, and the Synclavier’s influence was huge. The video below from ElectronicSupersonic, which features remakes of some of the most famous synth parts on Brothers In Arms using Arturia's Synclavier-V emulation and some other software instruments, confirms that the machine is all over it.
Pretty much every song features some of that New England Digital sauce: check out the intro to Money For Nothing and lead sound on Walk Of Life if you want to hear just a couple of very famous examples. In fact, the Synclavier is there right from the start, during the intro and throughout album opener So Far Away, and it sticks around until the end, on the title track.
Let’s give thanks to Guy Fletcher and his synth mastery, then: Dire Straits’ secret weapon. We’ll never know how many of Brothers In Arms’ 30 million sales he was responsible for, but without him and the Synclavier, we can say that the album would have sounded very different.
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