Album Review: Dire Straits, "On Every Street"

This album has been has eagerly awaited (and delayed as many times) as the new GUNS N’ ROSES opus, and comes not only on the back of a hit single, but also as the forerunner of a three-year (!) world tour. So has it been worth the wait? Well, the answer would seem to be a definite yes!

Having single-handedly helped to steer the CD into its current position has the only credible recording format for real music fans, MARK KNOPFLER and his cohorts have managed to produce an album that is every bit as good as its predecessor, Brothers In Arms. In fact the album is quite similar to the latter, featuring of course KNOPFLER’s trademark guitar and instantly recognisable vocals, and also containing several new tunes which bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the tracks on Brothers…

For example, slower, haunting numbers such as side one's Fade to Black and You and Your Friend, and side two's Iron Hand and Planet of New Orleans are all very reminiscent of the Brothers... title track, whilst the opening track on side two, Heavy Fuel, instantly brings to mind the huge hit Money for Nothing with its light, up-tempo beat and catchy singalonga STRAITS chorus.

The only criticism that this album lays itself open to, is that the band have played it fairly safe, is offering their huge audience more of what put them there in the first place, and is not really taking any risks -- sticking to a tried-and-tested formula.

Still, this does not detract from the fact that this is a very pleasing album that will no doubt find a home "on every street" in the record buying world between now and the end of the world tour.

Grade B-

Nick Douglas
Riff Raff
November 1991

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!