(Credits: Far Out / Aherrero)
Mon 29 December 2025 15:30, UK
It’s hard to think of Brothers In Arms as anything but a roaring success that propelled Dire Straits to the highest moment of their career as a band, and a decade-defining record that was beloved by many.
Songwriter Mark Knopfler had arguably perfected the band’s sound by this point, five albums in and after a handful of albums that hadn’t quite showcased his excellence in the earlier stages of their career together. With Brothers In Arms, things were considerably more refined than they had been, and it’s understandable that it would go on to define them as a group.
Not only was it a record that saw the band elevate their sound to a greater level, but it was a somewhat more commercial release than they’d ever put out up to that point. With singles such as ‘Walk of Life’ and ‘Money For Nothing’, the band saw even more chart success than they had been able to accrue before, with both songs ending the inconsistencies of previous album cycles and reaching the top five in the UK.
It has to be noted that while not as commercially successful, their previous album, Love Over Gold, had still been a huge critical success, so it made sense that things were going to be a little more high-stakes with whatever they did next, with audiences hotly anticipating an album that would exceed the high bar they’d set for themselves.
As it happens, its successor became not just one of the best-selling albums of the year, but of all time, shifting 30 million copies worldwide and becoming a global phenomenon, reaching the top of the album charts in the UK, US and most of Europe.
It wasn’t just a resounding success in terms of sales, as it also won a Grammy in 1986 for ‘Best Engineered Album’ in a non-classical context, and also took home the ‘Album of the Year’ gong at the Brit Awards the same year.
These are all signs of a record having been a carefully crafted masterpiece, but Knopfler has always thought of it as a complete accident, and that there were other external factors out of their control that helped it gain notoriety.
During a 1995 interview with Guitarist, ten years on from the album’s original release, Knopfler declared that the band have the advent of new technologies to thank for the success of the album. “Brothers In Arms just happened to coincide with compact discs, and it was a sheer fluke,” he supposed. “If it hadn’t been that album, it would have been something else. It was just an accident of timing.”
While he isn’t wrong inasmuch as it could have been any album that received this boost from sales in a new format, there’s no denying that it would have needed to be an album with mass appeal and the musical strength to back it up in order to reach that high level. With Brothers In Arms, Dire Straits has most certainly achieved that, and the existence of the compact disc was simply a bonus.
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