A band walks into a New York studio with a guitarist and walks out with a different one. That is the short version of how Dire Straits made their third album, Making Movies, which came out on 17 October 1980. The British group had already built a following with lean, dry rock songs, but this record would push them toward something more widescreen. The man steering that change was Mark Knopfler, the group's singer, guitarist and sole songwriter on the album.
Sessions at the Power Station
The sessions began at the Power Station studio in New York on 20 June 1980 and ran until 25 August. Knopfler had finished the tour for the previous Dire Straits record and started writing new material in the first half of that year. He wanted a different sound, so he brought in Jimmy Iovine as co-producer. Knopfler had heard Iovine's work on Patti Smith's song "Because the Night" and decided that was the kind of scale he wanted.
Iovine had already made his name with Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. He knew how to make a rock band feel bigger without losing its nerve. One of his first moves was to bring in Roy Bittan, the keyboard player from Springsteen's E Street Band. Bittan's piano gave the new songs a lift that the earlier Dire Straits records had never attempted.
David Knopfler's departure
Then the ground shifted. David Knopfler, Mark's brother and the band's rhythm guitarist, left Dire Straits in August 1980 while the album was still being recorded. The split came after repeated quarrels between the brothers. David's guitar parts were nearly finished, but Mark chose to re-record them himself rather than keep his brother's work on the record. A session guitarist, Sid McGinnis, also played on the album without being credited.
The album that emerged from that rupture was more confident and more dramatic. "Romeo and Juliet" became the biggest single from the record, reaching number 8 in the British chart after its release on 9 January 1981. "Tunnel of Love" came out in Europe on 24 October 1980, and "Skateaway" followed in the United States that December. The title Making Movies was borrowed from a song that never made the final track list; Knopfler reworked it into "Expresso Love".
Chart performance and short film
The gamble paid off commercially. Making Movies reached number 1 in Italy and Norway, number 4 in the United Kingdom and number 19 in the United States. It went platinum in America and double platinum in Britain. In 1981 a short film with the same title appeared on VHS and Beta and played in cinemas, built from three clips directed by Lester Bookbinder for "Romeo and Juliet", "Tunnel of Love" and "Skateaway".
The album also changed the shape of the band. After its release in October 1980, Dire Straits added keyboard player Alan Clark and guitarist Hal Lindes to the lineup. They would help carry the new, fuller sound into the long tour that followed. The record's three most durable songs, "Romeo and Juliet", "Tunnel of Love" and "Solid Rock", stayed in the band's setlists for years, through the tours for their later albums.
What makes Making Movies worth returning to is not just the singles. It is the sound of a songwriter deciding to stop sounding like his heroes and start sounding like himself. Mark Knopfler wrote every song, but he let the production open them up, with Bittan's piano and a more cinematic sweep. The brother who left is absent, but the music feels complete.
It is the sound of a songwriter deciding to stop sounding like his heroes and start sounding like himself.
By the time the album was remastered and reissued in 1996, and again in the United States in 2000, it had already become one of the defining rock records of its decade. Rolling Stone later placed it at number 52 on a list of the 100 best albums of the eighties. The title may have come from a song that was never released, but the movie it named turned out to be a hit.