Dire Straits: Making Movies [BACK TO BLACK/VERTIGO]

Why you'll love it

This Back to Black reissue comes with a custom inner sleeve. Making Movies holds "Romeo and Juliet," a UK No. 8 single, and "Tunnel of Love," featured in An Officer and a Gentleman.

This edition

• Back to Black series
• Custom inner sleeve
• Pressed in the Czech Republic
• Stereo mix

About the album

Mark Knopfler spent the first half of 1980 writing, then went looking for a producer with a big, widescreen touch. He found Jimmy Iovine, fresh from Patti Smith's "Because the Night" and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, and Iovine brought along E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan. They cut the album at the Power Station in New York between June and August 1980, and the songs got longer, bolder and more cinematic to match.

"Tunnel of Love" opens with a snatch of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel Waltz" before exploding into eight minutes of fairground romance and one of Knopfler's great solos. "Romeo and Juliet" is a heartbreaker sung to a resonator guitar, "Skateaway" follows a roller-skating girl through city traffic with the radio in her ears, and "Solid Rock" and "Expresso Love" rock hard. The closing "Les Boys" is a wry little cabaret number.

The album went to No. 1 in Italy and Norway and double platinum in the UK, and the title came from a song left off the record that was reworked into "Expresso Love." An album called Making Movies that ended up in a Richard Gere film is what we'd call a neat bit of forward planning.

Also at Kops: more Dire Straits on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Vertigo / Mercury (cat# 3752905), a reissue of the 1980 album.