Dire straits - live in chester, may 1978

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posted on 07 Sep 2006 under category Meta

Dire Straits - Live in Chester, May 1978

This is one of the boots I grabbed off of Dimeadozen a few weeks ago. It’s a soundboard recording for radio broadcast of Dire Straits playing live in Chester in May, 1978. It’s after the first album was recorded, but before it was released since he refers to it as the ‘forthcoming’ album. Being a soundboard, it’s very clear-sounding, but the bass is criminally buried in the mix. For a refreshing change, though, the rhythm guitar is quite audible (somewhat rare among lots of DS recordings, but I’ll get into that later…), so that’s a plus.

Though the band had already done a small tour of England opening for the Talking Heads, it’s somewhat obvious that the live show was still new to the band. While tight playing-wise, Mark has a bit of trouble integrating singing and playing at the same time, and his voice comes off a bit less than forceful early on. A few songs in, though, he’s doing fine. Maybe it was just an off-night.

Being this early in their career, it’s unsurprising that most of the songs are from the first album. “Eastbound Train”, a cover of the London Tubes that they did often in the club days, makes an appearance. Otherwise, everything is pretty much as it appears either on the album or on Live at the BBC, performance-wise. This version of “Six Blade Knife” is balanced between the sedate album version and the almost aggressive BBC version. “Lions” comes across very well, as does “Sultans of Swing”, and it’s really neat to hear a clean, early live version of “In the Gallery”.

Overall, the excellent performance musically, combined with the obviously live vocals and the quiet of it being a radio broadcast make it a good snapshot of what it might have been like to catch them in a pub in the early days. Fans of this early era of the band would be well-served to track this down if they’re tired of wearing out the debut album and the Live at the BBC disc.

(At this time I was having a hard time trying to come up with blog post material, what with being so busy otherwise, so when I started getting these bootlegs I thought I could milk them for blog posts, so that at least I would keep writing.

There’s a lesson for me in there somewhere. I should listen to me more often. Maybe I wasn’t always as stupid as I thought I used to be…)