Of course I have Brothers in Arms. Doesn't everybody in my age-group? Or, it seemed that everybody in my Hall of Residence at East Midlands Finishing School did. Except for Mad Lucy, of course.
Of course, I slightly missed the point. I bought it on Vinyl LP with 18th birthday money. Gosh, it was my first record bought as an adult... But it was supposed to be the big breakthrough for CD.
Dire Straits get a raw deal. They are seen as terminably naff. I just won't buy that. Just listen to this album, or some others of their singles with which I am familiar - Sultans of Swing, Romeo and Juliet, Twisting by the Pool.
I suppose they are regarded as naff because one has to apply brain to appreciate them - somewhat ironic, when you listen to the words of Money for Nothing - with Sting on backing vocals (oh yeah!). I adore Why Worry, and believe the title track to be an all-time rock classic.
Walk Right Back with The Everlys, in contrast, is just a nice collection of nice pleasant pop ditties. It would be difficult to read any deep meaning into the songs other than love lost and found, the eternal themes of pop music. And they don't require much brain power to understand and enjoy. Ephemera, but oxymoronically, lasting ephemera.
I think I like all of the tracks, especially Love is Strange.
But one track above all else stands out. Ebony eyes. When I first heard it, I regarded it as Sentimental Tosh. But just a few months later, it acquired a poignancy. His beautiful Ebony Eyes was flying out to marry him on Flight 1203, but the plane never arrived...
Then in December 1988 I had a dream about an aeroplane coming down in our back garden (in the flight path of Manchester Airport). the next evening, I was working a shift at the Cock Robin. A man came in, visibly shaken, and said that a plane had crashed in Scotland, over some, unknown town called Lockerbie.
That plane had a flight number of 103.
Perhaps it takes disasters to learn how many people you are vaguely connected with, and how small the world is. On that flight was a fellow student of mine, Flora Swire, who was friends with Medic friends of mine; there was also a former fellow student (from a small college) of my sister and brother-in-law.
My father's friend, the lovely John, was a keen potholer and very much part of the Pennine Pothole Rescue, so amongst many others was called in for the search-and-rescue. By all accounts (this was after my father died), John was never the same again, never the chirpy John, who would answer the phone "Wigan Wagon Wheelworks". A few years later, the firm was going through a round a redundancy and John committed suicide. It was generally acknowledged that whilst the redundancy acted as final straw, the real cause was the stress and trauma of search-and-recovery in such carnage.
Ebony Eyes makes me cry.
