Knopfler Tour

Given that Kill to Get Crimson follows Mark Knopfler's yearlong collaboration with Emmylou Harris – inaugurated by the album All the Roadrunning and followed by a tour, subsequently documented on the live set Real Live Roadrunning – it might be reasonable to presume that it bears a slightly heavier folk influence, as if Emmylou had rubbed off on the guitarist…

Exactly ten years after Dire Straits' first compilation, Money for Nothing, appeared in the stores, their second, Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits, was released. A decade is a significant span of time, and the average band would have produced enough material for an entirely different collection, one that shared no similarities with its predecessor. Dire Straits is not the average band, however, and during those ten years, they released exactly two albums – 1991's On Every Street, their first studio album since Brothers in Arms in 1985, and 1993's On the Night, a live album culled from tapes of the record's supporting tour. Not quite enough new material for a new greatest-hits album, but it had been years since Dire Straits had released an album of any sort (a compilation of BBC sessions snuck into the stores in 1995) – hence the birth of Sultans of Swing.

Pure…Country is a decent four-CD set highlighting 68 classic singles. Along with the original versions of radio favorites by Johnny Cash, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Ray Price, and Lynn Anderson are less than obvious inclusions by the Browns, Sylvia, and Little Jimmy Dickens.

Dire Straits emerged during the post-punk era of the late '70s, and while their sound was minimalistic and stripped down, they owed little to punk. If anything, the band was a direct outgrowth of the roots revivalism of pub rock, but where pub rock celebrated good times, Dire Straits were melancholy. Led by guitarist/vocalist Mark Knopfler, the group built their sound upon the laid-back blues-rock of J.J. Cale, but they also had jazz and country inflections, occasionally dipping into the epic song structures of progressive rock. The band's music was offset by Knopfler's lyrics, which approximated the winding, stream-of-conscious narratives of Bob Dylan…

Recorded live at St. Jacob Stadium, Basel, Switzerland, on June 28th 1992 during the ‘On Every Street Tour 1992’