Dire Strats Shm

Dire Straits is the debut album by British rock band Dire Straits, released on 7 October 1978 by Vertigo Records internationally, and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. The album produced the hit single "Sultans of Swing", which reached the number 4 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. The album reached the number one position on album charts in Australia and France, the number two position in the United States, and the number five position in the United Kingdom. Dire Straits was certified double-platinum in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Dire Straits is the debut studio album by the British rock band Dire Straits released on 7 October 1978 by Vertigo Records internationally and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. The album produced the hit single "Sultans of Swing", which reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. The album reached #1 on album charts in Germany, Australia and France, #2 in the United States and #5 in the United Kingdom. Dire Straits was later certified double-platinum in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Love Over Gold is the fourth album by British rock band Dire Straits, released on 20 September 1982 by Vertigo Records internationally, and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. The album produced two singles: "Private Investigations", which reached the number 2 position on the UK Singles Chart, and "Industrial Disease", which reached the number 9 position on Billboard's Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks in the United States. The album reached the number one position on album charts in Australia, Austria, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom, and the number 19 position in the United States. Love Over Gold was certified gold in the United States, platinum in France and Germany, and double-platinum in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Adding a new rhythm guitarist, Dire Straits expands its sounds and ambitions on the sprawling Love Over Gold. In a sense, the album is their prog rock effort, containing only five songs, including the 14-minute opener "Telegraph Road." Since Mark Knopfler is a skilled, tasteful guitarist, he can sustain interest even throughout the languid stretches, but the long, atmospheric, instrumental passages aren't as effective as the group's tight blues-rock, leaving Love Over Gold only a fitfully engaging listen…

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.