Two years ago, I received an email from a friend in London telling me she’d been out to see Dire Straits the night before and I should, under no circumstances, miss them when they come to Australia.
This was unusual on two counts. Firstly, I had no idea my friend was a Dire Straits fan. Secondly, the band stopped playing live after a gig in Zaragoza Spain in October 1992 on the final stop of their On Every Street Tour.
On that tour they played 300 shows in front of 7.1 million ticket-buying fans. Despite the numbers, the tour wasn’t as acclaimed or as commercially successful as previous outings. As manager Ed Bicknell once said: “The last tour was utter misery. Whatever the zeitgeist was that we had been part of, it had passed.”
My friend, it turns out, had probably seen the Dire Straits Legacy, formerly known as the Dire Straits Legends or she may have seen the The Dire Straits Experience, which is touring Australia in October. The “Legacy” features a number of former Dire Straits members, while the “Experience” (billed as “the world’s greatest Dire Straits show”) is helmed by the group’s former saxophone player, Chris White, alongside virtuoso guitarist and singer Terence Reis. None of these bands will ever feature original leader, singer, guitarist and songwriter, Mark Knopfler.
White’s pedigree as a player is high. He not only performed with the real Dire Straits, but he has also played with Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams and Mick Jagger. Like many of his generation, musical inspiration arrived as a boy while watching television.
“I’d been playing violin for some time, but didn’t really love it,” White explains. “I was watching TV with my Dad one night and there was a guy, I think John Dankworth, playing alto saxophone. I thought it sounded great, so I went and saw the music teacher at school the next day. Incredibly, he had one in a sack in the cupboard and gave it to me with the words, ‘Here, take that home and see what you can do with it’. That is how it all began.”
Growing up in something of a musical golden age, White found influences and musical heroes wherever his ears took him.
“My main influences, when I started out, were the jazz players like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley,” White says. “But in terms of how I play now and the way I like to play, I guess the most influential players were Michael Brecker, Dave Sanborn and Ernie Watts. Their approach to funk and rock was pretty groundbreaking.”
All of that playing eventually led to a spot touring with Dire Straits on the Brothers in Arms Tour (1985-1986) and the aforementioned On Every Street Tour (1991-1992). Among fans, White is possibly best known for his onstage solo during Romeo and Juliet.
“That solo came about in rehearsal for the Brothers in Arms Tour,” he recalls. “Originally there was no saxophone on Romeo and Juliet. One day in rehearsal, the band was playing it and Mark stopped singing. The band carried on playing, so I picked up my sax and started to play. Mark listened and when we got to the end, he just said, ‘Hmm, okay, I think we’ll have that’. It didn’t get properly recorded until the live version came out on the On the Night DVD.”
White has many memories from his time on stage with Dire Straits. One looms larger than all the others.
“There were lots of highlights and it would take a long time to list them, but one of the most memorable was playing at Live Aid with the band,” he says. “It was an incredible day at Wembley Stadium. The atmosphere was just electric, so many incredible bands and musicians all in one place and for such an important cause. It was also my 30th birthday, which just made it the best birthday party ever.
“One particular memory always makes me laugh. We were standing at the side of the stage waiting for the stage manager to tell us to go on. I was holding my saxophone standing next to Sting and Jack Sonni. It was chaos there, crew rushing all over the place, taking stuff off stage and putting stuff on. One of the crew pushing a flight case bumped into me from behind. He looked at me and said ‘Get out of the bloody way, mate!’. At that very moment the stage manager said, ‘Right. You’re on. GO!’ And that was it, we were onstage at Live Aid.”
So, after playing with the real thing, you have to wonder what inspired The Dire Straits Experience?
“The band came about because in 2011 I was asked to put a band together to play a Dire Straits set for a charity concert at The Royal Albert Hall in London,” White says. “I emailed Mark (Knopfler) to explain the situation. He was out on tour somewhere. He emailed back and said he thought it was great to be playing a charity event and wished us good luck with it. It was only supposed to be for one night. I had no thoughts of it continuing beyond that concert.
“Fortunately, the concert sold out and was very well received. Over the next few weeks, I got calls from promoters asking if we could maybe do it again? This continued to happen and now here we are 13 years later on our Shiver in the Dark World Tour. I had no idea this would happen, but I am grateful and humbled that it has.”
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The biggest question for the band at this stage of the game is what songs do you put in and what songs do you leave out? It’s a fine balance between pleasing hardcore fans and more casual lovers of the group’s music that might only be familiar with Sultans of Swing and a few others.
“Well, I think there are some songs which people pretty much always want to hear,” White says. “Songs such Telegraph Road, Brothers in Arms, Romeo and Juliet and Walk of Life, so we try to make sure they are included. After that, we can change things around a bit if we feel like it. There are so many great Dire Straits songs to choose from. It means that we can play early tracks like Lady Writer, Wild West End, Down to the Waterline and so on. There are still some we haven’t played yet.”
The Dire Straits Experience plays the QPAC Concert Hall, October 23, 7pm; qpac.com.au
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