Hi there,
on MKNews there is a link to Alan's new homepage, created together with Terry Kilburn. It is all in the early stages but I found some interesting stuff
at the "Biog" section. Have a read, it seems we all should be lucky to have had Alan join the band apparently otherwise there would not have been another record after Making Movies... A quotation here from Alan's biog section:
People sometimes point out to me that when I joined the band I transformed it into the huge, stadium-filling phenomina people remember it as, and perhaps, without blowing my own trumpet too hard, they're right. Before that, Mark's songs, amazing though they were, were written and performed within a very tight format with only a handful of chords played only on guitars. He'd begun to realise that if the band was going to go the distance he had to introduce another dynamic. He'd done that to a degree on the Making Movies album, by having Roy Bittan overdub some piano and organ parts, and he'd written at least one of the songs on a Prophet V synthesizer. But I brought a whole new musicality to the band by introducing them to new chords, ideas, sounds, moods and arrangements they hadn't experienced, which was immediately evident in the first record I recorded with them, the complex and expansive Love Over Gold album, and every record thereafter.
And another one about being in the band in general:
Let me give you another tip: If you ever get the chance to join a moderately successful band that stands a reasonable chance of becoming a huge, money-spinning global phenomina, be sure to have a manager representing you.
Some interesting stuff here. Anyone who thinks Dire Straits were at their best during the time from 1981 to 1985 must fully agree to these statements,
and of course of lot of us "Die-hard-fans" think that this era was the best one I am sure. That would also mean that Mark's solo career since then was
scaling down (because of the absence of Alan's contributions), and that is something I would not support at all. For my part, I am more happy with his solo releases and the amount of songs he still releases than always remembering one or two "better" albums from the 80's...
Not my cup of tea also is the fact that Alan is joining Marius M
