Gig 065/066 Dire Straits / The Motors

Dire Straits
Oxford Polytechnic
2 July 1978
The Motors
Oxford College of Further Education
7 July 1978

 

The Clash and Bowie was quite enough excitement for one week but a gig’s a gig so Saturday night I went to the Poly to see those no-hopers Dire Straits, for whom excitement wasn’t really a selling point. Not that I didn’t like them, I’d seem them earlier in the year (Gig 048) and thought they were pretty good in an undemonstrative way, perfectly enjoyable, obviously never going to make it big. They just didn’t fit anywhere in 1978; for a start the guitarist/singer was an old balding bloke who looked like a teacher (I checked, he was 28 and yes he was – or had been – a teacher) and didn’t seem remotely charismatic nor particularly cross about anything. But boy could he play guitar, eloquent cascades of melody defining the songs, in which the vocal line was semi-spoken rather than sung. He evoked JJ Cale, Clapton, Ry Cooder, maybe the more lyrical blues guys such as BB King. Already I could hear Bob Harris murmuring ‘hmmm, really great’, as the new wave tsunami wiped them all out of existence.

 

The audience was comprised mainly of students, clean-cut, studious young people who also didn’t ‘fit’ anywhere in the pop-cultural scheme of things and weren’t losing too much sleep about it. Within a few years they would be earning healthy salaries as architects, town planners, engineers, and while they probably didn’t obsess over music they would occasionally spend part of their considerable disposable income on albums, some of which probably included Dire Straits. For their part, Dire Straits are one of the most uncompromised groups I ever saw; just not in the snotty adolescent punk style, nor in the contrived so-normal-it’s-weird manner of Talking Heads. Mark Knopfler wasn’t about to spike up his sparse barnet for anyone. They just played their slightly sleepy, refined groove and if it didn’t take off they’d go back to teaching or whatever. For the most part the students enjoyed it and I did too, even if it lacked absolutely the thrill of The Clash and Bowie. It occurs to me that in terms of units shifted, Dire Straits may well be the most successful act I ever witnessed. Some fifty million-plus heavily marked-up album sales later I imagine they still don’t worry too much about what the zeitgeist is doing; they never were exciting, and much harm it did them.

 

Then there were The Motors, who were ostensibly ‘exciting’. As I may have mentioned, not many punk acts came to Oxford, and the Motors certainly weren’t punk but they were near enough to draw a punk-ish audience – a number of regulars from the Oranges & Lemons were at this gig. The Motors played high-energy melodic rock’n’roll and did so very well. Their problem was that they’d been around for a long time in various pub-rock acts, and were a bit old for this lark. I mean proper old, like 30-something, and it looked like they were trying too hard and too late to jump the punk bandwagon. Whatever, they were doing well around this time, their tune Airport being a big hit. In the print factory – probably in all factories – it was common practice for vaguely bored shop-floor workers to sing popular songs with the words altered to something smutty or profane, thus Message in a Bottle became ‘Massage in a Brothel’, and Airport became ‘Eff off’ (you’d have to hear it for it to make sense). Henceforth I have always heard it as ‘Eff off’, funny what sticks in the memory. It was a decent gig by the way, just not really what I was looking for at the time.