Dire Straits

They were broke. Mark Knopfler, his brother David, and bassist John Illsley were sharing a council flat in Deptford, South London, living on next to nothing and unable to pay the gas bill. That is where the name came from. Not a metaphor; the actual dire straits they were in.

Knopfler wrote the songs and played the guitar. The voice, the fingerpicked Stratocaster, the long unhurried solos; that was him. But the band had no record deal and no industry friends. What they had was a five-song demo, cut at a tiny eight-track room called Pathway Studios in North London in July 1977.

The demo is the whole origin story. They handed it to Charlie Gillett, who presented Honky Tonk on BBC Radio London, hoping for advice. Gillett put one of the songs straight into rotation and kept playing it. Two months later they signed to Phonogram. The reputation came before the industry even knew the name.

The debut album followed in 1978, self-titled, made cheap and fast. Everything Dire Straits would become starts in that flat, with that demo, with a guitarist who knew exactly what he wanted a song to sound like. Press play and you can hear it.