It was made cheap and made fast. In February 1978 Dire Straits went into Basing Street Studios in London with Muff Winwood producing and Rhett Davies engineering, and cut their first record. The band were still broke when they walked in. The deal was new, the budget was thin, and the songs had already been road-tested as a five-song demo at Pathway Studios the previous July.

Winwood kept it spare on purpose. He locked the bass and the bass drum together and otherwise let Knopfler get on with it. The guitar got compression and reverb and not much else. The studio hired in a pile of amps and effects to audition, then kept the plainest result. That restraint is the sound of the album.

The record came out quietly in October 1978, no fanfare, no obvious single anyone in the building agreed on. Winwood himself thought the standout track was a commercially absurd choice; a song about a trad jazz band in an empty pub, and who buys that. The album that grew out of a demo cut in a tiny eight-track room is the most direct version of this band you will ever hear. Start at track one and let it run.