Review: DS:UK pay highly accomplished tribute to Dire Straits at Festival Drayton Centre
Close your eyes and you could well have imagined that Mark Knopler and the rest of Dire Straits were up there on the Festival Drayton Centre stage, writes John Hargreaves.
DS:UK band leader Dave Phillips said "we do this because we love Mark’s music" and a highly accomplished musical tribute this proved to be. But you wouldn’t have wanted to keep your eyes shut for long because the performance made the most of the centre’s technical kit to add visual, kinetic drama to many of the songs. It added up to great, fast-paced entertainment in its own right.
They started with So Far Away, the opening track from Dire Straits' most popular album Brothers in Arms. Celebrating the 40th anniversary of its release, the band included every song on the album alongside other favourites.
In The Man’s Too Strong the drama was all in the music. Phillips played an acoustic guitar, creating a bluegrass feel that was broken eventually by powerful drum strokes from Joe Boult, fired like artillery shells. It led nicely into the title track Brothers in Arms, which opened with the sound of a thunderous storm off, billowing mist, and the stage cast in dark lighting. Great swells came from Kingsley Sage’s keyboards, there was soaring guitar, and finally Jade Gall’s flute returned soaring like a hawk above Phillips’ enigmatically laid-back vocals. Knopfler wrote the piece in 1982 during the Falklands War, and how well it conjured up images of the current tragedy in Ukraine.
Tunnel of Love was strangely thrilling, with its mellow guitar so fresh and young. Then came more storm effects with rain, smoke, rolls of thunder and roiling guitar clearing to an ethereal sound on keyboards and yellow downlights glittering off the numerous instruments on stage. You could almost feel electrons pulsing down the wire through the 14 minutes of Telegraph Road. "They say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed, We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed".
"I’ve run every red light on memory lane," the song ended. But not quite. The band went on to give a powerful performance of Romeo and Juliet making it sound like a clarion call to love. "He sang the streets a serenade, laying everybody low with a love song that he made." The exquisite sax from Jade said it all.
By the encore the audience was on its feet clapping and swaying just like Sultans of Swing.
