Music / Love Over Gold

"Well a long time ago came a man on a track, walking thirty miles with a sack on his back..."

Love Over Gold, released in 1982 through Vertigo Records in the UK and Warner (Bros.) Records in the US, is the fourth studio album by British roots rock band Dire Straits. A much more ambitious project than previous albums, this one continues the increasing complexity of the band's music that had started two years earlier with Making Movies, the product of frontman Mark Knopfler's continuing desire to push the boundaries of what Dire Straits as musicians were capable of and innovate more and more upon the band's sound. The end result of this was an outright Progressive Rock album, far removed from the Three Chords and the Truth style that the band first achieved fame from, with heavy incorporation of keyboards and atmospheric synthesizer parts courtesy of keyboardist Alan Clark.

The album topped the charts in the UK, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Italy, and Austria, and peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the Sweden Albums chart. The album additionally went gold in the US & Spain, platinum in Canada, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, and double-platinum in the UK. Lead single "Private Investigations" was also a No. 1 hit in the Netherlands and a No. 2 hit in the UK.

Love Over Gold spawned two singles: "Private Investigations" and "Industrial Disease". An additional song, "Private Dancer", was written for the album but not recorded beyond an instrumental track; Knopfler, finding the lyrics unsuited for a male vocalist, handed the song to Tina Turner, who re-recorded it from scratch (owing to rights issues regarding the instrumental track) and made it the Title Track of her 1984 comeback album.

On a more trivial note, Love Over Gold was the first album to be played over the radio on a Compact Disc; a promotional CD was broadcast by the BBC in October of 1982 (CD copies of the album wouldn't become commercially available for another two years).

Tracklist:

Side One

1. "Telegraph Road" (14:17)
2. "Private Investigations" (6:47)

Side Two

1. "Industrial Disease" (5:50)
2. "Love Over Gold" (6:18)
3. "It Never Rains" (8:00)

Two men say they're tropers, one of 'em must be wrong:

• Age-Progression Song: "Telegraph Road" is one for industrial Britain, inspired by a bus ride Mark Knopfler took across Detroit, Michigan (itself facing exponentially worsening industrial woes even back then).
• Anaphora: In "Telegraph Road", one part of the song's narrative sees the narrator recount the development of the towns that surround the titular road as follows:
  Then came the churches
  Then came the schools
  Then came the lawyers
  Then came the rules
  Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
• Call-Back: "It Never Rains" briefly alludes to "Romeo and Juliet", from the preceding album, Making Movies.
  Now your new Romeo
  Was just a gigolo when he let you down
• Concept Album: The album as a whole examines the rise and fall of British domestic industry under Margaret Thatcher.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the band's previous three albums, which explored many themes typical of roots rock and had a sound that ranged from upbeat to laid-back, Love Over Gold is a much more cynical album, with comparatively moodier instrumentals and lyrics that explore the increasingly desperate state of life outside of white-collar urbanity. Even the musically upbeat "Industrial Disease" is highly sarcastic with its musical tone.
• Echoing Acoustics: Used heavily throughout the album to give the music a more chamber-like effect.
• Epic Rocking: Oh yes. The shortest song on the album is the 5:50 "Industrial Disease", and the other four very much surpass the 6-minute mark; the 14-minute "Telegraph Road" deserves special mention for being Dire Straits' longest composition ever.
• The Falklands War: Alluded to in "Industrial Disease".
• Gratuitous Panning: The guitar part in "Love Over Gold" plays exclusively in the right channel.
• Here We Go Again!: "Industrial Disease" ends with a faint voice muttering "oh no... I'm sick," indicating that the cycle of industrial malaise is doomed to repeat itself because nobody took proper action in response to the last decline.
• Japan Takes Over the World: Mentioned by the protest singer in "Industrial Disease" as one of the British government's motives for starting The Falklands War.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: "Industrial Disease" mentions the narrator suffering from "brewer's droop," an old slang term for alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction.
• Longest Song Goes First: The 14-minute "Telegraph Road" opens the album.
• Lower-Class Lout: Everyone but Dr. Parkinson in "Industrial Disease" qualifies.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Industrial Disease", a bouncy song about society panicking in the face of industrial collapse.
• Mythology Gag: The narrator's diagnosis of "Brewer's Droop from drinking beer" in "Industrial Disease" harks back to Mark Knopfler's earlier band Brewer's Droop.
• Napoleon Delusion: The two men in "Industrial Disease" who claim to be Jesus.
• New Sound Album: Putting aside the Progressive Rock-shaped elephant in the room, this album sees the band's shift to a more atmospheric sound, with greater use of keyboards, Echoing Acoustics, and musical & engineering techniques very much oriented for the studio (compared to the more live performance-friendly instrumentation on previous albums), all of which would set the tone for the band's final two albums.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Compared to the roots rock albums before and after it, the Progressive Rock direction of Love Over Gold is a huge outlier in the Dire Straits backlog.
• Patriotic Fervor: Mocked scathingly in "Industrial Disease".
• Private Eye Monologue: "Private Investigations" is this trope in song form.
• Progressive Rock: An unusually thorough delve into this genre by Dire Straits' standards.
• Protest Song:
  • Love Over Gold could more or less be considered a protest album, calling out Britain's collapsing domestic industries under Margaret Thatcher's tenure as prime minister.
  • In-universe, "Industrial Disease" features an unnamed protest singer pointing out that The Falklands War is pretty much just the Tories' way of puffing themselves up for the British people and the rest of the world.
    They wanna have a war to keep their factories!
    They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees!
    They wanna have a war to stop us buying Japanese!
    They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease!
• Shout-Out:
  • "Industrial Disease" namedrops ITV and the The BBC.
  • "It Never Rains" mentions Tin Pan Alley, a block in New York City home to some of the most famous and most ubiquitous music publishers and songwriters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Spoken Word in Music: At the end of "Industrial Disease", Mark Knopfler can be heard muttering "oh no... I'm sick!" It's very faint in the mix, so it can be hard to notice without turning the volume up.
• Take That!: Many in "Industrial Disease", towards the Margaret Thatcher administration, towards anti-Japanese sentiment in Britain, towards people who over-analyze pressing issues with no offers of solutions, towards ineffectual protesters, and towards the more vapid and/or overly-patriotic members of British society.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Telegraph Road" is one to Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil.

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