We weren't vibing at all, but then I remember Omar coming in and it was like a bulldozer - New York attitude, New York energy." The music needed that energy and we weren't really getting it. It was like being on a vacation for a while and losing a little bit of edge without even realizing it. "We were there in Montserrat, it was beautiful, there was a lot of swimming, a lot of hanging out, and basically we got into a thing where the energy slowly ebbed away. "Omar is very, very confident as a musician and as a person, and what he brought to it was exactly what it needed, which was kind of a kick in the butt," said Dorfsman.
While he acknowledged that he could have handled the situation more delicately, Dorfsman stood by the results, which he recalled making an immediate difference as soon as Hakim knocked out his first drum track - the start of a quick two days of work that ended with him replacing all of Williams' performances except his crescendos during the "Money for Nothing" intro. Although Williams wasn't fired from the band, he was eventually dismissed from the sessions and replaced by Omar Hakim, then a member of Sting's Blue Turtles band. One notable exception to that rule proved to be drummer Terry Williams' playing, which Dorfsman immediately found lacking - an opinion that, as the weeks dragged on, Knopfler came to share. "And the board was so good that anything you put through it just sounded great." "It was a great place to hang out and it was very relaxed, so you could focus on what you were doing," explained Dorfsman. What saved the tracks - and helped make Brothers in Arms a benchmark recording for the early years of the nascent digital era - was the studio's Neve console, which combined with the overall Montserrat vibe to produce a purity of sound as well as intent. "It was a good-sounding studio, but the main room itself was nothing to write home about. Still, we crowded everybody in there, recording with at least three or four guys on every tune, while I built little rooms out of gobos and baffles and blankets." "It was pretty torturous," Dorfsman told Sound on Sound. After working the songs out with the band in rehearsal, Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler took the group and co-producer Neil Dorfsman out to AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat - a setting that proved idyllic in some ways and frustrating in others.
But tucked in between more typically Straits-ian cuts like "Your Latest Trick" and the title track were a handful of relatively punchy, aggressively radio-friendly songs, two of which - "Money for Nothing" and "Walk of Life" - would open up the band's music to millions and millions of new fans.īut before it topped charts, sold millions and won Grammys, Brothers in Arms had a fairly humble birth. That sound remained mostly intact throughout Brothers in Arms, which arrived on with the same impeccably clean performances and tasteful yet powerful guitar work as previous outings.
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