There is a particular kind of patience on Communiqué that most bands never learn, and Dire Straits had already figured it out on their second record.
Mark Knopfler plays guitar the way a good carpenter uses a plane — each stroke considered, no motion wasted. Where the debut had the nervous energy of a band that couldn’t believe its luck, this follow-up arrived slower, more certain of itself, content to let a groove breathe until the room fills with it. It came out in June 1979, barely eight months after the first album. The world expected them to repeat themselves. They didn’t, quite.
The Sessions
Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett produced it at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, and that decision alone tells you everything about Knopfler’s instincts at twenty-nine years old. Muscle Shoals was where Aretha Franklin cut “Respect,” where the Rolling Stones went for Sticky Fingers sessions, where the walls had absorbed a particular looseness that you cannot manufacture. Wexler was a legend who had helped define Atlantic Records’ sound across two decades. Bringing him in wasn’t a commercial calculation — it was a statement about what kind of music this was supposed to be.
The rhythm section locked in around Pick Withers on drums, whose restraint here is quietly extraordinary. Withers never showed off. He found the pocket and stayed there, which on a record this unhurried is exactly the discipline required. John Illsley held the low end with the same economical philosophy. The band was a unit in the old-fashioned sense — four people making room for each other.
What the Record Actually Does
“Once Upon a Time in the West” opens things at a lope, guitar figure hovering over the groove like heat off a road. It is not in a hurry to go anywhere and does not need to be.
“Where Do You Think You’re Going” is the obvious single, and it earned its place — one of those melodies that feels like it existed before Knopfler wrote it down. But the deeper pleasures on this record are the ones that don’t announce themselves. “Angel of Mercy” takes seven minutes to unspool, and every one of them is justified. “Follow Me Home” closes the record with a slow swagger that gets inside your chest somewhere around the third minute.
The guitar tone throughout is the thing I keep returning to. Knopfler was playing a National Style O resonator on certain tracks and his beloved Schecter Strat-style guitar on others, with Wexler’s engineers at Muscle Shoals — Jimmy Johnson among them, a session man of immense local experience — capturing it with a directness that a lot of late-seventies productions buried under compression and sheen. This record breathes. You can hear the room.
Opinion, plainly stated: Communiqué is better than people remember. It got overshadowed by what came before and what came after — the debut’s scrappy arrival, Making Movies two years later with its full ambitions on display. The middle child gets overlooked. This one deserves a full evening.
Put it on after ten o’clock. Keep the volume at a level where you can still hear the refrigerator if you try. Let “Angel of Mercy” do what it does.