When Dire Straits called it a day for the first time, Chris White had been a member for only a few years. Those, though, were the peak years, at least live: they included Live Aid, massive global tours, and playing for Nelson Mandela. Today, with the permission of the likes of Mark Knopfler and John Ilsley, White performs in the best recreation of Dire Straits he can manage, an act called ‘The Dire Straits Experience’.

“I had been working with Mark for a few tears on other productions, when the Brothers In Arms album really changed how the band was perceived and the size of venues, particularly with its success in America,” White recalls. “It was an incredible time. A few years later, there was the ‘On Every Street’ album and tour, which involved a huge band; I don’t know how many trucks driving around with stuff. I think Mark was looking for something a little more contained, really.”

“I first worked with Mark on a Bill Forsyth film called ‘Comfort and Joy’. I’d been told to go to a studio for an hour to work on one track. I turned up for that, started playing, and Mark turned up and listened to me warming up. We did the one track, then he asked me to try something on another. I ended up being there for three days, playing on the movie, and then he said ‘I’ll see you around, and you must come and play with the band’, and that was it. Mark gave me a lot of freedom.”

“The Experience don’t play note for note copies of Dire Straits,” White says of his current offering. “It is very much about giving people the chance to see what it was we did back then. There was freedom, and there is now, too, and it keeps things fresh for us.”

“We play for two hours and fifteen minutes, similar to what we did with Dire Straits, and we change around some things, and drop down to a four piece at one stage. There are lots of things we change around, but also things like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Brothers In Arms’, people want to hear those and I still love playing them.”

“These guys are all great performers, they all like what we’re doing, and the energy on stage is on a par with the energy I experienced with Dire Straits back in the day. The Experience allows us to do different things, too. In 2019, for example, we played Mozambique.”

“When the call came in, I said ‘really, are you sure’, as I wasn’t expecting Dire Straits stuff to have translated to a country like Mozambique. But we played two shows, one was a semi-corporate fundraiser thing in a hotel, but the other was on a university sports field to 5,000 people, a 99% black audience.”

“We started playing ‘So Far Away’, and they knew every word, we couldn’t hear ourselves play. It really took me by surprise. So this thing has rolled on and on, and it’s now a full time job. We get old fans and young people, which is a testament to what Mark wrote and produced.”

“I still look back at Live Aid,” he says. “That was my 30th birthday and we were in the middle of a run of 13 nights at Wembley Arena. We went and did Live Aid in the stadium in late afternoon, then went back to the Arena for our own shows, and a lot of people who played Live Aid wandered across and joined us for the night. It was an amazing day.” The band has died, but in this renewed form, the memories live on.

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