The dice was loaded from the start.
A love letter to the lyrics of Romeo And Juliet by Dire Straits.
Juliet, when we made love you used to cry
You said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you till I die
If you were a teenager in the early eighties there is a good chance that Romeo And Juliet by Dire Straits was your song.
You would have called it ‘our song’.
This dated song by that naff band belonged to you and your first significant other. It epitomised and encapsulated the intensity, the unique intensity, of the feelings shared by the two of you inside your bubble of love.
Yours. Special. Indescribable and incomprehensible to anyone on the outside.
Except that your friends were all in love like that too, and your song was their song. It was everyone’s song.
A most important social skill from that era was the ability to dance to Romeo And Juliet without looking like a premature accountant. This was not without its challenges.
Romeo And Juliet starts slowly and softly. Only couples are left on the dance floor at the school disco. There are quite a few couples, due to the commodity status of the song’s specialness. These were oxymoronic times. You hold each other tight and shuffle in slow circles, oblivious to those around you.
A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade
Says something like ‘you and me babe how about it?’
But what to do when the pace and amplitude pick up? What to do when the oblivion is shattered?
Juliet the dice were loaded from the start
And I bet, then you exploded in my heart
And I forget I forget the movie song
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
Do you wait it out in your clinch and endure the incongruity in the knowledge that these crescendos are relatively short-lived?
Or separate from your partner and bust some self-conscious moves to a mid-tempo beat on a half-empty dance floor ringed by sniggering peers?
Or maybe overcompensate for your embarrassment by putting on what you hope will be perceived as an ironic show. Lots of over the top flourishes, exaggerated arm movements and some unconvincing air drumming. On the outside you’re all, “I’m loving this. I want you to look at me,” but on the inside you’re all, “Dear God, please let this end.”
This is what first world problems looked like to teenagers in the eighties.
At least the naive infatuation that you associate with the song was a reciprocal arrangement. You and he, or you and she, felt the same way about each other.
And therein lies the irony.
What the song means to you and the meaning conveyed by the lyrics are two very different things.
Mark Knopfler is best known for his signature guitar sound and his constipated voice. But he is also a clever writer.
Romeo And Juliet is about the absence of reciprocity.
He is nuts about her. She is indifferent to the point of disdain.
He has written her a love song. She’s like, “Yeah, whatever.”
Juliet says hey it’s Romeo you nearly gimme me a heart attack
He’s underneath the window she’s singing hey la my boyfriend’s back
You shouldn’t come around here singing up at people like that
At the time I think we all brushed over this second, subtle layer. We focused instead on the tearful love making (a theoretical concept for most of us at the time) and the loving like the stars above. We chose to ignore her apathy, his frustration and the unrequited narrative.
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah
Now you just say oh Romeo yeah you know I used to have a scene with him
When I say we brushed over, I mean we boys. You girls almost certainly got it, all of it. You had the much vaunted early-onset maturity of teenage girls relative to teenage boys, and the perspicacity to recognise the song for what it was.
You were so lucky to bypass the gauche, gawky awkwardness that afflicted that period of male transition. The most acute growing pains were emotional. Growing out of silly boy stuff. Growing sillily into serious adolescent stuff, like you.
Romeo’s ham-fisted attempts at romance, and Juliet’s apathy, were an allegory for the underlying dynamics of many of those first loves.
Mark Knopfler was saying sooth. But we missed it and soon after dismissed it as a time-stamped love song, another thing to grow out of.
On more mature reflection the song is smart, subtle and savvy.
The Killers deemed it credible enough to do a cover version which, sadly, is more of a rendition than an interpretation. A well intentioned missed opportunity.
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?
Liking Dire Straits these days is the musical equivalent of being a shy Tory. They are a guilty pleasure that you publicly disown.
It wasn’t always so. They were very cool when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister. They had an unmistakeable sound and songs with high concept ideas and smart lyrics. Mr Knopfler could spin a ripping yarn:
Telegraph Road
Private Investigations
Once Upon A Time In The West
Your Latest Trick
If there were such a thing as coffee table albums, Dire Straits had a string of them from 1980 to 1985 — Making Movies, Love Over Gold, Brothers In Arms. It was the equivalent of one band releasing Graceland by Paul Simon, The Joshua Tree by U2, and Picture Book by Simply Red in relatively quick succession.
Indeed, Brothers In Arms was apparently the UK’s biggest selling album of the 1980's.
So what went wrong? What made us, who loved and who loved to them, make like Peter and deny and disown them?
Were Dire Straits the musical baby that went out with the 80's bath water? Did we consciously distance ourselves from everything associated with that decade, overlooking the fact that not everything was in bad taste?
(Although it has to be said that the plughole would be too good for the official Romeo And Juliet video — see below. What a shocker of a 1980 time capsule. It is so achingly of its time that it feels like a beautifully observed, tongue in cheek pastiche.)
Too much of a good thing maybe? Contemptuous familiarity and all that?
Did it all just get a little monotonous? The downside of having an unmistakeable sound being the same as the upside?
Or was it Harry Enfield?
More precisely was it Harry Enfield’s sketch show character Tim Nice-But-Dim?
Tim N-B-D is the archetypal Tory buffoon; ignorant, oblivious and a little bit stupid, albeit with a kind heart. You wouldn’t want to be like him.
And, oh dear, he is a Dire Straits fan, complete with a Mark Knopfler bandana made out of a rugby sock.
Is this a sketch or an assassination?
Did Mr Enfield’s sketch, broadcast on prime time BBC television, do for Dire Straits what “wife beater” user imagery did to Stella Artois?
The answer is probably all of the above to varying degrees, particularly the double-edged unmistakability.
Like all those first loves, it was great while it lasted. But, unlike those first loves, you can go back to Dire Straits. I’ve been listening to them a lot recently, whilst writing this post.
They are not ‘that naff band’. They were a class act and they are well worth revisiting (in private of course). And Romeo And Juliet is not ‘this dated song’. Unlike its video it resoundingly stands the test of time.
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
Since you got this far, would you mind going a little further?
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