Dire Straits – Money For Nothing (Live At Knebworth)

Sting Only Wanted to Sing Three Words on It — His Record Label Took a Co-Writing Credit and a Cut of Dire Straits’ Only American No. 1

Sting walked into the studio on Montserrat to sing six syllables. “I want my MTV” — that was the whole of his contribution to “Money for Nothing,” a falsetto hook he tossed off over a melody he’d written years earlier for The Police. He didn’t ask for a writing credit and, by his own account, didn’t think the song was much good. His record label disagreed on both counts. A&M noticed that the “I want my MTV” line rode the exact melody of the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” claimed it as a compositional borrowing, and took a co-writing credit — and the royalties that came with it — on what became Dire Straits’ only American No. 1. To this day the song is officially credited to Mark Knopfler and Sting, a partnership that, as far as the actual writing went, barely existed.

Keep watching: Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms · Walk of Life

Knopfler wrote almost all of it himself, and he wrote it from life. The story he’s told for decades: he was in a New York appliance store when he overheard a delivery man in a hard hat watching the bank of TVs on the sales floor, all of them tuned to MTV, grumbling about the musicians on screen — the easy money, the women, the makeup, the life that looked like no work at all next to hauling refrigerators. Knopfler grabbed a pen and started writing down what the man actually said, sitting at one of the store’s kitchen-display setups. Much of the lyric is close to verbatim. The narrator isn’t Knopfler; it’s that working man, envious and contemptuous, and the song’s most quoted lines — “money for nothing and chicks for free” — are his sneer, not the band’s opinion. That distance is the whole joke, and it’s also why the song’s casually ugly second verse has caused trouble in the decades since: a 2011 Canadian broadcast ruling briefly deemed the unedited version unfit for airplay, missing that the slur belonged to the character Knopfler was mocking, not to him.

The Riff That Sold a Million CDs

Musically, “Money for Nothing” started somewhere else entirely. Keyboardist Alan Clark has said the track began life sounding more like the Rolling Stones, until Knopfler hit on the song’s growling central riff while improvising to a click track in the studio. He chased a specific tone — the dry, processed crunch of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, whose own videos were already in heavy MTV rotation — and got there by running a Les Paul through a wah-wah pedal left half-open. The result was a sound that didn’t quite resemble anything else on the radio in 1985. The song became the second single from Brothers in Arms, released on June 28, 1985, and it climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and No. 1 on the Top Rock Tracks chart, reaching No. 4 in the band’s native UK. At the 1986 Grammy Awards it won Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The Steve Barron–directed video — one of the first ever to use computer-animated human characters — swept the MTV Video Music Awards, taking Video of the Year, and became the first clip aired on MTV Europe when that network launched on August 1, 1987. The “I want my MTV” hook was, fittingly, already the basis of MTV’s own promotional campaign. Brothers in Arms went on to become the first album to sell a million copies on compact disc, a commercial landmark that helped push the CD format itself into the mainstream.

The recording happened at AIR Studios on Montserrat, the Caribbean facility Beatles producer George Martin had built, which ran from 1979 until Hurricane Hugo destroyed it in 1989. Sting knew the place well — The Police had recorded there — and was on the island windsurfing when he stopped by the studio for supper and ended up on the track. That’s the entire origin of rock’s most disputed co-writing credit: a houseguest singing a few notes over dinner.

Knebworth, 1990: Two Guitar Heroes, One Stage

The performance on this page comes from a different chapter. By 1990, Dire Straits had been on hiatus for two years, and Knopfler had publicly cooled on the band’s biggest hits. But on June 30, 1990, he reassembled a version of the group for the Silver Clef Award Winners Concert at Knebworth Park — a charity show before roughly 120,000 people, raising money for the Nordoff-Robbins music therapy charity and the BRIT School, on a bill that included Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Phil Collins, Elton John and Robert Plant. Knopfler brought core members John Illsley, Alan Clark and Guy Fletcher, then filled out the stage with Eric Clapton’s touring band: guitarist Phil Palmer, bassist Nathan East, drummer Steve Ferrone, keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, and backing vocalists Katie Kissoon and Tessa Niles. The star turn was Clapton himself, stepping back from his usual frontman role to play rhythm and trade leads behind Knopfler. With Sting absent, the touring vocalists handled the famous falsetto. What the footage captures is two of Britain’s most distinctive guitarists grinning at each other across a stage, stretching a song about a man who thinks musicians do no real work into an extended, virtuosic showcase of exactly how much work it takes. Knopfler played it on his signature Pensa-Suhr MK-1 through a Soldano amplifier, the rig that produced his biting live tone. Months after this performance, Dire Straits formally reunited for one final album, On Every Street, and a last world tour. The band would break up for good in 1995; in 2018 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor Knopfler declined to attend.