Mark Knopfler
Shangri-La
(Mercury)
Mark Knopfler begins this album somewhere around 1964 - and in doing so underlines the timelessness of his gift for social commentary.
Ploughing a preparatory furrow in which songs of despair, regret, hope, longing and more despair will eventually take root, the incorrigible Geordie sidles into a snapshot of his homeland, the northeast of England, epitomised for him by the vision of a collier who 'cycles home from his night shift underground ... past the churchyard packed with mining dead'.
It's graphic, sobering stuff, and the laughs don't come much thicker further down the track listing. Sucker Row descends into the lurid world of the Las Vegas pimp; humour that deals with the 1950s spread of the McDonald's plague across the US, as in the intriguingly titled Boom, Like That, can only ever be black; and The Trawlerman's Song, narrated by a reluctant practitioner in another dying British industry, is hardly evangelical in its enthusiasm. But the elasticity of his range is undeniable: any time, any place, anywhere, that's Knopfler.