money for nothing dire straits album cover

'Sting used to come to Montserrat to go windsurfing, where we were recording the album, and he came up for supper at the studio. Dire Straits bass guitarist John Illsley recalled how the collaboration came about. The songwriting credits are shared between Mark Knopfler and Sting, yet Sting has stated that his only compositional contribution was the 'I want my MTV' line (which followed the melody from The Police track Don't Stand So Close to Me). I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real.'

I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. 'I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. Knopfler remembers the man coming up with lines such as 'what are those, Hawaiian noises?.that ain't workin',' etc. Knopfler then said there was a male employee dressed in a baseball cap, work boots, and a checkered shirt delivering boxes who was standing next to him watching MTV with him. At the back of the store was a wall of televisions which were all tuned to MTV. As he explained in an interview, he was in New York City in 1984 and had visited an appliance store. Whereas 1981 had seen Video Killed The Radio Star kick proceedings off on the parent channel, the first video shown on MTV Europe was Money for Nothing by Dire Straits, which, appropriately, starts and finishes with repetition of the line 'I want my MTV', voiced by Sting.Ĭonsidered groundbreaking at the time of its release in June 1985, thanks to its use of CGI graphics, the music video for the song was a literal interpretation of lead singer Mark Knopfler's lyrics. On August 1st 1987, six years to the day since MTV first began broadcasting in the USA, MTV Europe launched in a similar tongue-in-cheek style to its US counterpart.

Money for nothing dire straits album cover