UMC/EMI
★★★★ / ★★★★
By the end of the 80s, Dire Straits’ fifth album Brothers In Arms had become so successful it was to be indelibly linked with the decade’s greatest indulgences. This was unavoidable: as the first album to gain 10x platinum status in Britain, and for years the go-to disc for anyone who’d purchased a new CD player, it’s hardly something from which the nation can claim to have abstained.