Dire Straits tribute, so good the keyboardist thought it was the original

In 2007, guitarist and singer Oscar Rosende founded a Dire Straits tribute band.

It was called and still is called Brothers in Band (a play on ‘Brothers in Arms’). Oscar invited three others to be part of this venture. Looking back, as he has said in an interview, he made a couple of mistakes - he didn’t register the group’s name in his name and he formed a limited company in equal parts with two of the other members. In June 2019, he received a WhatsApp message from one of them - he was being replaced.

The consequences were that technicians and some musicians left and joined Oscar in creating Great Straits. He believes that the new band sounds more like Dire Straits than the previous one, and it sounds like the original.

Guy Fletcher, keyboardist with Dire Straits and with Mark Knopfler for solo ventures, has said that when he heard the cover of ‘Why Aye Man’ (from Knopfler’s album ‘The Ragpicker’s Dream’), he thought it was “our recording”.