I don't quite understand some of the negative reviews about the 2019 tour. Actually, I don't understand the points people are trying to make. I did not notice too many mistakes in Mark's guitar playing, at least not as much to ruin the overall sound of the band. I was at one of the shows that year, and not only was the sound by the sound engineers fantastic, the sound of the band was great, so was Mark on guitar. I liked the particular arrangements of the tour, which is one of the things that made the tour special. The unique arrangements, the unique sound overall. I felt it brought a lot of new and fresh things.
I felt the setlist was pretty strong for the most part, but this is also where I'll share my first batch of complaints. The setlist was too static for my taste and it appeared that it was kind of a lazy approach, also it became too predictable after a while, with very few rarities and one-offs across the year. Second complaint is the lack of DTRW songs. I can't think of an album with less songs played from it. Even Kill To Get Crimson had many songs played apart from the 2008 tour in rare performances in 2007 and 2009, so the songs were attempted live somewhere.
Then, Nobody Does That and Silvertown Blues getting cut from the setlist eventually was such a disappointment in so many ways, as they brought more variety of sound to the set, I felt.
But the biggest concern out of all, by far, was Mark's vocals and Mark's appearance, meaning physical appearance. I think these two things kind of go together.
I know Mark has looked differently for a while, and I'm not expecting him to look like he did with Dire Straits, and I know he had that motorcycle accident that kind of affected him in many ways, but.. my god.
In 2018 first, on that interview he did talking about Down The Road Wherever, he looked worse than I've ever seen him before. Don't get me wrong, I think Mark looks good for his age currently, he seems younger and seems to be in good spirits. However, his weight in 2018 was really something that got me worried. And in early 2019 he looked so out of shape physically. But also vocally. Many might say Mark is not that great of a vocalist in the first place. I tend to disagree. I think his songs wouldn't be as great if they weren't sung by him, with that exact voice. His studio albums have kept Mark in good voice thankfully and hopefully that remains the case with this new 2023 album. But his concert voice started carefully becoming weaker after 2010 I believe. 2013, 2015 and 2019 - is filled with a lot of moments of voice not being clear or strong enough. Obviously, I can still live with that. But with 2019 at times it was so hard to accept it. It's like a mix of his former smoking days and then the weight problems which I do believe affect him. Or at least he consumes the kind of food or drinks that affect the voice and doesn't pay too much attention to it anymore. There is almost no pitch at all, neither high or low pitch. He either can't find enough feeling in his soul to sing those or he simply can't, because his throat is so affected by something. Sometimes he could barely even talk how weak his voice was. It's like he can only scream and whisper now, but it doesn't bring out as much as feeling as it should when it's not so melodic. Maybe his vocal mic was not fixed properly for the entire tour, but I don't want to go that far.
Still, despite all that, I'd love to see him tour again.
I do hope he used the pandemic and everything after to get back into better physical shape. He showed progress I believe at the end of 2019, when I think he lost a little weight compared to the beginning of the year. Hopefully that carried on until today.
I'm sure that would make a lot of things easier for him.
