Dear Chris, with all due respect, everything being posted here is guesswork, not just my posts. It's a forum. We don't have any financial reports and barely even have first-hand evidence from the people responsible for the tour the most. John Illsley in his book about Dire Straits described the whole tour in a couple of pages, Mark acts like it never happened at all, and we welcome the re-release of On The Night as a miracle because it's the first change since its release up until this moment in 30 years.
The wealth of musicians is greatly overrated as well. I remember people like Sir Van Morrison, Chuck Berry or even Tommy Emmanuel cutting the BS and saying clear as day "I'm still playing music to earn money". Surprise, surprise, people want to get some dough for their work and eat something for lunch, so I don't get why the tour didn't need to be a "money-making exercise" as well as a celebration of music. Dire Straits is not a charitable organization.
Thank you once again for attacking me personally ("sob stories", "guess work", etc.), I try not to take it seriously. Your insights and photos are incredibly valuable and interesting, opening a shade behind this tour a little bit. The tour itself deserves a whole movie or a book about it, not just some posting on a forum, and the fact we are still discussing it today means something. The drama behind the last DS tour is just too interesting and still has a lot of unanswered questions.
The point is that you can just as easily flip these things around. You claim he did everything right. Maybe he did everything wrong? As you said, it's all guesswork, and there's no reason why the guesses should be in one direction or the other. GIven what we know, I think it's pretty safe to say that there were plenty of mistakes made. It might not have been a good idea to tour at all, in the long run. But, it would be weird if they didn't make any good moves, either.
I should also add that the OES tour wasn't all that long compared to what many other artists do. Proof:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_concert_tours - so no need to exaggerate the fact that it was 14 months long (+ prep). It's actually quite common.
Maybe you live in a different country, but around here, we have many people leave their families for a few weeks at the time to go work offshore. I have yet to hear of this being an issue, simply because everything is carefully planned and the whole concept and it's potential issues (i.e. related to personal relations) are reasonably well understood. Just as you would imagine MK & crew would plan the OES tour properly, and be well aware of their own experience from the BIA tour and also the tours done by other artists (pretty sure MK is friends with some of those and would have been able to ask for advice if needed). If this indeed took it's toll on some personal relations, then that's because of bad decisions being made (at least in hindsight).
"...and things snowballed out of control." - Well, who's in charge of that, if it's true? MK, no?
