One Night of Dire Straits - Tribute Show - '30 years later' Tour

Dire Straits were a band in a class of their own. Instantly recognizable through Mark Knopfler's distinctive guitar playing and deep voice, they climbed from small bar gigs to the world's biggest stages in barely a decade.

As a counterpoint to the punk-rock wave of the time, the perpetually broke musicians ("Dire Straits" in name and nature) spent only a brief spell in the margins before becoming one of the most celebrated and commercially successful bands in music history, selling over 120 million records across their career.

The breakthrough came in the late 1970s with "Sultans of Swing", which placed Mark Knopfler front and centre as singer, songwriter and above all guitarist. The band hit its peak in the mid-1980s with "Money For Nothing", a collaboration with Sting, fellow Geordie.

But the relentless pressure of success took too high a toll. After the triumph of the final album "On Every Street" (38x platinum worldwide) and the accompanying world tour of 1991-1992 spanning 229 concerts, Mark Knopfler announced in 1995 that the band would be inactive and would no longer perform publicly.

That final chapter is now - 30 years on - the focus of the tribute show "One Night of Dire Straits". Guitarist and vocalist Alex Moll, backed by a carefully assembled band of touring and studio musicians, takes the audience on a journey through the band's rich catalogue of handcrafted music.

Moll has studied Knopfler's playing since his youth and surrounds himself only with fellow musicians for whom Dire Straits runs just as deep. He not only coaxes the same sounds from his guitar that made Mark Knopfler world-famous, but lifts the energy and sheer joy of the nine-piece band to match the original.