The Serendipitous Story Behind the Dire Straits Song ‘Money for Nothing’

British musician David Hartley explained the fascinating story behind the seminal Dire Straits hit “Money for Nothing”, noting how certain serendipitous events all came together to create the song as we know it.

The story of “Money for Nothing” is weird and one that involves many happy accidents. Whether that’s microphones knocked over during recording that led to this legendary guitar sound or Sting just happening to be on the same Caribbean island when they were recording and quoting one of his songs.

Hartley explains that the lyrics were based off of a real experience that Mark Knopfler had while in a New York appliance store.

But perhaps the weirdest thing is just what this song is about. …The song was written when Mark Knopfler was in a hardware store in New York and in the store were a number of TV tuned into MTV. Mark overheard a couple of workers commenting on the music videos and joking that these musicians were making millions of dollars essentially not doing any work.

All these things plus a 3D computer animated video made it all but certain that the song would be a giant MTV hit.

Mark agreed that there weren’t enough interesting videos and this could be an opportunity to come up with something original. The result was an early example of 3D computer animation, something that doesn’t look so impressive today, but was groundbreaking at the time. The video was a huge success, winning video of the year at the 1986 and MTV Music Video Awards.

via Miss Cellania