Former Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers decided to move on from the band when everything started becoming too loud for him, alongside his desire to work on different projects. The musician sat down with Vintage Rock Pod to discuss the various factors that caused him to make the decision to leave Dire Straits.
“Lots of elements came together to make, ‘I think I want to do something else now,'” said Withers, explaining that several reasons caused him to quit Dire Straits. “We started to play very loudly. I was beginning to have trouble with my ears, although I didn’t realize what that was at the time. I just remember coming off stage and having trouble with my balance, readjusting after being on stage, so that was that element.”
In almost every band, there comes a time when one of the band members itches to leave the group to focus on a different creative outlet. In this case, Pick Withers decided to leave Dire Straits in the summer of 1982, soon after finishing the ‘Love Over Gold’ sessions. The differences in creative choices became bothersome, and tense dynamics between bandmates became too much to handle for the drummer to continue his tenure with the band.
He continued, “The music was going away from stuff where I felt that the drums could make a significant contribution or certainly be part of the conversation. It was getting much more kind of ‘This song is black, this song is blue,’ and starting to do rock stadium kind of stuff where it just doesn’t translate to the way I wanted to play, you know. Then there are a whole raft of personal aspects, the dynamics between main individuals, which I don’t want to discuss in this kind of interview; it just sounds like sour grapes or whatever it is, you know, which I thought, ‘Yeah, I think it’s time to do something else now.'”
After leaving Dire Straits, Pick Withers continued his music career and collaborated with many prominent musicians such as Gerry Rafferty, Joan Baez, Robert Plant, Phil Carmen, Dennis LeCorriere, Dave Kelly Band, Gary Fletcher Band, and more.
