Golden Heart

Dire Straits' last tour ended in October 1992 and was seen by 7.1 million people. Knopfler said he put the band to bed to get back to some kind of reality, spent two years recovering, and began his first solo album in 1994. Golden Heart came out on 25 March 1996 on Vertigo, with Warner Bros. handling the United States. He and Chuck Ainlay produced it, and Brian Masterson engineered.

Richard Bennett, Paul Franklin, Sonny Landreth and Vince Gill appear on it, alongside Irish musicians including Paul Brady, Dónal Lunny, Liam O'Flynn and the harpist Derek Bell. The first single, Darling Pretty, reached number 33 in the UK and was used in the film Twister. Cannibals was the second single and sounds much like Walk of Life, and Rüdiger was the third. The album reached the top 10 in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, and number 105 on the Billboard 200.

The Golden Heart Tour ran from Galway on 24 April 1996 to Antibes on 4 August, with 84 concerts in 66 cities. Fans later called its line-up of Knopfler, Guy Fletcher, Richard Bennett, Glenn Worf, Chad Cromwell and Jim Cox the 96-ers. A preview show at the BBC building in London on 15 April was filmed and released as A Night in London. William Ruhlmann of AllMusic gave the album three out of five and called it listenable but secondhand.