The reviews from other UK music papers were less harsh, with Jack Barron of "Sounds" feeling that "it's only a halfway decent album because it has only halfway decent songs... Knopfler has distilled his sonic essence, via blues, to appeal to billboard romantics with cinemascope insecurities. And he "can" pull it off well... but not often enough here." "Melody Maker"s Barry McIlheney observed that Knopfler had recently explored different creative directions with his work on movie soundtracks and on Bob Dylan's "Infidels", and bemoaned that "this admirable spirit of adventure fails to materialise... Instead it sounds just a bit too like the last Dire Straits album, which sounded not unlike the last one before that, which sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a hugely successful and very lucrative plan to take over the world known as AOR". He concluded, "the old rockschool restraints and the undeniably attractive smell of the winning formula seem to block out any such experimental work and what you end up with is something very like the same old story."