Our friend in the North

By Phil Sutcliffe - Mojo, 1996

Dire Straits, he says, are firmly on the back-burner. His income is down to a weekly five-figure sum. Yet, on the eve of his solo debut, life is looking up for Mark Knopfler as he contemplates his Atlantic-straddling roots, Bob Dylan and practical socialism. ”My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta,” he tells Phil Sutcliffe. "I'm always conscious of...how hard life is for a lot of people," says Mark Knopfler. The eight-bar rest mid-sentence is characteristic. Likewise, the right thumb and forefinger working at his brow as if they might squeeze out the verbal precision he seeks - whether his purpose is to reveal or, at least partly, conceal.

The subject at hand is as taxing as any. In a new song, No Can Do, he's written about a wage-slave fashion warehouse job he did back in the '70s. The lyrics expresses empathy with fellow workers who didn't have the luxery of knowing that their toil was only temporary: "Now some were grown up, unlike me/And were dealing with reality/I was spittin' sulkin' smokin' shirkin'/While a lady from Jamaica was singing and working."

Mind you, here he is sitting in a handsomely appointed management office financed by and dedicated to his work. A man whose salery in a recent thin year was cut by 68 per cent to just £54,975 a week, according to Labour Research magazine.

Knopfler is an intelligent bloke. He appreciates the ironies. Comprehensively. But then he also evinces an occasionally intimidating confidence in his own insight, the lenghty pauses only adding weight to this sense of conviction.

"I always felt lucky I've done jobs like that," he says. "If you've missed out on stupid hard work then you can't really have a worthwhile viewpoint. This'll sound a bit The Worst Job I Ever Had, but some of the hardest were market-gardening because it just killed my back; fruit warehouseman because I had to get up at 4am; farm labouring because I was so exhausted after work and my hands were so swollen I couldn't play guitar; cub reporting because I don't think printer's ink was flowing in my veins and that's a job where you've got to have the ambition; teaching because I was so tired when I got home I had to sit down for half an hour before I could remember my own name and there was the marking to come and... I was playing in a band at night." He smiles. No Can Do recalls that he "Dreamed that if my dreams came true/Then I wouldn't do what I didn't want to do".

"I'm glad that I've worked, but this is a lot better than being anything else. In the world!" He rocks back on the sofa and laughs without restraint - previously an unfamiliar sound from Knopfler in media interface mode. "I'm very lucky in that I like all aspects of what I do. I love to write, I love to rehearse - particularly love that - I love to play live, I love to record. It's much better to be doing anything than watching it."

"I feel alarmingly happy. And blessed. Not just about music but everything. Friends. My children. Waking up in the morning and realising I don't have to go to work. I mean, I do get up early, but I get up early to read. What a glorius privilege. So I love success."

"All the peices fit really. I've been through phases where I've shuffled about and worn a cap and kind of ducked out of situations because I was worried about people recognising me, but I don't any more."
Knopfler has gone public again to announce the album/tour launch of his solo career and the end of Dire Straits. More or less. He does foresee ceremonial duties for ”DS”, as he calls them. Probably the odd charity do. ”You've got to move on,” he says. ”I just have to.”

Founding partner John Illsley is portrayed peacefully cultivating a long neglected talent for oil painting while tinkering with ”movie projects”. This is a reassuring picture because, when the ordinary unflappable bassman did his last, maybe final, round of interviews for the On Every Street tour in 1991, he was saying, with more than a hint of moisture about the palms and brow, ”Everything I've got is on the line here”. Rather than stacking up a new debt to Phonogram, he and Knopfler had decided to pay all their upfront costs themselves: well over £2,5 million on recording, rehearsals and videos. As to the tour - 225 gigs in the end - manager Ed Bicknell had estimated that daily expenses would average over £130,000. Furthermore, they were heading off into a world recession deepening daily in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

No wonder Illsley was worried. No wonder Bicknell was showing about checking the bar mitzvah and masonic circuit on scheduled days off. But there was no matching sense of danger from Knopfler, even then. ”I don't feel the pressure. Or what they call pressure,” he said. ”It's only a record. It's only a band playing. It's not the second coming.” Looking back now, from the vantage point of 10 million albums sold [Straits' second best behind Brothers In Arms' phenomenal 22 million], four million tickets, he still insists - and rather fiercely, as if it's something no-one ever seems to believe - that he was truly never interested in the balance-sheet dramatics. He did the tour. He took a short break from playing. He moved on.

On, in fact, to a couple of favourite projects that didn't work out. There was the musical co-written with Lynda La Plante (of Widows and Prime suspect renown), envisioned as a gritty alternative to Rice-Webber fripperies. Much discussed, didn't happen. He'd also hoped to produce an album for the Everly Brohters: ”I was asked. I've loved the Evs since I was little. But after I said 'Fine,' their management came back and said, 'Would you re-record their old hits?' It was so dispiriting. Who on earth would want to re-record stuff that was... perfect. Wasn't it? It was perfect.” The extended silence that follows radiates hot waves of bemusement and indignation. Sweeter then, sweeter by far, to turn to the album Golden Heart recorded slowly and sporadically yet with a passion. ”I loved it,” he murmurs, suddenly at ease, reclining. His motorcycle boots thump down on the table, his leather trews scrumple cosily. He began in Ireland with a roistering gang of traditional fiddlers, whistlers and uillean pipes - definetely not the Dire Straits sound.

”I love Celtic music and the blues,” he says, proffering a reminder of his Local Hero and Cal soundtracks in the early '80s. ”I always say my idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues. That call to your blood kin. I don't know exactly how the Celtic music got into me. It probably goes back to when I was crawling on the foor. My Geordie mam, maybe. After we moved from Glasgow to Newcastle, my uncle Kingsley taught me boogie-woogie piano and at the same time, at school, I was singing all those Tyneside folk songs, lovely things like The Water Is Wide. It all goes in.”

Eventually the Irish material, though the starting point, became not so much a foundation as a flavouring. The bulk of the work was done in Nashville, Knopfler's musical home from home where Chet and Willie say ”Hi” like he was one of the neighbours and - largely unremarked by British Dire Straits fans - country masters such as Waylon Jennings, The Judds, John Anderson and Mary Chapin Carpenter choose his songs to cover.

”It's true that a lot of Nashville music has no attitude, it's trimmed deodorised and packed for the radio,” he says. ”The real players hate it but it's their bread and butter. They do crap sessions, they do good ones too. So it's a bit like life [laughs]. I still get a thrill being arund those people. And I kept on getting interrupted while I was there which I kind of like. I mean, I played Atlantis for a Shadows tribute album, then Clive James came through and I helped him do a demo for his TV show [Postcard From Nasville]. Interruptions like that take the focus off your own little thing.”

”I produced Waylon's track on the Buddy Holly tribute too. He's great prince of country music, you know. He stood at the mike and just gave 100 per cent. That's one of the things I love him for. I'll never forget one night at his house with Chet Atkins, Roger Miller and Don Gibson. Chet and me were doing Don's song Just One Time, and when we came to the solo Waylon grabbed a guitar and played it note for note the way Chet had recorded it ages ago. Waylon had learnt it when he was a kid. It was a great moment for me because I realised how hard he'd worked to get it right. It was a lovely circle rounded off.”

Knopfler is moved, aglow with a deep muso sentiment that outsiders might not catch at all. But it's very important to him. As he says from time to time - after EM Forster - Everything connects”. The following morning, Jennings marked the moment, obtusely perhaps, by giving him a wrecked 1950 Chevy pick-up which had been rusting away in his yard. It's now restored to serve as Knopfler's Nashville runabout.

The few songs of love from On Every Street were dark affairs: suspicious and a sense of entrapment in Fade To Black, fevered troilistic imaginings in You And Your Friend and sheer frustration in How Long. Not a trace of anything kissy-kissy. Well, Knopfler's second marriage quietly broke up early in the tour.

A couple of years later he started walking out with actress Kitty Aldridge (best known for her role as Francis Urquhart's mistress in BBC1's To Play The King). Although she was discreetely omitted from his earlier list of blessings, the new album honeydrips romance from the head-over-heels title track, Darling Pretty, A Night In Summer Long Ago, I'm The Fool and Are We In Trubble Now. Should anyone fail to catch his drift, Golden Heart is dedicated to ”my darling Kitty” - plainly the source of his easier demeanour and readier laughter.

”I'm happy, that's exactly it,” he says. ”If you're a songwriter you reflect your life. To some extent.”

He goes no further. He takes a moment to flatten narrow forelock to widening forehead. Gets up to check whether his motorbike is blocking anyone's access. He's had a ample reason to limit references to his personal life. The tabloids caught up with him and Kitty a couple of years ago and haunted them for weeks. The only consolation was that he got a song out of it, Vic And Ray, his little tribute to door-stepping hacks and papparazzi, ”the scum of the crying earth”.

”It's a source of surprise to me that somebody could spend their life - their life - wading around in...” He shakes his head, grunts, gathers more intensity. ”It's your life. You've only got one.”

Still, love is the greatest thing. He credits it with freeing his own creative instincts in regard to a song called Rudiger. The lyric about a menacing Michael Chapman-style hyperfan was written a decade ago. ”I could never find a tune to relate to it,” he says. ”But being happy and productive enabled me to do it. Although the subject is dark in itself, I got the energy to attack it, get into of the lyric, act it out musically.”

However, Knopfler reckons he's gained more than inspiration to break a logjam. ”I've moved on from the cynicism that's always been a part of me, that was one of the main influences Randy Newman had on me. I've moved on in the direction of the heart and soul.” He points an almost accusatory finger at the black humour of pieces like On Every Street's My Parties, in which the 'speaker' is an oblivious dunderhead who delivers a non-stop paean to his array of catalouge gadgets including a party cart, a brass toilet tissue holder-cum-telephone and a portable hammock (”honey, who needs trees?”).

”I couldn't bear to listen to My Parties now,” says Knopfler. ” I suppose it was truth as it appeared to me at the time. But is's not as good as You Are My Sunshine. I think that's what I should try to deal with rather than just being a cleversides. You've got to try to deafeat cynicism in your life. After all, with Randy, I've always liked his soulful songs and his romantic songs - the part of himself that he tries to keep in check.” Isn't a touch of the old acid required to maintain a balance, though? Indeed, Golden Heart bears a prime example of snidey-fine Knopfler characterisation in Imelda which stars not so much the Mrs Marcos archetype shopaholic, as the oleaginous sales assistant: ”Now we've got all of Madame's requisites and all in Madame's size/Madame's taste is truly exquisite, she must accesorise.” No glimmer of cynicism there?

”Yeah, you can never keep it away completely,” he sighs. For a moment it's almost as if he were regarding one of his own new songs as some kind of bacterium. ”I suppose I'm schizophrenic in that I'm appalled and enthusiastic at the same time.” He wants to rectify the balance of his comments about his old friend Newman. Randy has this... dedication to writing,” he says. The thought rolls on into recollections of Bob Dylan, another idol of his youth and compositional inspiration who, improbably, became a pal, not to mention employer.

”Bob shares that writerly approach with Randy. Paying attention to a lyric. Changing it and changing it. He means a great deal to me. I was about 11 when I heard The Times Are A-Changing and it made absolute sense to me. Then I loved it when he went electric. Totally. I saw him at Newcastle City Hall on the 1966 tour and I was filled with anger against the fundamentalists who booed him and walked out halfway through. Dolts!”

”So I've always felt protective of Bob. The first time I met him I felt like putting my arm around his shoulders because... I think he's always had a difficult life, being deified virtually since he was a kid. I remember one night when we were recording Slow Train Coming at Muscle Shoals. Some fans camped outside the studio and when we came out this guy approached him with these Manson eyes [he takes a deep breath as if sensing the tension of the moment all over again]. 'Hi, Bob.' It was OK. Bob said a few words. It's just... difficult.”

”Dylan, of course, provided the benchmark for Dire Straits' dizzy ascent to the rock pantheon. On the December night in 1977, when Ed Bicknell spotted them a fiver which John Illsley promptly tore up in disgust. Sixteen months later their debut album was at Number 2 in the American charts and Dylan had attended their Los Angeles gig, popped backstage and asked Knopfler to play guitar on Slow Train Coming.

So how was that? Something of a shock to the system, even for a man who never feels pressure? ”It was just great. I loved that period. I remember I hired this old convertible and drove to Santa Monica to run down songs with Bob thinking, this is really groovy. And I was just wearing a vest and I got sunburnt [laughs an inner laugh, perhaps at the Icarus-style symbolism]. I suppose it was daft the way that I felt because the world is full of people who don't give a damn about me, never did and never will, but for me at the time it meant something. I felt I'd been through a few places to get there.”
Live and 'solo', Knopfler is going back to the halls. A musical experience rahter than a show”, as Bicknell has it, will be touring the Odeons and Corn Exchanges of Britain and Europe from April to August, persuant to his intention to ”still be doing this” when he's 60 and beyond. But not only that.

”I'd like to speak decent French by the time I'm that age,” he says. ”Although I've got a few words of it from school I suddenly realised a couple of years ago, This is ridiculous, I'm still just this ignorant little islander. I've started already. I've got some BBC tapes. Then if I could do another degree it would be in history. It was fascinating to do the research for Done With Bonaparte [Golden Heart's account of the Napoleonic Wars from a French infantryman's point of view]. You end up writing to history professors because you want to find out if it was possible for a man to have lost an eye at Austerlitz and gone on to the russian campaign, as my lyrics says.”

”My main reading interest has always been literature, but once you've read a great deal of historical fiction, such as all of Patrick O'Brian's novels of the Napoleonic period, you want to go back to the sources - the only diary of a foot soldier from that era, or the autobiography of Admiral Lord Cohrane. The older I get the more literature leads me into history. I find that a joy.”

”Also by the time I'm 60, I want to get better at the art of living. And still be riding a motorbike.”