Interview with Mark Knopfler

By Patrick Humphries - Record Buyer and Music Collector, 2000.

Outside, Notting Hill luxuriates in a rare blaze of sunshine, while the real summer is still waiting to get kick-started. Inside, it's all polished wood and a low murmur coming off computer screens.

Tall and dressed in an anonymous black T-shirt, Mark Knopfler uncoils himself from a sofa to meet you. His motorcycle helmet and leathers piled next to the phone on which he will spend the rest of the day talking to European journalists ("which comes first, the music or the lyrics?")

In person, Knopfler is as easygoing and convivial as his music suggests. I have seen Knopfler at the epicentre of a web of spotlights, crisply picking off solos and sending them to the furthest reaches of Wembley Arena to the delight of die-hard Dire Straits fans and, on his last tour, confidently beguiling at the Albert Hall. But this one-to-one Mark Knopfler is a pleasant surprise: strangely shy and hesitant, there is none of the confidence you associate with third-generation rock gods and no sign at all of the rumoured single-mindedness.

Knopfler pauses to fiddle with a twist-tie, an object which preoccupies him throughout the interview. Hello, I think, recognising the symptoms, here's someone who used to smoke… In conversation, Knopfler is reserved, cautious - a caution which may well have roots in his previous occupation as a cub reporter ("Bowie, who regards Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey as his source of inspiration, goes a step further in his song, and tells us of Major Tom, the astronaut who chooses to remain in space rather than return home").

I ask if this smartly Bohemian territory tenaciously clinging to Westbourne Grove - the Hotting Hill of Performance rather than Hugh Grant - is his turf. "No… no," says the sometime Sultan of Swing, "I live in Chelsea" Then, remembering a former life, he smiles a sudden cheery grin: "I used to live round here… I wrote 'Portobello Belle' here…in 1978," the grin broadens, "long before the film!"

Knopfler has been a professional musician for nearly a quarter of a century and by now stories about the man and the band, that song and that album, are part of rock 'n' roll mythology. But it's still hard to reconcile the famous rock idol with this quietly spoken 51 year-old, offering to fetch refreshments.

Knopfler is a notoriously difficult interviewee but, for once, it is not the usual rock 'n' roll arrogance, but an evident shyness and discomfort at having to say something - anything! - about himself and his work.

Record Buyer: 'Sailing to Philadelphia' strikes me as more focused and more commercial then 'Golden Heart', your first solo album. Who's on the album with you this time?

Mark Knopfler: Same guys, same five guys as last time. Occasional augmentation with different voices, flavours. Van [Morrison] and James [Taylor], the Squeeze boys. I wanted them on a song about south London. I've always associated that part of the world with Glenn and Chris, I suppose because we started out together in Depford, I've always associated down there with them.

Then there's Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. There's something very ancient about Gillian's voice and David's perfect harmony - they are actually one person! They opened for me on the Golden Heart tour and I adore them, I think they're fantastic. But it's not just to promote them, I really wanted to have that sound on a couple of things: 'Prairie Wedding', 'Speedway At Nazareth' - there's something about what she does that resonates with me.

Record Buyer: On the cover of her first album she looks like she'd just come out of the dustbowl in Woody Guthrie's footsteps.

Mark Knopfler: Yeah, but you know Gillian's parents wrote music for The Carol Burnett Show. They were just on a Barry Manilow show and did a really great thing but I can't remember which one. It was a Barry Manilow song but I don't know his repertoire. The thing with Gillian is she's not going to confine herself to that traditional format. She's going to write songs which are capable of being done by anybody.

Record Buyer: On the last album your love of the research really comes across, was there a similar thing here?

Mark Knopfler: Yeah, there was. The main book was Thomas Pynchon's Mason Dixon - that's really a great big doorstep of a book, as big as a fridge. I was reading it and it occurred to me Philadelphia was this…, this… place you flew into on an airliner and changed planes … it was just a… junction. And you get off the plane and go round the airport and it's got Gap shops, restaurants and all these millions of people going in every direction. It's the same as changing in Chicago or any of these places.

Record Buyer: So why Philadelphia?

Mark Knopfler: I remember being in a park in Philadelphia the first time I went to America and I remember being stoned and watching a black gospel group. And I remember, not just because I was a little bit stoned but I remember being really overwhelmed by the music. And it struck me as being a very interesting place.

Record Buyer: Your music has always been shot through with American influences and America was quite kind to Dire Straits from early on.

Mark Knopfler: We didn't break in Britain till later. There was a woman at Radio 1 - Doris, Gladys or Mavis, one of those kind of names - and she was on the committee that decided what was going to get played and she said that 'Sultans Of Swing' had too many words! So they didn't play it.

But because it was a hit in America, they started playing it on a weekend programme - I think it was Paul Gambaccini - and it made an impression that way and eventually became a hit in England. But I think America was pretty swift. Of course it's such a big country and there are so many radio stations that the first time we went over there - and I'm sure all bands that make it in America experience this - you meet 120 people who all claim to have broken the record.

Record Buyer: America really took you to its heart didn't it, maybe it was the "I want my MTV…"?

Mark Knopfler: I actually turned down a thing a few weeks ago from, well… let's say 'A Large Corporation', they wanted to use 'Money For Nothing' but they wanted to change the words.

Record Buyer: There does seem to be an increasing homogenisation and corporatisation of rock 'n' roll in the 21st century. Do you think that the music itself is still as important as it was?

Mark Knopfler: Possibly not, to lots of people; but it is to me. Book are important to me too, although the written word is going down in importance in relation to pictures - now the photographer is getting more space that the journalist.

What I have noticed is the relentless march of corporatisation. My record company is a good example: Mercury was taken over by Phonogram before we joined, then it was taken by Universal, who've just taken over my publishing company. Now Universal have just been taken over by a huge French conglomerate. Our American record company, Warners, are talking about combining with EMI.

It's the relentless advance of the bean counters. A young director was telling me a couple of years ago, he was making a huge, big Hollywood film and he said there were a couple of accountants who came down onto the set from the studio every day to tell him what he could and couldn't shoot. He said that was bad enough, but they were fools - they didn't know anything about film.

When you switch a television on now, you're more likely to see share prices than anything else, there's this egregious self-promotion that a lot of these stations go in for - I'm not just talking about the business channels, I'm talking about a lot of channels - so there's always a logo somewhere.

Although the corporatisation has managed to pass us by to a certain extent, over the years we've figured out that we're probably the least grief-stricken group in terms of getting a record out. We're pretty much left alone to make it and deliver it and then we let the record company get on with distributing it, marketing it - whatever it is they do with it.

I think because the first record did well, they didn't really ever try and barge into sessions. But I do remember on thing about the first album - there's always a rush on and we needed a cover. So the art department came up with these pictures and we picked one but they came back and said 'No, you can't choose that one, you don't know what's marketable'. So we said okay and asked the marketing department what was marketable - and of course they couldn't tell us!

When Chet Atkins and I did our little home record, Chet said I think we should call it 'Neck & Neck' and the art department came up with these pictures of nooses and bodies hanging from trees. We didn't go with that.

Record Buyer: Right back at the beginning, Dire Straits came out of pub rock - as much a part of that phenomenon as Brinsley Schwarz.

Mark Knopfler: Absolutely, when we were playing The Hope & Anchor, a couple of feet away from the audience, people just assumed we were one of the bands on that circuit. Touring with Talking Heads, it was all part and parcel of the same thing: skinny little four-pieces playing music in pubs.

Record Buyer: You've played with Van Morrison before and he's in fine form on 'The Last Laugh' on 'Sailing To Philadelphia'. I am honour-bound to ask how you got on with him?

Mark Knopfler: I've always loved Van, since I was a university boy. He's a part of my life. I adore him. Van's music is a great source of comfort to me, not any particular period, the whole lot, the whole damned lot. It's a bit like Bob, in a sense I always feel protective towards Bob and Van, I always feel like putting my arm around them, partly because when you're deified as a child, it's quite a precarious thing to happen to you. It really didn't happen to me that way. But it's something I've noticed, working with different people.

Record Buyer: Is there a story behind the tantalisingly titled 'Speedway At Nazareth'?

Mark Knopfler: No, there is no story behind that. It's just another song that could be about anything but it's more a song about human perseverance than anything else. I realised that was a theme I have occasionally been attracted to. You read about people's lives and the whole thing seems so illogical, it seems so mad to be going round fighting battles that some people might see as being rather pointless. But it's just something that interests me… the sense of endeavour, there's something very human about it.

I'm trying to be helpful but I can't really explain it any more than that. I don't really know exactly what it is that eventually throws a switch and makes you want to write a song. It's a mysterious thing.
Record Buyer: So is there a little black book that phrases and jottings go into?

Mark Knopfler: Not today…" (searching through his bag) "Sometimes there'll be one in there. Right now, there's a motorcycle magazine, some pens, some boots I ride the bike with, because you can't ride the bike with these. But normally there would be one. There's usually a book of some kind.

Something might resonate for some reason or another. Sometimes it's years afterwards that the reason for the resonance makes itself apparent. Sometimes you can be in a place and things converge, so that you are suddenly made aware that the song is going 'Hello!' Like the 'Money For Nothing' situation. But other times, it's different, something that goes clang. But you can go down a lot of blind alleys, dark streets.

When I'm working on a film soundtrack, what I do is work with a guitar and a little tape recorder like yours, try to record the fragments I can remember, things do go but I don't know where they go to and they can come back.

I'm really pleased to report that there are no hard and fast rules to it. It's not quite the same as other artistic disciplines. I think if you're a ballet dancer or a concert pianist, you have to apply yourself. In a way, writing can be like that. If I did sit down every day behind a guitar and write, then I would write things and I do tend to do that. But if I don't do it for a while, then I don't do it for a while. I don't go and flog myself.

Record Buyer: Do you know when you've written one that's good or is going to be successful?

Mark Knopfler: No, I don't think you really do know. It's not something I actively go after. It's not that I don't take what I do seriously - I do take it reasonably seriously - but I'm not religious about it. A lot of times, I wake up with stuff in my head and I always just let it go. Always… And I don't regard it as any loss, because I know that other things will come.

There's one song on the new album called 'One More Matinee' that I started writing 30 years ago. It was when I went to interview the cast of a pantomime at Leeds City Varieties. I was experimenting with starting to write my own little things and a lot of those lines were said to me and they stayed. But I never got it together before.

There was a song on 'Golden Heart' called 'Rudiger', which was word for word what I wrote in Germany after I ran into the real Rudiger, about the time that John Lennon had been murdered. But I never had music for it that I liked and so I only got round to doing it years later. Another thing might hit you immediately and you just go straight away and do it.

Record Buyer: You mentioned the limitations of a three minute song but a great song focuses and concentrates the mind wonderfully. It must be tremendously satisfying to play the opening notes of a song you've written in concert and hear the roar of delight?

Mark Knopfler: It's wonderful. I can't get over it. That's why I feel so fortunate. I have to watch it when I go to work in the morning that I don't go too fast because I'm really looking forward to getting there. I had to wait a long time but now I feel very fortunate. Very fortunate.

I still remember the guy who came up to me after a show one night and said 'you know, I was real suicidal tonight, and my friends dragged me out to the show'. And you could see he wasn't a fool this guy. He said 'I just want you to know I'm going on'. It makes you feel… a good feeling. A very good feeling.

I think if one person feels something out of a million. If one person reads a line that you've written and it does something, you're transmitting. I mean, if one person feels something that changes their life in a good way, transforms something, that's a great thing.

Record Buyer: 'Brothers In Arms' remains one of those era-defining records. Did you have any idea how huge it was going to become?

Mark Knopfler: No. In fact, the actual stuff that went on the record was done incredibly quickly. We'd been trying to get something going for a while, but Terry (Williams) wasn't terribly well at that point. Omar Hakim came out and we got the tracks really very, very quickly. We were pretty lucky. I had written 'I want my MTV'. I'd seen The Police do this ad for MTV, going 'I want my MTV' and I thought I'd set that to the tune of 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' and then Sting was on holiday there and we were hanging out a bit, so that was fortunate.

Record Buyer: Since then those songs have entered the public consciousness but presumably you don't sit down and listen to Dire Straits albums?

Mark Knopfler: "I never sit down and listen to them. The only time I listen to anything that I've done is just at the time when it's being put together as an album. Then after that, I never listen to it. If I see myself on TV… if I'm flicking across the channels and see myself, I just keep going… It's not my fault! My whole thing is: 'it's not my fault!'"

Record Buyer: Finally, that old chestnut: what are your future plans?

Mark Knopfler: I'd like to do a couple of things: I'd like to get the guys who played on this album back together to do some more live things. I've recorded a couple of things with Emmylou Harris and I would like to make an album with Emmy and make an album with Van.

If I was hanging around the house too long I'd start getting on everyone's nerves and they'd be wondering what on earth they could do to get rid of me. But I usually find there's something going on that keeps me occupied. Or a film will just come along, something like 'Wag The Dog', which might seem like a small thing but actually takes a hell of a long time to do. It's pretty absoRecord Buyering.

I've just done a session with Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana - a Sun Records revival - at Abbey Road. I really enjoyed doing this Scottish Robert Duvall film [A Shot At Glory, due for release next year], I got to go up there and record in Scotland with some great players. That's always enjoyable, puts another angle on things but then when I've been doing that for a while, I get hungry for songs again.

And if there's nothing else, I could always sit down and learn a bit of guitar playing. That's always sitting back, mocking me, saying: come on then, what you gonna do about me?

Record Buyer: There are some people who say you're pretty good at that already.

Mark Knopfler: I think when you do it, you realise how very far away you really are. You must believe me, it's a humbling thing.

Interview with Mark Knopfler

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