A lifelong love affair with the guitar

By Neil McCormick - The Daily Telegraph, 2000

Former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler talks to Neil McCormick about his new album and his habit of practising chords till he nods off.

MARK KNOPFLER, erstwhile leader of stadium rockers Dire Straits, is not one of popular music's underachievers. In a band and solo career spanning 22 years, Knopfler has been responsible for sales in excess of 85 million. He has performed live in front of countless millions on some of the largest tours the world has ever seen. He has produced recordings for artists of the stature of Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Tina Turner. He has composed soundtracks for such films as Local Hero, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Metroland. He has been acclaimed as one of the greatest guitarists in the world and collaborated with some of his own guitar heroes, such as Eric Clapton and Chet Atkins.

Mark Knopfler: with Dire Straits he performed in some of the largest tours ever undertaken, has the dishevelled air of a contented academic. So it is a little disconcerting when Knopfler casually reveals that the thing he is proudest of is... giving up cigarettes three years ago. "The best thing I've ever done," he quietly asserts, almost as if affirming something to himself.

I don't think he is being disingenuous, or falsely modest. Rather, it is an offhand remark reflecting priorities far removed from the rock-star life. Indeed, it would be hard to conjure up an individual who conformed less to the stereotypes of superstardom.

At 51, with a physiognomy that is all jowls and bags, Knopfler has the dishevelled elegance and distracted air of an ageing academic, albeit an extremely contented and well-paid one (his fortune is estimated to be in excess of £70 million).

He is well-spoken, with only a hint of the Scots and Geordie roots that lend such character to his singing voice. The considered eloquence of his delivery provides an intriguing contrast with the vagueness of his manner.

Knopfler's gaze tends to drift as he speaks, as if trying to follow some obscure mental pathway, and his conversational style is best described as "rambling", punctuated by silences that do not so much signal the end of a line of thought as a moment of contemplation before embarking on a new direction.

It is something that he is evidently aware of, judging by the number of times he apologises for drifting off from the topic under discussion. "It's a shame the way my mind works," he announces at one point - but not that much of a shame, presumably, given everything he has achieved.

Our encounter took place in a surprisingly small room above his management offices in Holland Park, west London, where Knopfler does most of his pre-production work. At one end of the room stands a compact mixing desk, at the other is a comfortable, well-worn sofa. "It has to be a sofa, so that I can get my legs up in case I fall asleep," he declares. "I perfected the art of falling asleep while playing the guitar when I was a teenager."

This might be considered a dangerous admission for someone who has been accused by critics of creating music that is boring and even soporific, but Knopfler is untroubled by such implications. His tendency to drift off while playing is apparently a consequence of the perfectionism that has made him such an acclaimed instrumentalist. He relentlessly practises chord shapes and scales until sheer repetition induces slumber. (Indeed John Illsey, long-standing bassist with Dire Straits, has revealed that the first time he met Knopfler the guitarist was supine beneath his instrument.)

"Sometimes it can go nastily wrong," Knopfler admits. "You wake up lying under a guitar with something wet and sticky all over your strides, like cold tea or wine." It does not seem to have dented his enthusiasm. "It's a wonderful instrument," he says with genuine conviction. He still practises every day and feels that his playing is ever-improving. "The more pieces added to the general jigsaw the better, even though a lot of the time I'm just playing very simple things. I do believe that the simple things are almost invariably the best, but that doesn't stop me getting into atomic power chords."

Knopfler claims that guitars have always been his personal objects of desire. "I was absolutely sure it was what I wanted when I was very, very small. I hadn't even heard one, I just saw a tiny picture in a little ad on the back of a model magazine or something, a white plastic guitar with a picture of Elvis Presley on the head. When my dad eventually did the big stretch for a £50 Hofner it seemed such a lot of money that I didn't have the heart to ask him for an amplifier. So after I blew up the radio with one and a half watts of seething, pulsating power, I ended up borrowing acoustic guitars from friends, which took me into folk joints and learning finger-picking. And actually it was such a good thing because this duality was developing: I was learning about the roots of white music and the roots of black music, just working backwards, basically, and what a wonderful trip it was."

The potent mix of blues, rock and folk through which Knopfler developed his playing and writing style is once again evident on his first single in four years, What It Is, an evocative Celtic-flavoured strut celebrating the timeless quality of the city of Edinburgh. "I'm interested in history, the living history that comes up through the stones of a place, and you can really feel that in Edinburgh," Knopfler explains. The single, released by Mercury records next week, precedes what is officially his second solo album, Sailing to Philadelphia (although the ever-changing line-ups of Dire Straits were all essentially vehicles for Knopfler's distinctive talents).

Never particularly prolific ("I'm not greased lightning"), Knopfler reveals that he finds being a singer-songwriter a lonely profession and is increasingly drawn to (or perhaps distracted by) the teamwork involved in scoring films.

Which is a pity in a way, because Knopfler's new collection of concise, texturally rich and emotionally rewarding songs is a reminder that he is one of Britain's most talented songwriters. Lauded for his fluid, silvery guitar playing, Knopfler's compassionate and extremely literate lyrical style is sometimes overlooked. Bob Dylan once informed Knopfler that what impressed him most about his epic Private Investigations was not the extended guitar solo but the rhyming of "diary" with "inquiry".

The songs on Sailing to Philadelphia continue to explore Knopfler's fascination with history and survival, and centre on the tenacity and perseverance of ordinary people struggling in difficult circumstances. "It is not a confessional album at all," he claims, adding modestly, "but I don't think it would be very interesting if it was."

He cites as an example Junkie Doll, a song about a drug-fuelled love affair in Turnham Green. "I've never been a junkie and I've never even been to Turnham Green," he laughs. "Well, I may have been through it a couple of times, but the place name was singing to me. That's part of the curse of being a songwriter, you wake up with stuff in your head, going round and round, 'Turnham Green, Turnham Green'." He laughs and shrugs. "But thankfully by the time I've shaved it has usually disappeared." Now, what was it he said about the way his mind works?

A lifelong love affair with the guitar

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