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Mark Knopfler Tour History

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Mark Knopfler concert reviews and tour history

• reviews: 11
• rating: 78.9% (17)

Fans' concert reviews Read all

Dpac - durham performing arts center in durham, us on thu, 22 oct 2015.

The base guitar was way too overwhelming and distorted. Who was running the sound board?

Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, Spain on Thu, 25 Jul 2013

Setlist: 1. What It Is 2. Corned Beef City 3. Privateering 4. Father and Son 5. Hill Farmer's Blues 6. I Dug Up a Diamond (Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris cover) 7. I Used to Could 8. Romeo and Juliet 9. Song for Sonny Liston 10. Postcards from Paraguay 11. Marbletown 12. Speedway at Nazareth 13. Telegraph Road Encore: 14. So Far Away 15. Going Home: Theme from Local Hero

Palau Olímpic de Badalona in Badalona, Spain on Fri, 23 Jul 2010

Setlist: 1. Border Reiver 2. What It Is 3. Sailing to Philadelphia 4. Prairie Wedding 5. Hill Farmer's Blues 6. Romeo and Juliet 7. Sultans of Swing 8. Done With Bonaparte 9. Marbletown 10. Speedway at Nazareth 11. Telegraph Road Encore: 12. Brothers in Arms 13. So Far Away Encore 2: 14. Piper to the End

Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Spain on Wed, 02 Apr 2008

Setlist: 1. Cannibals 2. Why Aye Man 3. What It Is 4. Sailing to Philadelphia 5. True Love Will Never Fade 6. The Fish and the Bird 7. Hill Farmer's Blues 8. Romeo and Juliet 9. Sultans of Swing 10. Marbletown 11. Daddy's Gone to Knoxville 12. Postcards from Paraguay 13. Speedway at Nazareth 14. Telegraph Road Encore: 15. Brothers in Arms 16. Our Shangri-La 17. So Far Away 18. Going Home: Theme from Local Hero

Chateau Ste Michelle Winery in Woodinville, US on Sat, 12 Sep 2015

My first MK concert. I was expecting to hear more Dire Straits songs, not really knowing his new music so much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I love his Celtic sound. Really beautiful music. I'm really glad I went. And the venue of Chateau St. Michelle winery is wonderful.

Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, Spain on Fri, 31 Jul 2015

Show after the rain. 1. Broken Bones 2. Corned Beef City 3. Privateering 4. Father and Son 5. Hill Farmer's Blues 6. Skydiver 7. Laughs and Jokes and Drinks and Smokes 8. She's Gone 9. Your Latest Trick 10. Romeo and Juliet 11. Sultans of Swing 12. Postcards from Paraguay 13. Marbletown 14. Speedway at Nazareth 15. Telegraph Road Encore: 16. Brothers in Arms 17. So Far Away 18. Going Home: Theme from Local Hero

Hanns-Martin-Schleyerhalle in Stuttgart, Germany on Sun, 05 Jul 2015

Thought it would be a special and legendary concert but Mark played his songs impersonal and workmanlike. Wasn't really worth the 83 Euros! I'm a bit dissapointed.

Frognerbadet in Oslo, Norway on Wed, 10 Jun 2015

Mark Knopfler never ceases to amaze me!!! He keeps on giving and giving, despite his age! His voice is still fresh and vibrant, as well as his guitar skills! An unforgettable concert!!!

Resorts World Arena in Birmingham, UK on Sat, 23 May 2015

The sound was poor you could not hear the words above the band. The seats were terrible I had a tall girl in front of me and could hardly see the stage. i enjoyed all his old songs from the dire straight days but some of his new work was not to my taste . I would point out I like Mark Knopfler I have albums at home but I found the concert lacking in atmosphere and audience participation.the nec needs to do something about the use of tablets being used to record the concert. One guy had his up in the air recording which meant it was completely blocking any view I might have had of the stage.

Center Stožice in Ljubljana, Slovenia on Sat, 04 May 2013

Live photos, rated concerts view all.

• Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, Netherlands Sat, 06 Jun 2015 100% from 1 rating
• Frognerbadet in Oslo, Norway Wed, 10 Jun 2015 100% from 1 rating
• Sportpaleis in Merksem, Belgium Mon, 25 Apr 2005 100% from 1 rating
• Hala Tivoli in Ljubljana, Slovenia Tue, 03 May 2005 90% from 1 rating
• Arena Stožice in Ljubljana, Slovenia Sat, 29 Jun 2019 90% from 1 rating
• Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Spain Wed, 02 Apr 2008 90% from 1 rating
• Chateau Ste Michelle Winery in Woodinville, US Sat, 12 Sep 2015 90% from 1 rating
• Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, Spain Fri, 31 Jul 2015 75% from 1 rating
• Palau Olímpic de Badalona in Badalona, Spain Fri, 23 Jul 2010 75% from 1 rating
• Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, Spain Thu, 25 Jul 2013 75% from 1 rating

Ratings View all

• one of the best: 3 18%
• fantastic: 5 29%
• great: 4 24%
• good: 3 18%
• disappointing: 2 12%
• should've stayed at home: 0 0%

Biggest fans

Mark knopfler tour history, about mark knopfler.

Mark Knopfler was born 74 years ago, on Friday, 12 August 1949 in Glasgow, UK.

Based on our research data, it appears, that the first Mark Knopfler concert happened 36 years ago on Thu, 01 Sep 1988 in Gexa Energy Pavilion - Dallas, US and that the last Mark Knopfler concert was 5 years ago on Wed, 25 Sep 2019 in Madison Square Garden - New York (NYC), US.

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Mark Knopfler on the Most Patient and Wistful Music of His Career

Mark Knopfler is a tough guy to pin down. A reluctant sultan of swing, if you will. Fame? He can’t think of anything good about it; in fact, he eschews it instinctively. But he’s been in its shadow since Dire Straits debuted their self-titled album of lyrical portraits in 1978 — he was their sole songwriter and de facto leader until their breakup in the early ’90s — cementing it further with 1985’s epochal Brothers in Arms and a steady collection of solo outings in the subsequent decades.

Knopfler’s lineage now includes One Deep River (out April 12), an elegant record that’s a culmination of everything we know and admire about his style. “I’m always thinking about another crowd, another arena, another place, another time,” he tells me, “and another reality.” This type of geographical osmosis is at the core of Knopfler’s work, which has reverence for the past as much as the future. His rich, fluid guitar playing is just an added bonus. But if you try to compliment him on it, you might be met with a laugh: “I didn’t know what I was doing. At least I was there.”

Song you’ve grown to respect more

If you were to look at the last tour set, it would be anything that was still part of the picture. “Brothers in Arms” or “Romeo and Juliet” perhaps. “Sailing to Philadelphia.” They survived the trip. It’s quite nice to be able to go on playing those songs because you’ve written them and they mean a lot to people. So I don’t just skate over them; I try to find something in there that’s new and interesting. You try to get the most out of songs and they take a lot of playing. If you try, the song will try, too. Surely you never know if you will survive the trip. When you set out to write something, you never say to yourself, “Oh, this is going to be good all the way.” Nobody knows that. It’s like a love affair. You don’t know, for sure, where it’s going. I’ve been lucky a few times and had some things that stuck.

Another part of the fun is touring, which I’ve got to contemplate now as being something that’s over and done with. But I’m not scared of that, I’m quite happy about it, because what it means is that I’ll have more time to write. The first stage was getting used to having a guitar and then getting used to the idea that maybe I could play a little bit as a guitarist. And then, getting used to the idea that maybe I could write a song. And then thinking of myself as a songwriter is probably the last thing. I’m still adjusting to that and what I’m hoping to be able to do is write a couple of good songs before I quit.

Song that took the longest to unlock

There are definitely some that hang around in the junkyard out the back in bits, and before you can make them into a finished thing, they take their old time. One song took 16 years. Other songs can take 16 minutes. It took a long time for “Rüdiger” to arrive because I wrote the lyrics without changing a word right after John Lennon was assassinated. I wrote about an autograph hunter, “Rüdiger stands in the rain and the snow.” We went to Germany and that’s where I saw him, met him, and I was obviously thinking about the shooting in New York City. But for the music to arrive good and ready, it took years. In my case, there doesn’t seem to be a hard-and-fast rule about that stuff, and I never panic about it because I know it’ll turn up eventually.

That’s what it’s like, certainly, for a boy who’s got the scrapyard of a mind that I have. You find that you know certain things about boy things — like bicycle badges, just useless information. You have things in your head that stay there until you need them. And then you come out with this useless stuff occasionally. It’s kind of general knowledge, I suppose. I have a friend and we just sit and quiz each other on music and rock-and-roll records. We take enormous winnings off each other, which are all forgotten about as soon as we start playing. We give each other clues if someone’s struggling, but it’s great fun. It’s amazing how much rubbish a mind can retain, isn’t it?

Most collaborative Dire Straits song

I think we’d probably be making up a spoof song about somebody or just having a laugh and taking ideas from the floor. It wouldn’t have been anything serious. Writing, for me, is a solo affair and I never could write in a recording studio. Now I’ve got a studio of my own and I can’t write in it either. Go figure. I like recording studios for recording purposes only. I would write on the road and I would write in hotel rooms. What I’m looking forward to is having more time to write at home and seeing what happens there, just trying to write like a writer instead of snatching the moments here and there or late at night. It feels more civilized to me. In a hotel, you might see me walking down a corridor carrying a chair with no arms because there’s not one in my room, so I’ve found a dining chair somewhere and I’m bringing it back so I can put it at the desk and work on a song.

Song with your favorite character

I haven’t had the chance to think about it, so I’m sure I’ll be wrong. But I quite like the optimist in Jeremiah Dixon from “Sailing to Philadelphia,” as opposed to Mason’s pessimism and apprehensiveness. Mason seemed to have this fear about the enormity of where they were in this vast unknown wilderness of savages and what was going to happen to them. Whereas, Jeremiah would have a glass of wine with the ladies quite happily and just get on with the business of mapping out the Mason-Dixon Line. You identify with certain characters more than others — you just like them more. I think that happens to authors, because things you create do tend to start going their own way. Certainly a song does. When you’ve written a song, the song just says, “Well, see you,” and goes off down the road, just like a little figure you’ve created. When you have children, you realize it’s quite similar to that in some ways. There’s something enormous about it.

I find that I don’t have to love these characters. In fact, sometimes it can be the opposite. They can kind of scare you as well. They can be somebody whom you actively disagree with, or they can be somebody different from how you think you are. I’m not saying I’m in that Randy Newman bag. I mean, I’ve worked with Randy, adore him, and love his songs, but I’ve become much more interested in his direct, soulful style rather than identifying with some horrible individual. It’s great the way Randy could do that — you could identify with a war criminal , write about a war criminal, and try to understand what it’s like to be that. I wrote about a character like that for Dire Straits in “The Man’s Too Strong.” That’s the only time I’ve done it. I don’t think I could write a song as an executioner now. I don’t think it would interest me. I’d rather be able to write a song like “You Are My Sunshine.” To me, it would be in many ways superior. Take “Nobody’s Darling but Mine,” by Merle Haggard. I’m busy, unsuccessfully, trying to create something like that.

Song whose meaning you discovered after

In certain places you feel the ghosts. When I’m in Edinburgh, say, it’s a historic town, and a lot of my ancestors are Scottish so you feel them. The songs you sang when you were a kid, the scraps of those come back to life in your soul. History is in the cobblestones. When I’m in Rome playing at an arena, I feel it, like I’m playing the part of the gladiator. You connect with the place in a real geographical sense. I’m there from centuries before. Sometimes I’ll think of what places were, like with “Telegraph Road.” I’m thinking about what it was like when it was a little path going along the lake shore in Michigan, once upon a time. And now it’s 12 lanes of Texaco.

So it’s a different reality, but I like thinking of all of those realities at once, together. When “Sailing to Philadelphia,” came to me, I was reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , but I was looking down on this modern accommodation of massive highways, chemical refineries, and big ships in the canals — thinking only in the blink of an eye, a few years ago, Mason and Dixon were getting barges out from the United Kingdom to this deserted place. There was hardly anything there. Now, it’s Philadelphia, and that all seems to have happened in a very short space of time. Then you start wondering what it’s going to be like in another 100 years. I’m always imagining a place in another time — either the way it used to be, the way it is now, or where it’s going and what it’s going to. I don’t know whether I can help it. I’m sure a lot of people do it. Because, also, America is such an evocative country. The language of it, the biblical references, the places, and the names. I get enchanted just reading lists of kids’ names from the South. It’s the promise of those names. The promise is always there, isn’t it?

Song that makes you feel most wistful for Dire Straits

There are certain songs that go with playing live. Playing “Going Home” at the end of a set, to a crowd anywhere in the world, people go bananas. It’s a fun thing for a band to experience. I suppose you get used to that happening, the big audience reactions and massive noises. It’s a thrill. “Wow, this is Madison Square Garden and people are going nuts.” Surely, that’s what you’re doing here. Otherwise, go home. It doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re in the wrong place. You got to want to be there and you’ve got to go looking for the source of it. So you become this little dragon slayer who’s got a nerve. Who do you think you are? You’re just a kid who doesn’t know anything, but without that, where would we be? I’m perfectly well aware that a lot of it is just blowing smoke. But you’re trying to figure out a way through. You stick around for long enough and after a while you get a bit more of an idea. I feel as though I’ve had a really blessed run with some great people. I wouldn’t ask for anything more than I’ve had.

Solo that doubles as the greatest endurance test

Some of the guitars are pretty hard to play. Playing the beginning of “Telegraph Road” always seems hard when you’re going from a spiffy electric to that old war horse. You’ve just got to brace your hands for an old guitar from the 1930s. So that’s all part of the challenge of that song, when the guitar itself doesn’t want to play pretty.

Learning to play those longer songs in different conditions — or shorter songs we extended for a live setting — before the modern lights came in was difficult. They got rid of the big old heavy lights, because if one of those dropped and hit you, you’re a dead person. And the new lights seem as though they don’t generate any heat at all. The old lights generated so much heat. We were always drenched when we came off-stage, literally soaked to the skin. Sweat would be stinging your eyes, so you learn to play with your eyes squeezed shut. I’m pretty sure I played a lot of that stuff without looking. That’s all part of the fun of it: figuring out ways around things. I remember someone putting a little note up at the front row that said, “More liquid gumption, please.” I was spraying the audience with so much sweat that it was stinging them . I always used to think, Only rock and roll could do this.

How working on one Steely Dan song affected your morale

It was very different from the way that I work. I was really pleased to have gotten to be there in the first place. I certainly wasn’t expecting to walk out at the end of that day and have anything on the record that they would keep. The story that I got from Gaucho ’s engineer was something like, “Man, you ought to see the guys crawling out of this place,” so I didn’t expect to emerge victorious at all. I’d gone through this period of loving Steely Dan records. I just heard “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” the other day. What a beautiful, beautiful thing. The music ends up affecting you and becomes part of what you are.

I think it’s easy to forget what that little chord sequence in “Time Out of Mind” means to so many people. You know, what living they’ve done with it or how they’ve used it to live. I must have played those chords a thousand times in the studio. What’s important is to try to get into the mind-set where you’re not thinking of that — you’re thinking of what it means. If you’re, for example, playing “Brothers in Arms” in a great big stadium in Munich where Adolf Hitler spoke, it invests it with something. So you’re thinking about history and where we are now, where we’re going, and where we’ve been. You get that historical perspective and it gives you all of these other perspectives, which I don’t think you can put a price on.

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The writer-guitarist discusses his ninth solo studio album, a record on which he reaches well beyond the folk-roots base of his latter-day work.

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For most artists with a 40-year recording history, completing a new 14-track album with many more bonus tracks for various release formats — and many other songs written but set aside — would be more than enough work. The fact that Mark Knopfler did all of that for his  Down The Road Wherever album but also simultaneously wrote dozens of new songs for the stage production of Local Hero (a show inevitably delayed by the pandemic) says much about his insatiable appetite to create.

The new version of the story previously filmed by Bill Forsyth, with which Knopfler made his soundtrack-writing debut in 1983, opened at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in March 2019. The singer-guitarist’s worldwide fan base also savored the release, on his own British Grove label via Universal, of his ninth solo studio set, released on November 16, 2018. Down The Road Wherever was a noble follow-up to 2015’s Tracker, and one that saw Knopfler reaching well beyond the folk-roots base of his latter-day work.

Such acoustics continue to underpin his sound, but now they shared space on the album with elements of jazz saxophone and the slinky grooves of “Back On The Dance Floor.” There was the amiable lilt of “Heavy Up,” a touch of Rodgers and Hammerstein on “Just A Boy Away From Home” (in which Knopfler quotes the entire verse and chorus melody of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”) and more. The album was introduced by the lead track “Good On You Son.”

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“I think it will be different, because whether you want it or not, you develop, that’s just what happens,” said Knopfler, talking to us at his British Grove Studios in west London. “Sometimes the songs will tell you, after you’re done, what it is you’ve been doing wrong. So that’s a never-ending source of amusement — you can even find out from doing them what they’re about, or what you’ve been thinking about, perhaps. So it’s an odd business.”

The time between studio albums is explained both by the long recording process and, before that, the extensive world tour he undertook behind Tracker. “I suppose it has been a bit of a gap, but the reason for that is that I had a lot of stuff to record,” he says. “I was touring and writing this stuff, and being able to write on the road is a bit of an advantage.

Leaving a smaller footprint

“You just keep looking at the songs, and having a laptop has certainly improved that. I’m not just tearing up bits of paper and throwing them in the bin anymore, so ecologically speaking, I’m leaving a smaller footprint,” he jokes. “But it means that there’s more stuff. More stuff to throw away as well, of course, but I think we were quite a long time just putting recording sessions together.

“And possibly [there’s] the fact that there’s nobody to throw you out of the studio, which I got quite used to, using other studios. You can maybe just get a chance to get in and get a bit more studio time. So here and there, that is dead useful.”

Useful, that is, when he can get into his own studios, which are in great demand for all sorts of work, notably including the Rolling Stones’ 2016 Blue & Lonesome album. “Yeah, it seems to have grown,” says Knopfler of British Grove. “I think it’s because it’s so flexible. You can use the place for high-tech things like movies and surround sound, so it’s great for that brigade. I think we’ve done the last three Warner Brothers musicals here. And it’s great for rock’n’roll recording.

“So you can use tons and tons of vintage recording gear, and the band can all play together, and you can do lots of different set-ups,” he adds. “It has the latest digital recording gear, but it also has analogue gear from 1954 onwards. In fact the microphones go back even further, they go back into the 30s, even.”

From the opening “Trapper Man,” the new album adds the ingredient, little heard on Knopfler’s solo work, of female singers. “I think female b.v.s [backing vocalists] is something that was going to happen, [and I’ve] probably been meaning to have it a long time. I just get probably bored with it being guys.

Introducing a brass element

“Also, the brass is another thing. I’ve really been enjoying having the brass element in quite a lot of the songs, so when I go out on tour, I’m thinking I will just have to still have the elements I’ve always had, but then to have a brass element in there as well, because it’ll just be more people on the bus.”

Irish star Imelda May also appears on the album, on “Back On The Dance Floor,”   and Knopfler professes himself a fan. “It was great to have Imelda on that song, I think she’s just fantastic,” he says. “She really did a lot to color it, she’s just so creative, and that was fun.

“It was open enough to try some keyboard sounds and different things as well as the guitars being in there, like they nearly always are, so it’s a good old mix of stuff. It’s a kind of a mystery song to me, but I really like it. That’s one of my favourites from the record.”

The 2019 tour was another exhaustive undertaking, opening in Barcelona on April 25 and continuing, over more than 80 dates, until late September. “That gets harder of course, the older you get,” confides the frontman. “The actual physical shifting of the songs over to an audience every night does become a reality. Who knows if it’s the last big go around. But I ain’t on a Zimmer frame yet, so I’ll try to get the most out of it that I can.”

Certain new songs were already in Knopfler’s sights for the tour set list. “You do find yourself thinking about being on a stage and playing a song. [The closing] ‘Matchstick Man,’ I’d really quite like to play that to an audience with an acoustic guitar. ‘Back On The Dance Floor’ will be fun to play with a band, so there are a few.

“I’m thinking about having Mike [McGoldrick] and John [McCusker], the folk players, as part of some of the songs, and having Nige and Tom [Nigel Hitchcock, saxophone, and Tom Walsh, trumpet] as part of the brass thing on some of the songs. I’m looking forward to it.”

Listen to the best of Mark Knopfler on Apple Music and Spotify .

At 69 on the album’s release, Knopfler’s enthusiasm for the entire process of being a musician is undimmed. “I feel the same way I always felt,” he says, looking around the studio. “So when I come in here and I see a couple of guitars in the corner, I get the same buzz that I had when I was a kid. You’ve got to have that. It’s almost a childish attitude that keeps you fired up about turning up.”

Buy or stream Down The Road Wherever .

November 15, 2018 at 11:24 pm

I am sure to enjoy this latest cd. I kept meaning to buy previous 3 cos and lucky now to catch up through YouTube and Spotify but I do intend to purchase them all. The behind the scenes videos are just as enjoyable and intriguing. So many comments duplicate what Justin Hayward often says so it must be true of these prolific story tellers with addition of making strings from their guitars sing their own song too. Truly magical totally hooked.

VeraLucia Casarin Oliveira

November 17, 2018 at 4:07 am

adorei!!! como sempre!!!suas canções são maravilhosas!!!!

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Sultans Of Swing: The Untold Story Of Dire Straits

Why the biggest-selling British rock band of the 80s deserve to be rescued from the dustbin of history.

At 10.10pm on October 9, 1992, Mark Knopfler bid goodnight to 40,000 people and walked off stage in Zaragoza, Spain. It was the last time he did so as the singer, guitarist and undisputed leader of Dire Straits. It brought to an end a 15-year journey during which time the band had risen from the pubs and sweaty clubs of London to the very biggest stages in the world.

The simple facts are these: Knopfler formed Dire Straits in London in 1977 with his younger brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass and Pick Withers on drums. Emerging from the city’s fertile pub-rock scene at the dawn of the punk era, they were an overnight sensation. The white-hot success of their first single, Sultans Of Swing , and self-titled debut album was founded on the elder Knopfler’s fluid, finger-picked guitar style, which sounded as lovely as a bubbling stream. Theirs was no fleeting moment, either, with three more hit records following before they reached their apogee on their fifth studio album, Brothers In Arms .

That record was unstoppable from the moment of its release in May 1985. It made Dire Straits superstars, but it also warped the popular perception of both Knopfler and his band. Dire Straits became a byword for a certain sort of safe, homogenised music, and Knopfler was turned into a caricature of the middle-aged rocker, with jacket sleeves rolled up and wearing a headband.

What was forgotten in the wake of its stellar success was just how striking and sometimes radical Dire Straits had seemed from their inception. The bare-boned economy of Knopfler’s songs and his dizzying guitar fills were a breath of clean air amid the lumbering rock dinosaurs and one-dimensional punk thrashers of the late 70s. He was peerless as craftsman and virtuoso, able to plug into rock’s classic lineage and bend it to sometimes wild forms. He wrote terrific songs, too: from Sultans Of Swing to Romeo And Juliet , Tunnel Of Love to Private Investigations . These were taut mini-dramas of dark depths and dazzling melodic and lyrical flourishes. In quick time Knopfler was fêted by the rock aristocracy. Bob Dylan invited him to be his band leader and producer, and a parade of other icons also beat a path to Knopfler’s door, among them Phil Lynott, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Tina Turner.

It would be hard to conjure a less likely rock star than Knopfler. Balding and outwardly taciturn, he seemed born to the role of sideman. Yet his formidable talent was yoked to an iron will. He drove Dire Straits on, expanding their boundaries right up to the point Brothers In Arms became too all-consuming to contain. It wasn’t even as if he had contrived to make a blockbuster. In large part it was hushed and melancholy, a sigh rather than a roar. But it was damned by having its signature single explode out of context. At its core, Money For Nothing was an old-school boogie, but a dash of studio polish, Sting’s mannered backing vocal and a computer-generated promo video were enough to turn it, and Dire Straits themselves, into the very embodiment of 80s naff.

Small wonder that Knopfler once told Rolling Stone: “Success I adore. It means I can buy 1959 Gibson Les Pauls and Triumph motorcycles. But I detest fame. It interferes with what you do and has no redeeming features at all.”

Mark Knopfler was born into a middle-class household in Glasgow in 1949. His brother and future Dire Straits bandmate David followed three years later. Their father was an architect expelled from his native Hungary on account of his firebrand socialism. When the family moved to Newcastle in the 50s their English mother became a headmistress, and both boys attended a local grammar school in Gosforth.

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Music was a fact of life in the Knopfler house. The brothers latched on to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and, later, The Shadows. Hearing the latter, and in particular their bespectacled lead guitarist Hank Marvin, opened up a future filled with possibilities for Mark Knopfler. He traced the arc of Marvin’s distinctive sound back to American wizards like Chet Atkins, Elvis’s guitar slingers Scotty Moore and James Burton, and blues greats such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. At 15 he persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, a £50 copy of Marvin’s red Stratocaster. Soon he’d taught himself the basics and was playing in school bands and on the city’s club circuit. Brother David followed suit, performing at working men’s clubs in a folk duo.

“On one hand our parents were horrified that we wanted to make a career of pop music,” David Knopfler says now. “On the other they had a liberal bias for letting us follow our own path. But they would have preferred us to be architects or lawyers, not ‘My son the unemployed strummer’.”

Mark was first to flee the nest, when he got a job as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds. One of his first tasks for the paper was to write Jimi Hendrix’s obituary in September 1970, handed to him on account of him being the only person in the office young enough to know who Hendrix was. Another was to interview a local blues guitarist, Steve Phillips. The two of them hit it off and began performing together as an acoustic duo called Duolian Stringpickers, and spent the next few years playing gigs in the north-east.

“Mark was already a very capable guitarist at eighteen or nineteen, way above the norm,” notes Steve Phillips. “But he hadn’t developed his own style. He was far more withdrawn then as well. He didn’t have the confidence he acquired later as a musician, and didn’t see himself as a singer at all. His idea was that he would be the guitar player behind somebody else.”

During that time Knopfler left the paper to take a degree in English at Leeds University, and married his school sweetheart, Kathy White. As soon as he graduated in 1973 Knopfler headed for London. He answered a classified ad in the Melody Maker to join jobbing pub-rock band Brewers Droop. The group had a record deal with RCA but were in the process of falling apart. Two months later Knopfler was out of a job, destitute and newly divorced, the move to London having brought about the end of his marriage. He returned to Newcastle. Later he took a post as an English lecturer at Loughton College in Essex, and put together his own pub-rock band, the Café Racers.

The teaching job gave Knopfler a lifeline and disposable income. He bought a motorbike and his dad’s car, allowing him to transport his growing collection of guitars from one pub gig to the next. In 1976 he struck out on his own on a trip to America, travelling the country on a Greyhound bus and starting work on what would become Dire Straits’ first set of songs.

At the same time, David Knopfler moved to London to work as a social worker in Deptford, a down-at-heel neighbourhood south of the Thames. He moved into a council flat shared with 26-year-old John Illsley, a bass player who’d grown up in rural Leicestershire and was then studying sociology at nearby Goldsmith’s College. The senior Knopfler became a regular visitor to the flat, bringing along his guitar for jamming sessions that took off after last orders at the pub.

“We got along well from the start,” Illsley recounts now. “I did a couple of gigs with Mark’s band because the bass player’s girlfriend was having a baby. After that we were sat in the pub one night and decided to start our own band. There was always a strong consensus between Mark and me about how things should be. We rarely disagreed about anything.”

Knopfler introduced his brother and Illsley to Pick Withers, a propulsive drummer he’d first met while doing an aborted session with Rod Clements of Lindisfarne. The four of them began rehearsing together in the poky flat, padding the walls and trusting to the benevolence of the neighbours.

“We didn’t talk about it, we just got on with it and it evolved,” says David Knopfler (below, with Mark). “But then I think both Mark and I had a different vision of what we were up to. I was building a democracy, and Mark was making an autocracy.”

It was Pick Withers, the only member of the fledgling band without a day job, who suggested the name Dire Straits. The newly christened four-piece played their first gig together in the summer of 1977. It was at a makeshift festival that took place on a patch of grass out the back of the Deptford council block, and they ran a power cable from their flat to the small stage. Illsley recalls sharing the bill that afternoon with a bunch of snarling punk bands, though in fact it was the more approachable Squeeze who headlined.

Using £500 Illsley had inherited from his grandmother, the band cut a demo at the tiny Pathway Studios in north London. Among the five Mark Knopfler originals on the tape were Sultans Of Swing , a loose-limbed account of watching a hapless jazz combo flailing in a London pub, and a languorous shuffle titled Down To The Waterline . Lyrically evocative, beautifully played and sung by Knopfler in a laconic drawl, the tracks sounded fresh and different. DJ and rock historian Charlie Gillett got hold of the tape and began airing it, alerting Phonogram Records A&R man John Stainze, a rockabilly buff who snapped the band up to the major label.

Stainze reached out to a booking agent contact of his, Ed Bicknell, inviting him along to see his new band playing at the Dingwalls club in Camden. Bicknell had taken his first steps into the music business at Hull University in the 60s, where as social secretary he booked gigs by the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd before joining the prestigious NEMS agency that handled such heavyweight clients as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Elton John. Fortuitously, Bicknell too had had his road-to-Damascus moment with music through The Shadows.

“I listened to two songs that night and turned to John and said: ‘He’s got a red Stratocaster like Hank Marvin’s. Who’s managing this group?’” Bicknell recalls. “If Mark would have had a blue Gibson I’d have walked out, but he encapsulated everything that was my dream. I remember I was wearing a long suede coat with a nylon fur collar that night. When I went into the dressing room to meet the band, the hem of the coat caught the red Stratocaster and knocked it off its stand to the floor. That went down like a lead balloon.”

Bicknell cemented his credentials by booking the band onto a 23-date UK tour with Talking Heads in December 1977. By the end of it he was their manager and within two months Dire Straits were recording their first album at Island Records’ Basing Street studios with producer Muff Winwood, elder brother of Stevie and former bassist with the Spencer Davies Group.

“Or Spluff Windbag, as we called him,” says Bicknell, laughing. “He pretty much recorded a live record but without the audience. It cost £12,500, including the sleeve, and it sold eight million within nine months of coming out. We were reeling: ‘Fuck me. What’s happening?’”

The Dire Straits album was released in October 1978. At a point when such second-generation punk and new-wave acts as The Jam, Boomtown Rats and Generation X were making an impression, it stood apart. Knopfler’s songs were characterised by the intricacies of his guitar playing, the rolling gait of the band’s rhythms and by their open spaces, as uncluttered as prairie lands. It was a rich musical terrain that drew comparisons with Dylan, JJ Cale and Ry Cooder. But in spirit it was closest to another great record released that year, Bruce Springsteen’s symphony to the working man, Darkness On The Edge Of Town . Like that record it had the same connection to time and place. In Dire Straits’ case this was to the back streets of Newcastle and the bright lights of London, with Knopfler narrating his journey from one city to the other.

It was a success from the off, going Top 10 all across Europe. When it was released in America six months later it vaulted to No.2 on the Billboard chart. The band drove themselves around the States on their first tour of the country at the start of 1979. Dylan came to see their show in LA, popping backstage afterwards to ask Knopfler to play on his next album, Slow Train Coming . Knopfler, who had seen Dylan at Newcastle City Hall on his first electric tour in 1966, would later recall hiring an open-top convertible and driving down Santa Monica Boulevard to the session, getting sunburnt on route and thinking to himself: “This is it.”

“Mark was our standard bearer and ticket to being exceptional rather than merely good,” acknowledges David Knopfler. “He was actually rather humble at that point – hard for me to imagine now. John Illsley and I pretty much dragged him to the altar all the way.”

Before they even got to America, the band’s UK record company hurried them for a follow-up record, winging them out to the Bahamas to make Communique with producer and impresario Jerry Wexler, the man who had signed Led Zeppelin and recorded Ray Charles. Wexler smoothed the rougher edges of their sound. The album was rushed out less than a year after their debut, to a cooler response and slower sales. In retrospect it sounds like a logical step forward: Wexler’s sheen bringing Knopfler’s textured melodies into sharper focus, heard to best effect on Once Upon A Time In The West and the quick-stepping Lady Writer, each as coolly embracing as a Bahamian sunset.

As their whirlwind schedule intensified, the first strains began to show. Tensions within the band were brewing, intensified by the claustrophobia engendered by being constantly on the road or in the studio, and arising most damagingly between the two brothers.

“Everything put a strain on us,” says David Knopfler. “It was just through being exhausted: drinking too much every night, partying and wrecking your physical and mental health in the way that rock bands did then to excess.”

“Nobody involved is prepared for success like that,” adds Bicknell. “Everything changes, of course, but you stay the same. You’re probably still in your horrible little flat eating bacon sandwiches because none of the money has flowed through. Or if it has, you’re so terrified of it that you don’t spend anything, which is what happened with us. You think the tax man is going to take it away or that this is going to stop tomorrow.”

Bicknell suggests that the tension between the Knopflers ran deeper than Dire Straits. “David’s problem was he thought that the band should be a democracy, and it was more like a brutal dictatorship – as far as he was concerned. The issues between him and Mark, which for public consumption have been packaged up as musical issues, they weren’t. As John Illsley said to me at the time: ‘This has been going on since David was born.’ I’m stating the obvious, but David was in the group because he was Mark’s brother, not because he was the greatest rhythm guitarist that Mark could have found.”

John Illsley and I meet at a coffee shop in Notting Hill on a bright spring morning. The moment he walks through the door, Dire Straits’ 1980 hit Romeo And Juliet begins playing on the radio. Illsley smiles at the coincidence and suggests – entirely accurately – that the 35-year-old song sounds as if it had been made just yesterday.

At the time of its release it represented a crossing of the Rubicon for Mark Knopfler as a songwriter and for the band in general. Knopfler always was a prolific writer, but as he approached Dire Straits’ third album he had new horizons in mind. He envisioned the band’s sound being enhanced by keyboards, and of this freeing him to explore more complex terrain. Romeo And Juliet was the first signpost to his intentions: a near six-minute roller-coaster ride rumbling through the wreckage of a shattered love affair.

“I remember him coming into the office and playing it to me for the first time,” says Ed Bicknell. “I didn’t know what to say: I just sat and stared at the ground in complete disbelief. By then Mark had cottoned on that this was his group and he edged himself into pole position.”

The act of Knopfler conclusively seizing control would have been provocative enough, but it was exacerbated by other issues bubbling to the surface as the band gathered in New York to record their third album, Making Movies. According to Bicknell, three years of constant work had left them in a parlous state. It transpired that Romeo And Juliet was drawn from very personal experience.

“There were issues with various band members that related mostly to the girls in their lives and were calamitous,” says Bicknell. “We went into that record off the back of three out of four of them going through break-ups. Certain people also didn’t like certain people. It got very fractious. I thought the band was about to break up.”

To begin with, nothing was helped by them being in the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine. A brash New Yorker just off the back of making hit records with Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, Iovine had a painstaking way of working; the first week of recording was spent attempting to get the perfect drum sound. In this hothouse atmosphere the Knopflers were soon at each other’s throats.

“Before we started recording, Jimmy took Mark to watch a Springsteen session and his jaw was on the floor,” says David Knopfler. “Everyone was calling Springsteen ‘Boss’ and he completely called the shots. But Bruce had spent thirty years learning to be boss and he’s very good at it. Mark had not long come from being a college lecturer and hadn’t been schooled in people skills.

By that point the Knopflers’ relationship was as bad as it could be. “By the time of Making Movies he was king,” recalls David. “But he was the bloke I’d shared a bedroom with. How could I be deferential to him?”

When the blow-up came it was swift and brutal. The brothers had an explosive argument and David Knopfler quit. He returned to the UK, where he would begin a solo career. Three years later his elder brother guested on his debut solo album, but the two of them were estranged.

“David’s going wasn’t nice but it was absolutely inevitable,” says Ed Bicknell, who says that same issue of control led to Pick Withers’s departure within two years. “Mark’s got a strong personality and he’s very determined, and quite ruthless. But you need to be ruthless if you’re going to climb the greasy pole, and democracy in groups never, ever works.”

With David Knopfler gone, the pace of recording picked up and Making Movies took shape. Iovine brought in Springsteen’s E Street Band pianist Roy Bittan, and his heart-stopping fills gave wings to another epic, Tunnel Of Love , on which Knopfler located the sweet spot between the E Street Band’s hulking engine and Dylan’s rolling thunder. Hearing the track come into being, says Bicknell, “it felt like a jet plane taking off”.

A glut of boldly ambitious records came out in 1980 – Springsteen’s The River , John Lennon’s Double Fantasy , Sandinista! by the Clash and Talking Heads’ Remain In Light to name but four. Making Movies stood at least shoulder to shoulder with each of them. Fired by the extra dimension Bittan brought into play, Knopfler subverted his guitar to the songs, and in doing so extracted from them greater heft and a new-found emotional resonance. Romeo And Juliet and Tunnel Of Love initially towered over the rest, but repeated listening revealed more jewels in Solid Rock , Espresso Love and the surging ballad Hand In Hand .

For the ensuing tour Knopfler brought in American guitarist Hal Lindes to fill his brother’s shoes and fellow Geordie Alan Clark on keyboards. Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan were among those turning out to pay their respects at one triumphal show at the Roxy on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip.

As the 80s unwound Mark Knopfler was like a man released. He wrote a thoroughly fitting soundtrack for the bittersweet British film Local Hero , produced Dylan’s Infidels album and, in 1982, reconvened Dire Straits for the grandiose Love Over Gold . That album featured just five songs – all of them long and involved, and two of them stone-cold classics. Fifteen-minute opener Telegraph Road was pieced together during sound-checks on the Making Movies tour and unfolded like a literary novel, documenting America’s industrial revolution. Private Investigations was even more outlandish, a somnolent musical noir that Knopfler insisted be released unedited as a seven-minute single. Remarkably it reached No.2 in the UK.

Next up was the live double Alchemy, taped on the Love Over Gold tour and showcasing a band at the peak of its powers. Free from the confines of the studio, Dire Straits were able to stretch out and take flight, nowhere more so than on Sultans Of Swing and Telegraph Road . Both were longer and far more powerful than their studio counterparts.

Knopfler saw this as the end of an era for the band. “I’d like to try something else now,” he said at the time. “It could be acoustic guitar, or it could be all brass instruments, I really don’t know.”

Perhaps least of all he anticipated making one of the defining albums of the decade.

Towards the end of 1984 Knopfler assembled a new line-up of Dire Straits in London to rehearse their next record. He appeared more single-minded and attentive to detail than ever, rigorously putting the group through their paces for a month before whisking them off to Air Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat to cut Brothers In Arms.

Air Studios, later razed to the ground by a hurricane, was an idyllic location, and the tranquillity of island life seemed to relax Knopfler to his task. There was an ease to much of Brothers In Arms , as if the music had seeped from his fingertips unbidden. The mood of much of it was low-key and reflective, shifting from the late-night whispers of Why Worry and Your Latest Trick to the near-whispered title track. When it was roused, as on the crashing chords of The Man’s Too Strong , the effect was that much more magnified.

Yet one of Knopfler’s new songs immediately stood out from the rest. It began with a fuzzed guitar riff that Ed Bicknell suspects was inspired by ZZ Top, and proceeded to recount verbatim a rant at MTV that Knopfler had overheard a deliveryman making in an electrical goods store in New York. Sting added his distinctive vocals to the intro section of the track – singing the single sorrowful refrain: ‘I want my MTV.’

“Sting used to come to Montserrat to go windsurfing, and he came up for supper at the studio,” says John Illsley. “We played him Money For Nothing and he turned round and said: ‘You’ve done it this time, you bastards.’ Mark said if he thought it was so good why didn’t he go and add something to it. He did his bit there and then.”

Knopfler had another song, the gambolling boogie Walk Of Life , set aside as a B-side, until Ed Bicknell happened upon it while it was being mixed and persuaded him to include it on the album at the last minute. In the event it was an even bigger-selling single than Money For Nothing .

Upon its release, Brothers In Arms met with lukewarm reviews, but it arrived at precisely the right time. MTV was about to launch in the UK, and the music station leapt upon the animated promo for Money For Nothing, choosing it as the first video to be aired on the channel. The compact disc had also arrived, and Brothers In Arms’ exquisite production was tailor-made for the new format. The album sold more than a million copies on CD alone, taking Dire Straits to a new generation of consumers who saw music a status symbol. It took up a four-year residency in the UK chart and spent nine weeks at No.1 in the US, elevating Knopfler and his band to the top table of 80s megastardom alongside Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna.

In its wake, Dire Straits set off on an 18-month world tour that took in 247 sold-out stadium and arena shows in 100 cities. By the end of it the endless attention and the sheer weight of numbers had lost all meaning for the band members, and for Mark Knopfler most of all.

“I would do a report for them every week which was then shoved under each of their hotel room doors,” says Ed Bicknell. “It would give world chart positions, and album and singles sales figures. I’m absolutely sure in my own mind that Mark would take his copy and put it straight in the bin.”

After Brothers In Arms Knopfler retreated from the spotlight for the best part of five years, but was eventually tempted back. In 1991 he gathered Dire Straits once more, for the On Every Street album. It sounded worn and tired, but still racked up 10 million sales. They embarked on another mammoth tour on the back of it, playing close to 300 shows in two years. It was a vast undertaking and also a ruinous one. Knopfler’s second marriage disintegrated, and he recoiled from the dehumanising nature of existing on such a grand scale. It was all over after that last gig in Zaragoza, but he formally laid the band to rest in 1996 and has barely spoken of them since.

“The last tour was utter misery,” says Ed Bicknell. “Whatever the zeitgeist was that we had been part of, it had passed.”

“Mark and I agreed that was enough,” recalls John Illsey. “Personal relationships were in trouble and it put a terrible strain on everybody emotionally and physically. We were changed by it. Neither of us wants to go back to those days. Mark described it to me just the other day as being too much ‘white light’ – too much in the spotlight, and he was never very comfortable with that.”

With the band laid to rest, John Illsley settled down to indulge his love of painting and is currently preparing an exhibition of his work in London. He also continues to record and tour with his own band. Ed Bicknell managed Mark Knopfler for several years after the split but has now retired.

Having run his race with Dire Straits, Knopfler has since contented himself in a quieter, more comfortable niche – composing soundtracks, collaborating with the likes of Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris, and making a succession of roots-based solo albums, of which the latest, and possibly best, is this year’s Tracker . He was married for the third time, to actress Kitty Aldridge in 1997, and continues to indulge his lifelong passion for motorbikes and collecting classic cars. He and his brother are still not speaking.

“I spent a lot of time doing therapy and dealing with my issues and ghosts and demons,” says David Knopfler. “Maybe Mark has too. I don’t know what he does. Of course, it casts a huge shadow on both our lives and on our families. We’ve got cousins who don’t know each other.”

Ed Bicknell says that people ask him regularly when Dire Straits are going to get back together. His answer remains the same.

“I tell them the same thing: why would they? None of them needs the money. Peter Grant once said to me: ‘When you’ve had an experience like I had with Led Zeppelin and you had with Dire Straits, there is no point trying to reproduce it.’ And he was exactly right. That was the one.”

The Top 10 Best Dire Straits Songs

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Paul Rees been a professional writer and journalist for more than 20 years. He was Editor-in-Chief of the music magazines Q and Kerrang! for a total of 13 years and during that period interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen to Noel Gallagher, Adele and Take That. His work has also been published in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Sunday Express, Classic Rock, Outdoor Fitness, When Saturday Comes and a range of international periodicals. 

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Revisiting Opening Night of Mark Knopfler’s 2019 Tour

On opening night at Palau Sant Jordi, Knopfler and his band performed 19 songs culled from his solo catalog and Dire Straits material. Among them: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “Telegraph Road,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Money For Nothing.” Conspicuously missing from the setlist was “Sultans of Swing” from Dire Straits’ 1978 debut album.

Watch him perform “Telegraph Road” on opening night

On tour, Knopfler performed with an expanded 10-piece band, most of whom have been working with him for more than two decades: Guy Fletcher (keyboards), Richard Bennett (guitar), Jim Cox (piano), Mike McGoldrick (whistle and flute), John McCusker (fiddle and cittern), Glenn Worf (bass), Danny Cummings (percussion) and Ian Thomas (drums). New additions include Graeme Blevins (saxophone) and Tom Walsh (trumpet).

Watch them perform “On Every Street”

Knopfler, born Aug. 12, 1949, turned 70 in between the European and North American legs of the tour.

Related: A look back at Dire Straits’ debut LP

Watch  them perform “Once Upon a Time in the West” on opening night

Knopfler has previously released eight solo albums, as well as Neck And Neck with guitar great Chet Atkins and All The Roadrunning with Emmylou Harris. He has also created film soundtracks for Local Hero , The Princess Bride and Cal .

Watch the band perform the evening’s final number, “Going Home (Theme From  Local Hero )”

Related: Knopfler has written new material for a musical adaptation of  Local Hero

In addition to producing his own records, Knopfler has also produced albums for Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, among others. Knopfler was made an Order of the British Empire in 1999 and was given the Lifetime Achievement honor at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2012.

Mark Knopfler, April 25, 2019, Palau Sant Jordi, Barcelona, Spain Setlist

Why Aye Man Nobody Does That Corned Beef City Sailing to Philadelphia Once Upon a Time in the West Romeo and Juliet My Bacon Roll Matchstick Men Done With Bonaparte Heart Full of Holes She’s Gone Your Latest Trick Silvertown Blues Postcards From Paraguay On Every Street Speedway at Nazareth Telegraph Road

Encore Money For Nothing Going Home: Theme From Local Hero

When Knopfler tours again, tickets can be purchased here and here .

Watch Knopfler perform Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” in 2015

Related: In 2018, Knopfler skipped Dire Straits’ induction into the Rock Hall

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2 Comments so far

Great show my wife and I saw in Phoenix.

Saw this tour, a good show. But not as intense as his 99 tour. Glad to catch him one more time, most probably the last chance to see him. As always a killer backup band.

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Mark Knopfler Returns With Signature Mix of Celtic Folk, Rock & Blues on ‘One Deep River’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

• By Jim Hynes
• One Comment

All these years later, the indelible sound of those classic Dire Straits songs remains, and through nine solo albums over the past two decades, almost three now, the first few words or first few guitar notes have one immediately recognizing Mark Knopfler. I t’s hard to believe that he now presents his tenth solo album since disbanding the group in 1995. The tried and true have stayed with him on his solo journey, marked by his poetic storytelling and one-of-a-kind deep voice. Those dulcet tones of Knopfler’s voice remain immaculately intact. Now 74, every aspect of his artistry remains at its consistently high quality. As with the past few releases, Knopfler waxes mostly nostalgic here again on One Deep River . The band features mostly his longtime collaborators, Jim Cox and Guy Fletcher on keyboards, Glenn Worf on bass , Ian Thomas on drums, Danny Cummings (percussion), Richard Bennett (guitar), Mike McGoldrick (whistle and Uilleann pipes), John McCusker (fiddle), and newcomer the in-demand Greg Leisz on pedal and lap steel.

“Two Pairs of Hands” lands in that most familiar groove, like sinking into one’s favorite cushioning couch. The sneaky groove and ringing guitar are trademark Knopfler, as he tries to explain what it’s like leading a band that’s playing to a packed house, resorting to that old saying “I’ve only got two pairs of hands.” “Ahead of the Game,” the first single with accompanying YouTube video, has Knopfler recalling his earliest days playing for tips in the clubs, and brimming with a satisfied pride that he’s still able to do so, “ With the sawdust on the floor/We’re worn out and weary, all of us/But we know why we came/Banged up and battered like this old bus/Staying just ahead of the game/Ahead of the game. Topically, it bears similarities lyrically to “Matchstick Man” from his previous, 2028’s Down the Road Wherever .

Piano and background vocals imbue the buoyant “Smart Money,” which has all those Knopfler traits of infectious melodicism, unhurried but spot-on fretwork, and his eminently cool, understated vocals. “Scavenger’s Yard” plays to an impossibly funky groove with spiraling, twisting guitar surfing above the insistent backbeat as the story unwinds with its blues references, “ In Scavengers Yard the wild things roam/Welcome-the bag man’s home/You’ll find down on the killing floor.” Invariably, a slow waltz follows with Knopfler crooning through “Black Tie Jobs,” using just a few well-placed sustained guitar notes to color the tune. The ethereal “Tunnel 13” places his signature voice front and center with a largely acoustic, spare accompaniment, burnished by Leisz’s deft touches. Going beyond the affecting sonics, this is another one of Knopfler’s storytelling songs in the vein of Mason and Dixon in “Sailing to Philadelphia.” In this case he recounts a real-life Western tale of a train robbery staged in the Siskiyou Mountains in 1923. 

Knopfler continues the Western motif with the tale of a boomtown gone bust and a busted love in “Janine,” with his soaring guitar inevitably evoking the score of Local Hero.  Leisz colors the humble, but rather sly recounting of presumably how his career rocketed upward in “Watch Me Gone” with references to Dylan and Van in these lines – “Well maybe I’ll hit the road with Bob/Or maybe hitch a ride with Van.,” the backgrounds giving a soft edge to the chorus. The gently swaying “Before My Train Comes” is the third song that invokes trains, this time a nod to mortality.

The use of trains and mention of Dylan re-kindles 1979 when Knopfler performed on Slow Train Coming. This album feels very much like every other Knopfler solo album and could certainly benefit from those age-old grooves and punch that graced the Dylan album and early Dire Straits releases.

There appears to be an implicit warning about emerging global tyranny in “This One’s Not Going to End Well.” Yet, maybe the sequencing is at issue. As was true of his previous effort, the back half of the album does drag a bit until we reach the title track, an endearing ode to River Tyne, connecting his childhood to present day, rendered exquisitely as his guitar weaves with the pedal steel, one of his best songs in years. Knopfler remains that singular, comforting voice that’s nourished us for nearly five decades now.

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One response.

not a music critic but long time fan- I am 76. From India, living the US for 50 plus years. Brought up with Cliff Richard, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Beach Boys, Dylan and Beatles, Stones, and more lately, Springsteen. Late discovery of JJ Cale. First heard Walk of Life on a road trip with my 8 and 5 yr old daughters. In Mark Knopfler’s music so many genres come together- the tuning of the guitars, the dragging out of the notes on slide guitar, Mark K’s soothing voice, and the stories of those who are lost, abused, and struggling; they all appeal to the romantic in me. I do believe also that there is redemption for all of us. Every song has a background story, and some time it takes a little searching to find the back line- all the better to allow repeated listening to find new meaning each time. I could go on and on. My only regret is not seeing him in concert more often- done it twice I think. Cannot wait to get the CD in my hands.

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Mark Knopfler's New Album 'One Deep River' Out Now

This is his tenth solo studio album.

One Deep River, the eagerly awaited tenth solo studio album from Mark Knopfler, has just debuted.

The new LP offers an unstoppable flow of future Knopfler classics, with their customarily learned lyrics and refined guitar textures. They draw on a lifetime of genre-crossing ingredients and influences in blues, folk, rock and beyond.

Produced by Knopfler and his longstanding collaborator of more than 40 years, Guy Fletcher, One Deep River was recorded at his state-of-the-art British Grove Studios in London. The band features Knopfler on guitars, Jim Cox and Guy Fletcher on keyboards, Glenn Worf on bass, Ian Thomas on drums and Danny Cummings on percussion, Richard Bennett on guitar, and newcomer Greg Leisz on pedal and lap steel; Mike McGoldrick provides whistle and uilleann pipes, and John McCusker plays fiddle, while the Topolski sisters Emma and Tamsin add backing vocals. All songs are written by Knopfler.

Leading into release, Knopfler shared three album tracks, “Ahead Of The Game,” “Watch Me Gone” and “Two Pairs Of Hands.”

The new album adds to what has already been a busy year for Knopfler. In January, the Mark Knopfler Guitar Collection was auctioned at Christies, with several of the guitars selling for record breaking sums. Last month, Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes released a spine-tingling reworking of his song, “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero),” by a who’s who of legendary guitarists for the Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America.

Knopfler has teamed up with Brian Johnson, the singer from legendary rock band AC/DC, to make a new six-part TV series for Sky Arts entitled “Johnson & Knopfler’s Music Legends.” The two friends take a fascinating look at the history of popular music alongside various special guests including Tom Jones, Sam Fender, Carlos Santana, Cyndi Lauper, Nile Rodgers, Emmylou Harris and Vince Gill. The series will air on Sky Arts starting April 25.

ONE DEEP RIVER TRACKLIST

1. Two Pairs Of Hands

2. Ahead Of The Game

3. Smart Money

4. Scavengers Yard

5. Black Tie Jobs

6. Tunnel 13

8. Watch Me Gone

9. Sweeter Than The Rain

10. Before My Train Comes

11. This One’s Not Going To End Well

12. One Deep River

BONUS VINYL TRACKLIST (IN BOX SET)

1. Dolly Shop Man

2. Your Leading Man

3. Wrong’un

  BONUS CD TRACKLIST (IN BOX SET)

1. The Living End

2. Fat Chance Dupree

3. Along A Foreign Coast

4. What I’m Gonna Need

5. Nothing But Rain

About Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopfler, singer-songwriter, record producer and composer, is one of the most successful musicians the U.K. has ever produced and is often cited as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He first came to prominence in the 80s as leader of Dire Straits, who created many of the signature songs of the era. Knopfler broke up the band in 1995 and set off on a new path as a solo artist. In the ensuing years, Knopfler has released nine solo albums of sophisticated rootsy rock and has continued to tour the globe with his band. Over the years, Knopfler has written the music for several films, including Local Hero, Cal, The Princess Bride, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Wag The Dog and has played and recorded with a number of artists, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Emmylou Harris, Tina Turner, Randy Newman and Chet Atkins.Knopfler was made an OBE in 1999 and was given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Ivor Novellos in 2012.

Photo Credit: Murdo McLeod

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Mark Knopfler on why chances of Dire Straits reunion are so far away

Dire straits frontman said he had an ‘absolute ball’ during his time in the band, article bookmarked.

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Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler has said it’s unlikely he would ever play as part of the group again.

Knopfler said he wouldn’t play with the band again as he wanted to “expand and work with different players and have a bigger line-up”, despite loving his time on the road.

“The last time I had the band in, and that’s the high point for me, I would probably have had about six or seven guys. Bigger than the little four-piece that was stripped down when we had it, and that was great, I loved it.”

The group, which he formed in 1977 with brother David and friends John Illsley and Pick Withers, found global success with hit singles including “Romeo and Juliet”, “Money for Nothing”, and “Sultans of Swing”, before disbanding in 1995.

Knopfler didn’t have any regrets about his time in the group, saying “I had an absolute ball for as long as it lasted until it got so big that I didn’t know the names of all the roadies, it was just getting big.”

He added: “It got so big, we were actually leapfrogging stages, and that is what you have to do when you get to a certain scale.”

The acclaimed guitarist’s comments came during an appearance on BBC Breakfast. He mentioned one of the reasons for not wanting to perform with the band as having built his own studio, which he “really loves.”

“I haven’t had a bad day in there”, he explained. “It’s given me the chance to really push. I mean, this last album, I have done far too many songs.”

Recently, the musician has collaborated with fellow band member Guy Fletcher as part of a charity single for Teenage Cancer Trust. He assembled more than 60 performers, including Bruce Springsteen , Sir Brian May and Eric Clapton , for a nine-minute recording of “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)”.

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The record, released on March 15, also featured contributions from Slash , Sting , Roger Daltrey , and Sir Ringo Starr , and was released under the star’s supergroup, Guitar Heroes.

Knopfler is also working on his latest solo album, One Deep River, which is scheduled for release on April 12.

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Mark Knopfler, ‘One Deep River': Album Review

Mark Knopfler ‘s One Deep River is an album of lyrical poignancy, with a depth of world-weariness that almost becomes dreamlike. His vocals and most certainly that guitar connect back to Dire Straits , but only in their quietest, most reflective moments.

It’s as if he left simply to downshift. In this enduring quiet, Knopfler has done a lot of looking back – but not to his hitmaking former group . No, he’s looking much further back – back into the histories of aging figures and long-ago characters, connecting their struggles, heartbreaks and (only very occasional) triumphs to the present. He’s always had an iterate life and that probably plays a role in Knopfler’s lingering fascination with wanderers, whether they’re running from or toward something.

Yet age catches up with all of them – even rock ‘n’ rollers. So, One Deep River remains plugged in but explores the more contemplative side of Americana (Greg Leisz plays pedal and lap steel, John McCusker is on violin) through a distinctive U.K. lens (Mike McGoldrick adds the whistle and uilleann pipes). Similarly, nothing here is root-bound. “Tunnel 13,” with its lengthy meditation on a real-life bandit trio’s lifetime of adventure, and “Before My Train Comes” are both set on the rails. “This One’s Not Going to End Well” finds Knopfler on the open sea.

READ MORE: Mark Knopfler Remembers the Real Sultans of Swing

What holds this restless cast together is Knopfler’s wizened presence. His voice has always had an ageless yet very aged quality . Even on his earliest singles with Dire Straits, Knopfler came off like this knowing sage. The only drawback to One Deep River , if it even is one, is that he occasionally also had a playfulness back then , and that’s been conveyed to a far lesser degree on subsequent solo projects. Oh, Knopfler offers a wink or two, but One Deep River is here to create enveloping narratives more than get toes to tap. So, “This One’s Not Going to End Well” is set aboard a slave trader’s ship, rather than seekers of new lands. “Sweeter Than the Rain” wrestles with some unspoken ask that tries a man’s faith in himself. Even the loping J.J. Cale-esque “Two Pairs of Hands” is grizzled and knowing, rather than expectedly celebratory.

A river runs through it. The album and title track both reference the Tyne, which bisects Knopfler’s childhood hometown of Newcastle, England, while also creating a powerful boundary image between past and present: There’s no going back. Yet with “Ahead of the Game,” Knopfler makes clear that he still finds solace in song . One Deep River simply confirms that those songs will arrive on their own more slow-moving currents.

Next: Top 10 Dire Straits Songs

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Mark Knopfler: «Coi Dire Straits non tornerò mai. In tour? Al momento sto con mia moglie. E non conosco i Maneskin»

Il chitarrista presenta il suo nono disco da solista: "One Deep River"

Quando lo incontri, ti imbatti in un uomo pacioso, uno di quei pensionati della British Mail che potresti incontrare in qualche sobborgo delle Midlands, tra le case a mattoni rossi e i fish’n’chips. Eppure questo tranquillo e distinto signore 74enne ha incendiato palchi di tutto il pianeta ed è entrato in molte delle colonne sonore delle nostre vite. Già, se dici anni 80 dici Mark Knopfler e i Dire Straits. E anche se Mark ha mollato i suoi sodali da quasi trent’anni (correva il 1995) e, come vedremo, non ha intenzione di riprenderli, il suo mito rimane inscalfibile. Pure se nulla fa per alimentarlo.

L’occasione dell’incontro è «One Deep River», nono album da solista che va ad aggiungersi ai leggendari sei della band. Non nelle Midlands, ma a Newcastle dove Knopfler è cresciuto, sembra ambientato il disco, a partire dalla copertina che reca il ponte sul Tyne, il fiume della città portuale del Nord.

Un disco autobiografico, si direbbe. «Non necessariamente. Il fiume di cui parlo potrebbe essere anche una persona, una situazione, quello che vi pare. Mi piace che le canzoni possano essere flessibili».

Di sicuro è un tuffo nella memoria: «Ahead of the game» parla dei suoi faticosi esordi, mezzo secolo fa. «Facevo il giornalista, cosa che mi ha aiutato a focalizzare chi ero nella vita. E facevo l’insegnante, un mestiere che mi ha letteralmente salvato la vita. Al mattino coi ragazzi, alla sera in giro con una band rockabilly, con la macchina, gli amplificatori e le chitarre comprati grazie a quel lavoro. Non so se , senza, sarei qui oggi... ».

Le chitarre, il suo marchio di fabbrica: non sembrano così popolari ora tra le giovani band. «Se i ragazzi vogliono usare lavatrici e bottiglie, per me va bene, non ci dovrebbe essere una legge, secondo cui una band debba avere un bassista, un batterista o un chitarrista: non sottoscriverei mai un’ortodossia simile. Tutto può essere attrattivo. Non mi piacciono i formalismi per cui il tango va fatto così, il flamenco cosà...».

Forse una band c’è, però: i nostri Måneskin, dove la chitarra è ancora centrale nella loro poetica. «No, non li conosco. Com’è che si chiamano? Manskin? Comunque approfondirò. Ad ogni modo, per me le chitarre sono uno strumento per scrivere canzoni. Non ho mai voluto essere un virtuoso alla Jimmy Page o alla Ritchie Blackmore per intenderci e, detto col massimo rispetto, preferisco rimanere con le mie filastrocche».

Non dirà mica che suona «come un idraulico», come ha dichiarato in passato. Ride. «Guardate le mie mani, sono proprio quelle di un idraulico: il mio modo di suonare si è deteriorato, un maestro di chitarra non approverebbe».

In Smart money parla di soldi facili... «Sì, è il gergo delle scommesse. Ma è anche la metafora dello showbiz: le carriere sono sempre più corte. Io sono ancora in giro a vendere dischi, mi sembra da cento anni e c’è gente che sparisce dopo due. Hai la sensazione che i giovani vengano divorati dai dinosauri con i talent show».

Ecco, i dischi: sono 40 anni dal capolavoro dei Dire Straits «Brothers in Arms». «Ci andò bene con i singoli, fin dal primo divennero hit in America, ci fu una massa critica intorno a quelle canzoni. E proprio in quel momento il cd divenne popolarissimo. La combinazione di questi due elementi fece la fortuna del disco».

Ma la canzone che dà il titolo al disco, un inno antimilitarista, non viene molto ascoltata, vedi la guerra in Ucraina o in Palestina. «Se “Brothers in Arms” è però utile alle persone, le fa sentire come se tutto avesse un senso e serve di conforto in tempi duri come questi, sono contento».

Molte band del passato si sono riunite. Tra i pochi che mancano, da 29 anni, ci sono i Dire Straits. «E non cambierò idea. È stato bello finché è durato, mi sono divertito. Ma io non voglio essere più “grande” di quello che sono oggi, non mi interessa».   Ma almeno la rivedremo in tour per questo disco? « Per ora penso di rimanere a casa, insieme a mia moglie, dedicarmi alla famiglia questa volta: perché a scrivere altre canzoni e andare in studio non sto mai male».

E in futuro? «Non so se riprenderò...».

Infine, lei è tifoso del Newcastle, prima abbiamo parlato di scommesse: che idea si è fatto del caso Tonali? «Nessuno è perfetto»

Corriere della Sera è anche su Whatsapp . È sufficiente cliccare qui per iscriversi al canale ed essere sempre aggiornati.-->

16 aprile 2024

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