sultans of swing the very best of dire straits 320

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. 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. The group had a record deal with RCA but were in the process of falling apart. He answered a classified ad in the Melody Maker to join jobbing pub-rock band Brewers Droop. As soon as he graduated in 1973 Knopfler headed for London. His idea was that he would be the guitar player behind somebody else.”ĭuring that time Knopfler left the paper to take a degree in English at Leeds University, and married his school sweetheart, Kathy White. He didn’t have the confidence he acquired later as a musician, and didn’t see himself as a singer at all. “Mark was already a very capable guitarist at eighteen or nineteen, way above the norm,” notes 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. Another was to interview a local blues guitarist, Steve Phillips. 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. Mark was first to flee the nest, when he got a job as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds. But they would have preferred us to be architects or lawyers, not ‘My son the unemployed strummer’.” “On the other they had a liberal bias for letting us follow our own path. “On one hand our parents were horrified that we wanted to make a career of pop music,” David Knopfler says now. Brother David followed suit, performing at working men’s clubs in a folk duo. Soon he’d taught himself the basics and was playing in school bands and on the city’s club circuit.

At 15 he persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, a £50 copy of Marvin’s red Stratocaster. 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. Hearing the latter, and in particular their bespectacled lead guitarist Hank Marvin, opened up a future filled with possibilities for Mark Knopfler. The brothers latched on to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and, later, The Shadows. Music was a fact of life in the Knopfler house. 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. Their father was an architect expelled from his native Hungary on account of his firebrand socialism. His brother and future Dire Straits bandmate David followed three years later. Mark Knopfler was born into a middle-class household in Glasgow in 1949.

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. It made Dire Straits superstars, but it also warped the popular perception of both Knopfler and his band. That record was unstoppable from the moment of its release in May 1985. 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. 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. Emerging from the city’s fertile pub-rock scene at the dawn of the punk era, they were an overnight sensation. 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.

Sultans of swing the very best of dire straits 320