Mark Knopfler's down-home music seems at odds with the arenas he plays to satisfy his many fans - but he's happy so long as his concerts remain communal, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
If any one musician could be charged with replicating his demeanour and his mindset through his music, it's Mark Knopfler. Through his work with Dire Straits (a multi-million selling act indefinitely on hold, according to Knopfler) and his perhaps more representative solo work, the guitarist and lyricist has forged a notable career out of making music that reflects a low-key, homely approach to life. Like Knopfler himself, his music is not loud or in your face - there are no screams uttered nor grunts growled, no squalling guitar solos nor thundering drums. Rather, it is music that meanders like a country stream through rustic neighbourhoods; it is music that takes its time to get from start to finish. There is no rush to get it over and done with, no unseemly haste to take the money and run.
The irony, however, is that such intimate and casually engaging music is played in large venues. Make no bones about it - Knopfler might be a soft-spoken musician with a steady line in down-home material, but he's also something of a superstar. While his solo albums shift in respectable amounts, the Dire Straits back catalogue is a constant seller to lovers of polished soft-rock/blues/pop. Laced with pristine guitar work, it is the latter that has ensured Knopfler - whether he likes it or not; the impression is that he doesn't but has little choice - remains stuck playing in arenas.
'IT DEPENDS ON the length of time you have to tour," he says. "It happens that I can't tour in the same way as I could years ago; these days it tends to be around the school holidays. I love touring, but in the past there was too much of it. You have to decide how many gigs you can do in one place, and how long you have got to be in any particular country. Those factors tend to push up the size of the venue a little bit. Thankfully, I haven't got into that situation where I've gone to a venue and it hasn't worked, in terms of there being a proper concert experience for the audience who are there, rather than them feeling they're at some anonymous event. A concert is a communal experience, whereas an event is something at which there are too many fireworks."
HE STILL PLAYS small clubs, but they're more record company showcases than bona fide gigs. "I like them when I can play for real, and that's how we're doing it," he avers. "They're such fun - tiny little places. I play for an hour, it's a musician doing what it is that they do, and not talking all the time. The showcases are essentially for promotional purposes. You've still got to let people know you have an album out or a concert coming up, which is why I do these gigs and the occasional interview."
Born in Glasgow in 1949, Knopfler and his younger brother David moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne when they were nippers. Following secondary school, Knopfler moved to Leeds University, where he studied English literature.
A stint at the Yorkshire Evening Post as a junior reporter followed, but Knopfler's heart ran on blood, not printer's ink. Switching to teaching, he moved from the north to London. Come the mid-1970s, Dire Straits was formed, but their streamlined tunes were well out of whack in the punk rock era, with virtually every record label on the block passing on them. Within a year, however, the band - whose musicianship and songwriting skills were championed by London disc jockey Charlie Gillett - signed to a major label. Dire Straits' self-titled debut album was released in 1978, and the rest is music history.
Knopfler remembers a time when playing music for music's sake was one of the few reasons to exist. At 58 years of age, and like many people of a similar vintage (and, indeed, a lot younger), he likes to pick up a newspaper, flick through a magazine, browse through the racks in a record shop. The internet has its uses, he implies, but it shouldn't be allowed to do everything for you.
"You've got to try not to get too grumpy about it. I try to stay positive. What's more of a worry is the fixation that so many kids have these days about fame and celebrity, and the television programmes that feed into that. They're quite iniquitous, these programmes. I suppose they're not bad all the way through, but there are a lot of kids today who are confused about what fame actually is. They think fame itself is a good thing, rather than being successful, which is something that can actually be recommended. The 'fame at any price' angle, or fame for fame's sake - which seems to be prevalent these days - is pushed at them, making it seem as if it's great to be famous. Which is absurd."
Knopfler's experiences of the fame game - which hit home from the relatively soft release of the debut album to the hardball pitch of 1985's Brothers in Arms, itself the apogee of the guitarist's quietly confident and subtle lyricism - are, he says, extremely disquieting. "As a songwriter you're used to looking at the world, but when the fame element kicks in you see the world looking at you - or, at least, you think it is. In fact, sometimes in reality it couldn't care less.
"Fame can upset your life, though, turn it upside down. The critical factor is the age of the person involved. It's utterly debilitating and damaging to a teenager, because any teenager who has been - or is being - idolised is in for a tricky adulthood. It's a sapping thing to take on, and thankfully when it happened to me, when I was in Dire Straits, I was about 27. Even at that age I didn't get away unscathed - there's a price to pay - but I survived it because I was older. I was half a twit at 27, but if it had happened when I was the complete twit I'd been at 17 I don't know if I'd have survived it at all."
YET SURVIVE HE did. Thirty years on, following Dire Straits reunions (they took an extended sabbatical from 1986 to 1991, when they returned with another multi-million selling album, On Every Street), movie soundtrack work (elegiac, sympathetic melodies for the likes of Cal, Local Hero, Comfort and Joy, The Princess Bride, Last Exit to Brooklyn), unassuming roots (the Notting Hillbillies) and some pleasant country/folk collaborations (with Chet Atkins on 1990's Neck and Neck, and Emmylou Harris on last year's All the Roadrunning), Knopfler has successfully balanced the occasional intensity of the media glare with living his life.
"You just do what it is you do, and you let people draw their own conclusions. What you have to have is the thrill that keeps you going. It's the sheer love of what you do that sustains you. Essentially, you have to be compulsive - virtually an adolescent fixation - about it all, which is what I am about songwriting. The thrill of the writing and the song, just getting used to living with it, knowing that the ideas I have going round in my head are going to be songs - they're brilliant."
Does it get any easier or more difficult to come up with a batch of songs? "No, I just find it more and more involving, gripping and enjoyable. I wouldn't change what I do for anything, I'm just totally into it - I love what I do so much I can't tell you. Admittedly, you have to live with these ideas going round and round in your head, but that's nothing much to contend with."
A final question? Knopfler knows what is going to be asked. "Would I contemplate another Dire Straits reunion? Well, to get back together for a world tour would take a lot of planning. And you would have to do it for the right reasons. At the moment I've got other things to do, and that's just the way it is."
Mark Knopfler plays two dates in Ireland next year: Dublin's RDS Main Hall on May 19, and Belfast's Odyssey Arena on May 20