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THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GROUP IN THE WORLD.
They wear headbands and some of the dullest clothes imaginable. They perform in gigantic arenas and play music of a doggedly old-fashioned, guitar-twanging nature. And yet Dire Straits appeal to all classes (from Eastenders' Michelle Fowler to our "lovely" Princess Diana) and all age groups, and their records sell by the mega-ton across at least four continents. In Fact, Dire Straits are probably the biggest "rock 'n' roll" band in the whole world. Why? How did they get here? What is their "golden" secret? Who IS Mark Knopfler??
Well, he was born in Glasgow on August 12 1949, the son of a Jewish architect who fled his native Hungary in the 1930's to escape the Nazis. When Mark was eight, the Knopfler family moved down to Newcastle where Mark first became interested in music from listening to his uncle Kingsley playing boogie-woogie piano ("That was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard," he says). And soon he became passionately interested - obsessed even - in the sound of the electric guitar. He heard people like Duane Eddy and The Shadows a-twanging away on the radio, and he and his younger brother David would pose in front of bedroom mirrors as midget "guitar heroes". "David and I used to practise on tennis rackets," remembers Mark, "banging away to this old record by The Fireballs (famously awful instrumental combo) . Eventually our Dad had to buy guitars." So Mark got his first guitar when he was 15. It was red. It was a Hofner V-2, as a matter of fact. It cost fifty fat pounds - quite a lot of money for 1964 - and Mark used to polish it all the time. When he wasn't actually playing it, that is. And then he wrote this terrible song called "Summer's Coming My Way" and decided he was going to be a "rock" star for sure. But, as fate would have it, he did a spot of journalism first, "writing" a few news stories for the Yorkshie Evening Post for £9. 18s. 3d a go. But then in September 1970 one of Mark's major heroes, guitarist Jimi Hendrix, died suddenly and the paper's news editor rang up saying, as Mark remembers, "'Look, laddie, there's this pop star or whatever called Jimmy Henderson or something who's just snuffed it. Have you heard of him?' ... That was the last story I wrote. I left the paper and got drunk ..." Meanwhile, Mark had got himself a degree in English Literature at Leeds University (where he struck up a friendship with Smash Hits cartoonist Kipper Williams) and then he moved down to London where he gave guitar lessons and joined his first proper group. They were called Brewer's Droop, and they were not awfully good. They were sort of bawdy, boozy, vulgar rhythm and blues band and they actually made a couple of famously terrible records. Fortunately, however, M. Knopfler didn't actually play on these, for no sooner had he joined the band than they split up. Thank goodness for that. But ...
"After that I just starved to death," says Mark. This isn't quite true; soon he'd found a proper job, teaching at a place called Loughton College and he'd formed a band of his own (called Cafe Racers after a customised motor cycle) who performed in dodgy pubs and at the college where he was teaching. Then, in 1976, Mark began turning up for "jam sessions" (i.e. loads of musicians making up things as they go along) at the coucil flat in South London that his brother David shared with a bass-playing bank manager's son called John Illsley. They sound-proofed the "pad" with cheap carpeting and got a drummer, Pick Withers, to join in - and it was a friend of his who made a quip about the quartet being utterly, utterly broke abd suggested the group name Dire Straits. In June 1977, they managed to scrape together £120 to record a "demo" tape of four songs, "Wild West End", "Sacred Loving", "Water Of Love", and the famous legendary "Sultans Of Swing". Illsley took a copy of the tape to Charlie Gillett, an "alternative" disc jockey with Radio London, and one Sunday whilst Mark was out moving furniture for a friend, Gillet actually played "Sultans Of Swing" on his Honky Tonkin' radio show. A bloke from Phonogram Records was listening to the show - within seconds - Dire Straits had a worldwide recording contract and were on tour as support band to Talking Heads. And the rest, they say, is "history" - and here are just a few spicettes of information from the rich pages . . . "Dire Straits", the first LP, was recorded for the mimiscule amount of £12,500. It soon went "platinum" in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America, France, Germany, Britain . . . (that's enough countries where "Dire Straits" went "platinum" - Ed..) Mark Knopfler has been married twice!! He had a brief, unhappy "fling" while still at University then, in 1983, got spliced to his current wife, American Lourdes Salamone who doesn't like him lying on the bed to watch sport on TV. In 1978, the group played in Belgium in a tent. In 1979, Bob Dylan went to a Dire Straits concert in Los Angeles and asked Mark Knopfler to play on his Born Again Christian LP "Slow Train Coming". Three years later M. Knopfler actually produced a Bob Dylan LP - "Infidels". (Mark's droony singing is somewhat "influenced" by the smoky drawl of B. Dylan.) In all Dire Straits songs, there is only one word that was not written by Mark Knopfler himself. That word is "make-up" - in the line "See the little faggot with the earing and the make-up" from "Money For Nothing" - which was suggested by band member Jack Sonni instead of Knopfler's original "tutu". All the other Dire Straits LP's - "Communique", "Making Movies", "Love Over Gold", "Alchemy", "Brothers In Arms" - have gone "platinum" just about everywhere in the spooniverse, too. In New Zealand, "Brothers In Arms" has gone "platinum" 13 times over and on their recent N.Z. Tour, the group played to approximately 8 per cent of the entire population.