Mark Knopfler is one of the most successful British musicians in history, and one of the most admired guitarists. With his former band Dire Straits, he sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, and he’s worked with everyone from Chet Atkins to Bob Dylan.
In 2019, as he prepared to release his ninth solo album, Down The Road Wherever, he sat down with Classic Rock in West London to look back on a career like no other.
Several years ago, Mark Knopfler was riding his motorbike not far from his home in central London when he was sideswiped by a car.
The impact sent him spinning, smashing his bike and breaking his collarbone and seven ribs. His injuries could have been worse, but they were still serious enough to make a man whose entire career has been built on playing the guitar worry if he would ever be able to pick up the instrument again.
“I had what they called frozen shoulder,” Knopfler says today. He mimes stiffly attempting to hold a guitar. “I couldn’t get a Fender in.
Apparently if you’ve got a broken collarbone your body stops it working. I asked the doctor how long it would last. He said: ‘I don’t know.
Could be a short time, might not come back at all. Good luck.’” He chuckles, which he does often. “That was quite scary.”
The fact that Knopfler has just released his ninth solo album, and he’s currently sitting here in a discreetly classy West London restaurant talking about it, is a large spoiler as to what happened next.
The ensuing course of physical therapy worked, his shoulder unfroze and he picked up where he left off with both his guitar and his bike.
But the drama of the crash isn’t really the point here. It’s the fact that Mark Knopfler – who as the former leader of Dire Straits and subsequently a successful solo artist has sold upwards of 100 million records and was recently estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List to have amassed a fortune of £75 million – was pootling around central
London on a motorbike when he could have called up a gleaming chauffeured limo to transport him in considerably more style and with considerably less peril.
“Why would I do that?” he says, looking genuinely baffled. “Two wheels. There’s no other way to get around London. Except the Tube. When I played the O2 [in 2015], I got the Tube from South Kensington. Said hello to a lot of people. They
Traveling on the Tube to his own arena gig seems like a very Mark Knopfler thing to do. The Glasgow-born, Newcastle-raised 69-year-old is the least starry megastar you’ll ever meet. And ‘megastar’ isn’t overstating the case, not if you’re going by numbers alone.
Dire Straits were the biggest-selling British band of the 1980s. Their fifth album, 1986’s Brothers In Arms, fired the starting pistol on the CD era and went on to sell more than 30 million copies.
Knopfler himself has long been a go-to collaborator for music’s A-listers – Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart and old mate Sting, and younger bucks The Killers and The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach have called on him to lend his inimitable guitar playing and, less frequently, laconic vocals to their albums.
Knopfler is here today to talk about his own album, Down The Road Wherever. He arrived alone, a few minutes early, having walked from his manager’s office, wearing a thick jacket and woolly beanie hat that serve more to keep out the cold than render him unrecognisable as one of the most successful musicians Britain has ever produced.
Even without the beanie you have to squint to see the scrawny guitar slinger he once was (the toweling headbands were retired years ago, the last wisps of hair shaved to the skull more recently).
He’s warm and friendly, but sometimes drifts off into vagueness. It’s not entirely clear whether that’s what he’s like or if it’s a polite way of avoiding talking about subjects he doesn’t really want to go deep into. Like Dire Straits.
Much like the man who made it, Down The Road Wherever is modest and assured at the same time. It glides between the windswept Celtic rock of Tracker Man and Drovers Road to the Mersey Delta blues of Just A Boy Away From Home (Knopfler is a lifelong Newcastle United fan, but the latter references Liverpool’s terrace anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone).
The album’s title comes from a line in his song One Song At A Time, itself inspired by something Knopfler’s great hero Chet Atkins used to say.
“Chet and I got to be got to be good friends,” says Knopfler. “I think he took pity on me because I was a picker. Anyway, one day he was telling me about his childhood, which was very tough; not having a coat to go school in, having to walk to school, his family were very poor. And he said he picked his way out of poverty one song at a time. It just stuck in my mind.”
The phrase resonated with Knopfler. He may not have grown up in abject poverty, but there was little spare money around when he was young. “Everything went on the house and feeding the family,” he says.
“There wasn’t much left afterwards. It took a while to convince my dad to part with fifty quid for this electric guitar I wanted.
And once I got it I realised I needed to buy an amplifier. I couldn’t ask him for an amp as well, so I wired up an old Marconi radio – and blew it up in short order.
And then I used to torture my poor mum and dad. After they go to bed at night I’d be downstairs thumping away in this little house.
Were your parents supportive?
“Yeah, really they were. When you consider the fact that popular music was looked down upon by respectable society.
There were no guitar lessons in school. It was frowned upon: ‘Knopfler, I might have known you’d be involved in this [disparaging voice] rock and roll, boy.’”