Oh dear, AMIT down and I actually had to do some real work
Once back, I wanted to share a very nice Australian review. Didn't know that about the clock for example. And the door seems not to have been shut for SOS live or more albums in the future!
Some mates says it's subscriber only, but it works for me.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-sultan-mark-knopfler-looks-back-in-his-new-album-trackers/story-fn9n8gph-1227249814538(The "thinking MK in the rehearsal studio" picture headlines the article.)
Mark Knopfler’s concerts include Dire Straits songs but he has consistently ruled out a band reunion. Source: Supplied
A STRATOCASTER has been Mark Knopfler’s favoured guitar in a career spanning five decades. It brings that distinctive trademark tone to Dire Straits classics such as Sultans of Swing, So Far Away and Tunnel of Love, and to much of his solo and soundtrack recordings. He even has a Strat named after him. Yet there’s another instrument bearing the famous Fender logo that has a special place in the Englishman’s heart. It has pride of place in the west London studio where the 65-year-old muso spends a lot of his time. It’s a clock.
“It used to hang in a guitar shop in Newcastle,” says Knopfler, who moved to Tyneside from Glasgow when he was eight years old. As a teenager he spent many hours eyeing up the equipment in that shop, dreaming of one day putting it to good use. The clock, he explains, was “for the dealers. They used to get a clock. It was a blue and yellow diamond with the word Fender on it. I used to think it was the coolest thing. And I used to think there was no way you could ever own something like that because you have to own a guitar shop to get one.”
Well into his tenure as a gun guitarist and a rock star, Knopfler found one of the Fender timepieces. “To anyone else it’s just a daft old clock,” he says, “but for me it’s a connection and I still like to keep that stuff alive.”
There’s abundant evidence of that Knopfler nostalgic streak on his new solo album, Tracker, the eighth under his own name and one that was crafted from beginning to end within the walls of British Grove, the studio in Chiswick Knopfler built 10 years ago as “a monument to past and future technology”. Alongside his collection of vintage cars, which he drives and exhibits, his studio is his passion. “I’m only in here when I’ve got something to record,” he says, “but I wish I could be here more than I am.”
A journey through the 11 songs on Tracker encompasses pivotal points in Knopfler’s life, from the 15-year-old working as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle (Basil) to the revered veteran songwriter and musician touring across Europe four years ago with his friend Bob Dylan (Silver Eagle, Lights of Taormina). In between there are more observational and introspective pieces, such as Broken Bones, Long Cool Girl and Mighty Man. There’s also Beryl, a musing on English writer Beryl Bainbridge, focusing on the fact she received acknowledgment from the Booker Prize committee only after her death in 2010.
All of the songs bear that recognisable, slightly gnarled Knopfler vocal, with music that has equally familiar strains of Celtic folk, country and rock ’n’ roll within it.
Basil is inspired by Basil Bunting, a crotchety subeditor on the Chronicle but also a respected poet. “When I was still at school I was playing folk music with a girl from the lower form,” Knopfler explains. “We were a folk duo. Her big brother was a reporter on the Evening Chronicle and I thought that was quite glamorous.”
Thus the young aspiring journo found himself working as a copy boy on Saturday afternoons, sending sports stories down the line to the printers and trying to avoid Bunting’s wrath:
He calls for a copy boy, grumpy as hell
Poets have to eat as well
What he wouldn’t give just to walk out today
To have time to think about time
And young love thrown away.
“He was very grumpy and he fascinated me,” Knopfler says. “I didn’t speak to him. He would have addressed me very gruffly as ‘boy’ and that would have been it. Somebody told me he was a poet. While I was there he had a poem, Briggflatts, published and that allowed him to leave the Chronicle and he went to America as an academic. He was writing about time and now I’m at an age where time is more important to me too.”
Knopfler credits some of his skills as a songwriter to his brief career before Dire Straits as a journalist in Leeds. He worked as a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post after studying journalism at Harlow College in Esspam.
“I was glad I did journalism because it teaches you the way of the world and it also taught me how to condense,” he says. “If you have a lot of bumf to read you can make sense of it pretty quickly. And songwriting is very much about that. You are cutting it down to the essentials. You’re not using that many words in a song, even if you’re dealing with a big subject, so I think that really helped me. I wouldn’t have called myself a journalist, though. I was a cub reporter. I thought it might be an exciting life.”
As it turned out, excitement lay elsewhere. After a move to London in 1973, Knopfler cut his teeth in a handful of bands before forming Dire Straits with his guitarist brother David, drummer Pick Withers and bassist John Illsley in 1977. Sultans of Swing announced them as a band somewhat adjacent to the punk frenzy that was engulfing London at the time. Across the next few years albums such as Communique and Love Over Gold took them to a mainstream, worldwide audience.
It’s close on 20 years since Knopfler drew a line under Dire Straits. The band’s fifth album, Brothers in Arms (1985), remains one of the highest selling records, with sales of more than 30 million. Although more recordings followed in that album’s wake, in 1996, after a world tour, Knopfler decided the band had run its course and it was time to focus on a solo career. He has no regrets about doing so and has always dismissed any notion of a Dire Straits reunion. He still plays Dire Straits material in his shows
“If we do something like Sultans of Swing I like to do it the way we did it originally, as a four-piece, really stripped down,” he says. “So I’ll do that. I like playing those songs still.
“If you play Brothers in Arms or whatever … those songs mean a lot to people. You have to play them well.”
However, at the peak of the band’s fame Knopfler says, the scale of it was overwhelming.
“It was too big to handle,” he says. “It was massive. We were actually touring at one point with three big stages, leapfrogging around. But also the songs were changing. The kind of songs I was writing were very varied and very different. We had pedal steel and saxophone and percussion. I’d expanded as much as I wanted — and then too much.” A few years before Brothers in Arms, Knopfler took his first tentative steps into the world of film composition and that debut, with the haunting Celtic soundtrack to Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), including the hit theme song, Going Home, established his composing credentials.
He followed that up quickly with Cal, Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy (both 1984) and The Princess Bride (1987).
Multi-instrumentalist Guy Fletcher has worked alongside Knopfler on a regular basis since joining Dire Straits in 1984. That was soon after Knopfler had asked him to work on Cal and just before Brothers in Arms.
It’s important, Knopfler says, to maintain some musical consistency, whether in style or in execution. That’s why Fletcher is also co-producer and musical foil on this latest album.
Knopfler’s production credits other than on his own records include Aztec Camera, Randy Newman and Bob Dylan, for whom he took the controls on the 1983 album Infidels. The two songwriters have maintained a friendship since then and toured together through Europe and the US in 2011. “We’ve put in quite a lot of miles together,” he says. “If you’ve done that it’s always there.”
Lights of Taormina, a reference to the Sicilian coastal town, has a direct connection to His Bobness. “I was on tour in Europe,” Knopfler says, “and Bob had been to Taormina just before we were there. I stayed in the same hotel room he had stayed in. It was right up next to the venue, an ancient amphitheatre. I stayed out on my balcony for a long time after we’d done the show and it made me think of a whole lot of things.
“Then next morning I read some material that said Bob had spent a long time out on the balcony as well. I just knew it was the same kind of experience. I don’t know that I could have written that song without that experience. “
Knopfler is taking this new album out on the road this year, although so far there are no plans to play in Australia. “I’d love to come, though,” he says. In the meantime, the clock is ticking. There are more songs to write, when the mood or inspiration strikes.
“The trouble of being a songwriter is that you are a victim of the songs that turn up,” he says. His one ambition is “to be able to get a result; to make a decent record. The studio is the theatre of humiliation. It’s not easy, but I love it. If I can just keep going with the cycle, I’ll be happy.”
Tracker is released on March 20 through Universal.
