David Knopfler posted this on his facebook page this morning:
"It’s rare these days that it happens but I woke up with an old Dire Straits song running around my head, tonight. It was among my favourite Mark Knopfler compositions from that 1970s era.
“Single Handed Sailor” has a nicely sketched out, emotionally satisfying, lyric and a quite demanding tune to perform too, with some jazz influenced inflections. I probably wouldn’t be able to figure it all out now.
Mark brought it, pretty much fully formed, to rehearsals and I think, had written it overnight. I don’t believe the slightly quirky and busy, rhythm part I added, after Mark showed me the trickier chords, really met full approval from either Mark or later our Producer, Barry Becket. I’m pretty sure if I’d been a session player, they would have insisted it was tidied up more and delivered something a little more consistent, spacey and disciplined but they generously let it go and it survived to make the cut, for better or worse. If memory serves, and often these days it doesn’t, it was still performed in the live set when I left the band.
It had a kind of rhythmic pace and economy that was simpatico to the sentiment of the song. Maybe I also liked it, in part, because I also found the river Thames at night, with its quiet barges moving, almost invisibly, through the dark, so quickly in and out of view inspirational... a place of excitement and beauty. And there was also the not unremarkable skill for just one person to be handling such a boat. I don’t suppose those long sand barges are still around these days performing their industrial deliveries.
That economical, almost romantic “Eng-Lit” and half-journalistic style of narration worked for me. It wasn’t commonly used by lyricists in the gracelessness of the punk era either. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark wouldn’t have tipped a nod to the way Ray Davis could mine treasure from the battered grime of Waterloo Station and bridge.
I guess we made a decent noise for four people. It never felt at the time like we had enough men onboard to do the job but maybe that was part of the skeletal charm; that like most four piece bands, you couldn’t disguise much in the arrangements."
LE
