Mark Knopfler gleams with pride as he shows me around British Grove Studios in a quiet corner of Chiswick in London. In the control room, alongside the main state-of-the-art desk, there are three vintage consoles, one of which was used to record Band on the Run by Wings, lovingly maintained so they’re still in operation. Across the glass in the live room, a studio hand is tidying away the set-up for a film score recorded here, so there’s still a digital counter that keeps time to an nth of a second, rows of comfy-looking headphones for the orchestra, and leads, wires and pre-war microphones restored to great nick, because, according to Knopfler, no microphone records strings better.
“The padding can be flipped around too,” he says, pointing up to sound pads that line the walls. “You’d want the soft side if you were recording Frank Sinatra, or you can turn them around and have a hard sound if you want to rock out.”
If anyone knows how to make a versatile recording space, it’s Knopfler: a self-taught guitarist who went from his childhood home in Newcastle to front Dire Straits, one of the most successful rock bands in British history, before entering a prolific and varied career involve critically acclaimed solo albums, collaboration albums, film scores, writing songs like Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, and a spot of producing if the likes of Bob Dylan or Van Morrison need his magic touch.
Even now, his appetite to learn is apparent. As we move into the second studio, all quality wood and soft lighting, he explains how he’s looking for a jazz guitar tutor to expand his breadth, as if he wasn’t regularly voted one of the greatest guitarists of all time. (“I play like a plumber,” he remarks.)
Speaking with such humility, in a comfortable grey jumper and hair silvery and shorn, you’d never guess he was the same person as the sweatbanded rock star showboating in the Money for Nothing video (the first song played on MTV Europe), nor the same person who this year’s Sunday Times Rich List valued at €80 million.
Not that money matters. Truly, it takes an unblemished soul to refuse continual requests to reform Dire Straits for lucrative sums since their split in 1995.
Formed 18 years previously as an evolution of his former pub band the Café Racers, the group immediately grew interest; the enduring Sultans of Swing was their first release, and they followed it with surprise (Romeo and Juliet) after surprise (Private Investigations, Britain’s most unlikely-sounding number two single).
Then Brothers in Arms happened. With tracks like Money for Nothing and Walk of Life offering no respite from their ubiquity, it eventually racked up sales of 30 million – the same as Nirvana’s Nevermind, to put it in context. If anyone in Europe or US hadn’t heard of them, that changed with Brothers in Arms.
But just one album later, and Mark Knopfler stepped away from the behemoth, preferring to concentrate on his more creatively satisfying solo career.
“I’ve been offered enormous amounts of money to do all that Dire Straits stuff,” he says. “I don’t know how much – I’m not interested in that and I never have been. I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve never done anything for money, and I’m not starting now. The exception would be if there was an absolute crisis with the studio, if I couldn’t run the ship the way I like to. Otherwise, it’s just a load of old exhaust to me.”
If his Dire Straits heyday is behind him, more exciting is his new release, Down the Road Wherever, recorded in these very studios. His ninth solo album and one which showcases his rootsy rock delivered with the Knopfler coolness, it features the upbeat lead track Good on You Son, plus the intriguingly titled My Bacon Roll.
It turns out the roll represents the disenfranchised part of society that longs for the past.
“The song is basically a Brexit Man in a café,” he explains. “To me, he is a man out of his time. He says: ‘I used to love a bit of folding, just for getting by, a wad of cash, now that’s out of date, and so am I’. Because now people would buy coffee with their card. That’s the modern way. Who carries around a wad of cash anymore? But it’s like being nostalgic for a time before food containers. It’s not something you can stop.”
Elsewhere, Back on the Dance Floor features Imelda May, the latest in a long line of Irish musicians with whom Knopfler has collaborated. He helped Phil Lynott out on his solo albums, and included an Irish contingent of Paul Brady, Dónal Lunny, Máirtín O’Connor, Liam O’Flynn and Seán Keane in his own solo album Golden Heart (Brady and O’Flynn previously played on Mark’s soundtrack for the Irish drama Cal).
“My old friend Paul Brady helped put an outfit of heavyweight, great musicians on Golden Heart,” he says. “That helped me make friends with so many great players. It was a tremendous quartet that I took around with the band. If you love Celtic music, then you feel part-Irish as a musician. Musicians kind of understand it.
“Ireland is full of memories for me. Obviously playing there with Dire Straits was amazing. When we eventually got there, the audiences were manic,” he says, referring to their five-night run in Dublin in 1991, eight years after they last appeared in Ireland.
“I can still remember playing the intro to Romeo and Juliet at the Point, and as I walked up to the mic, before I could sing, someone yelled, ‘A lovestruck Romeo!’ and everybody roared with laughter. The whole place collapsed. I had to laugh, everybody laughed. We had good times there.”
He’ll be returning to the updated version of the same venue when he tours the album next year. But now 69, he’s limiting his time on the road, and he warns it may well grind to a halt after the tour.
“I have more days off on the road now than I used to,” he says. “I used to play six nights a week, but you get to an age where it’s too much strain, so I do three in a row now, and then a night off, as befits an ageing performer.
“I think touring will be the first casualty. I’ll have to stop, like Paul Simon has just stopped. You can understand it, because it takes a lot out of you. So I’ll go on writing, I’ll go on recording if I can, and then maybe just do the odd show.”
Does that mean the 2019 dates will be his last proper tour?
“It might very well be. It will be funny to say goodbye to it, because it’s always been the end of the cycle. But I won’t think about it. I’ll just make a record like I’ve always made, and then when it comes to talking about the tour, I just won’t talk about it.”
Coming off the road is inevitable unless you’re Bob Dylan; a more curious trend among his peers is to approve a biopic. The newly-released Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of Queen, while Elton John’s biopic Rocketman is due to appear in cinemas at the end of May next year. But not one to revisit past territory, we won’t see a Mark Knopfler-approved Dire Straits biopic any time soon. Even though it’s begging to be titled Walk of Life.
“I’m not very good at nostalgia – that’s my point with My Bacon Roll,” he says. “I don’t like going back to old school reunions. I’m more interested in now.” That might explain why he was notably absent as Dire Straits were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in April. In the end, former members John Illsley, Alan Clark and Guy Fletcher represented the band. Mark’s brother David Knopfler retracted his attendance when the organisers retracted their offer to cover his travel expenses.
“I can well understand that with only $5 million a year in sponsorships and 100k a table and no fees for the artist that paying my taxi to the airport must have given them heart murmurs,” David wrote on Facebook. The organisers made Dire Straits the first act to be inducted without an induction speech or commemorative performance. Ouch.
Asked to shed light on his absence at an event that prompted the Police, Led Zeppelin and Talking Heads to semi-reunite, he shrugs his shoulders as calm as ever.
“It doesn’t interest me very much,” he says. “And I don’t like being told what to do. They called Paul Crockard [his longtime manager] first. We have the same detectors, and I could tell he wasn’t happy. I think he felt they were dictating the details of how it would run, who should be there, when we should go, how much press to do.
“At that time, I was trying to ride two horses at once: I was writing a musical for Local Hero and trying to make this album, I had plenty to be doing, so it didn’t interest me.
“Also, the name puts me off. Fame is a by-product of success to me. I like that success has enabled me to build this studio, but I don’t know that fame has ever done anything good.”
Aside from touring, Local Hero, the musical, is Knopfler’s main project for 2019. Based on Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film for which he wrote the Bafta-nominated soundtrack, it finally opens at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh next March for an initial run.
Knopfler, who was born in Glasgow, says: “I didn’t think I would ever do a musical because I’m not a musical type of a person. I don’t normally get excited about them and it’s not usually my style. But I love the story of Local Hero – it still makes me emotional, and I found I could write songs for the characters.”
So while he may be winding down touring activity soon, with his mental dexterity still evident in his new output – and imminent music lessons – expect to hear new projects from Knopfler in years to come. Just don’t expect a Dire Straits reunion.
