Mark Knopfler
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Mark Freuder Knopfler (born 12 August 1949) is a British songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He was the lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter for the rock band Dire Straits, which he co-founded with his younger brother, David Knopfler, in 1977. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised near Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
Dire Straits recorded six albums, including Brothers in Arms (1985), one of the bestselling albums in history. After they disbanded in 1995, Knopfler began a solo career, and has produced nine solo albums. He has composed and produced film scores for nine films, including Local Hero (1983), Cal (1984), The Princess Bride (1987), Wag the Dog (1997) and Altamira (2016). He has worked with musicians including B.B. King, Chet Atkins, Chris Botti, John Anderson, the Chieftains, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Joan Armatrading, Bryan Ferry, George Jones, Phil Lynott, Donal Lunny, Van Morrison, Steely Dan, Sting, Emmylou Harris and James Taylor, sometimes working as a session musician. He has produced albums for Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, and Randy Newman.
Described by Classic Rock as a virtuoso, Knopfler is a fingerstyle guitarist and was ranked 27th on Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". As of 2009, he and Dire Straits had sold more than 120 million records. A four-time Grammy Award winner, Knopfler is the recipient of the Edison Award, the Steiger Award and the Ivor Novello Award, as well as holding three honorary doctorate degrees in music from universities in the United Kingdom. Knopfler was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Dire Straits in 2018.
Mark Freuder Knopfler was born on 12 August 1949 in Glasgow, Scotland, to an English mother, Louisa Mary (née Laidler), and a Hungarian father, Erwin Knopfler. His mother was a teacher and his father was an architect and a chess player whose anti-fascist sympathies and Jewish parentage forced him to flee from his native Hungary in 1939. Knopfler later described his father as a Marxist agnostic.
The Knopflers originally lived in the Glasgow area, and Mark's younger brother David was also born there, on 27 December 1952. Mark's older sister Ruth was born in Newcastle, where Mark's parents were married, in 1947. The family moved to Knopfler's mother's hometown of Blyth, near Newcastle, in North East England when he was seven years old. Mark had attended Bearsden Primary School in Scotland for two years; both brothers attended Gosforth Grammar School in Newcastle.
Originally inspired by his uncle Kingsley's harmonica and boogie-woogie piano playing, Mark soon became familiar with many different styles of music. Although he hounded his father for an expensive Fiesta Red Fender Stratocaster electric guitar just like Hank Marvin's, he had to settle for a £50 twin-pick-up Höfner Super Solid, more in line with the family's income.
In 1963, when he was 13, he took a Saturday job at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle newspaper earning six shillings and six pence. Here he met the ageing poet Basil Bunting, who was a copy editor. The two had little to say to each other but in 2015 Knopfler wrote a track in tribute to him.
During the 1960s, he formed and joined several bands and listened to singers like Elvis Presley and guitarists Chet Atkins, Scotty Moore, B.B King, Django Reinhardt, Hank Marvin, and James Burton. At sixteen years of age he made a local television appearance as part of a harmony duo, with his classmate Sue Hercombe.
In 1968, after studying journalism for a year at Harlow College, Knopfler was hired as a junior reporter in Leeds for the Yorkshire Evening Post. During this time, he made the acquaintance of local furniture restorer, country blues enthusiast and part-time performer Steve Phillips, one year his senior, from whose record collection and guitar style Knopfler acquired a good knowledge of early blues artists and their styles; the two subsequently formed a duo called "The Duolian String Pickers", which performed in local folk and acoustic blues venues. Two years later, he decided to further his education, and later graduated with a degree in English at the University of Leeds. In April 1970, while living in Leeds, Knopfler recorded a demo disk of an original song he had written, "Summer's Coming My Way". The recording included Knopfler (guitar and vocals), Steve Phillips (second guitar), Dave Johnson (bass), and Paul Granger (percussion). Johnson, Granger, and vocalist Mick Dewhirst played with Knopfler in a band called Silverheels; Phillips was later to rejoin Knopfler in the short lived side exercise from Dire Straits, The Notting Hillbillies.
Upon graduation in 1973, Knopfler moved to London and joined a band based in High Wycombe called Brewers Droop, appearing on the album The Booze Brothers. One night, while spending time with friends, the only guitar available was an old acoustic with a badly warped neck that had been strung with extra-light strings to make it usable. Even so, he found it impossible to play unless he finger-picked it. He said in a later interview, "That was where I found my "voice" on guitar." After a brief stint with Brewers Droop, Knopfler took a job as a lecturer at Loughton College in Essex – a position he held for three years. Throughout this time, he continued performing with local pub bands, including the Café Racers.
By the mid-1970s, Knopfler devoted much of his musical energies to his group, the Café Racers. His brother David moved to London, where he shared a flat with John Illsley, a guitarist who changed over to playing bass guitar. In April 1977, Mark moved out of his flat in Buckhurst Hill and moved in with David and John. The three began playing music together, and soon Mark invited John to join the Café Racers.
Knopfler's first solo album, Golden Heart, was released in March 1996. It featured the UK single "Darling Pretty". The album's recording sessions helped create Knopfler's backing band, which is also known as The 96ers. It features Knopfler's old bandmate Guy Fletcher on keyboards. This band's main line-up has lasted much longer than any Dire Straits line-up. Also in 1996, Knopfler recorded guitar for Ted Christopher's Dunblane massacre tribute cover, Knockin' on Heaven's Door.
In 1997, Knopfler recorded the soundtrack for the movie Wag the Dog. During that same year Rolling Stone magazine listed Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, which included Sultans of Swing, Dire Straits' first hit. 2000 saw the release of Knopfler's next solo album, Sailing to Philadelphia. This has been his most successful to date, possibly helped by the number of notable contributors to the album, like Van Morrison. On 15 September 1997, Knopfler appeared at the Music for Montserrat concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, performing alongside artists such as Sting, Phil Collins, Elton John, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney.
In 2002, Knopfler gave four charity concerts with former Dire Straits members John Illsley, Chris White, Danny Cummings and Guy Fletcher, playing old material from the Dire Straits years. The concerts also featured The Notting Hillbillies with Brendan Croker and Steve Phillips. At these four concerts (three of the four were at the Shepherd's Bush, the fourth at Beaulieu on the south coast) they were joined by Jimmy Nail, who provided backing vocals for Knopfler's 2002 composition Why Aye Man.
Also in 2002, Knopfler released his third solo album, The Ragpicker's Dream. In March 2003 he was involved in a motorbike crash in Grosvenor Road, Belgravia and suffered a broken collarbone, broken shoulder blade and seven broken ribs. The planned Ragpicker's Dream tour was subsequently cancelled, but Knopfler recovered and returned to the stage in 2004 for his fourth album, Shangri-La.
Knopfler performing in Hamburg, 2006
Shangri-La was recorded at the Shangri-La Studio in Malibu, California, in 2004, where the Band had made recordings years before for their documentary/movie, The Last Waltz. In the promo for Shangri-La on his official website, he said his current line-up of Glenn Worf (bass), Guy Fletcher (keyboards), Chad Cromwell (drums), Richard Bennett (guitar), and Matt Rollings (piano) "... play Dire Straits songs better than Dire Straits did." The Shangri-La tour took Knopfler to countries such as India and the United Arab Emirates for the first time. In India, his concerts at Mumbai and Bangalore were well received, with over 20,000 fans at each concert.
In November 2005 a compilation, Private Investigations: The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler was released, consisting of material from most of Dire Straits' studio albums and Knopfler's solo and soundtrack material. The album was released in two editions, as a single CD (with a grey cover) and as a double CD (with the cover in blue), and was well received. The only previously unreleased track on the album is All the Roadrunning, a duet with country music singer Emmylou Harris, which was followed in 2006 by an album of duets of the same name.
Released in April 2006, All the Roadrunning reached No. 1 in Denmark and Switzerland, No. 2 in Norway and Sweden, No. 3 in Germany, The Netherlands and Italy, No. 8 in Austria and UK, No. 9 in Spain, No. 17 in the United States (Billboard Top 200 Chart), No. 25 in Ireland, and No. 41 in Australia. All the Roadrunning was nominated for "Best Folk Rock/Americana Album" at the 49th Grammy Awards (11 February 2007) but lost out to Bob Dylan's nomination for Modern Times.
Joined by Emmylou Harris, Knopfler supported All the Roadrunning with a limited - 15 concerts in Europe, 1 in Canada, and 8 in the United States - but highly successful tour of Europe and North America. Selections from the duo's performance of 28 June at the Gibson Amphitheatre, Universal City, California, were released as a DVD entitled Real Live Roadrunning on 14 November 2006. In addition to several of the compositions that Harris and Knopfler recorded together in the studio, Real Live Roadrunning features solo hits from both members of the duo, as well as three tracks from Knopfler's days with Dire Straits.
A charity event in 2007 went wrong: a Fender Stratocaster guitar signed by Knopfler, Clapton, Brian May, and Jimmy Page, which was to be auctioned for £20,000 to raise the money for a children's hospice, was lost when being shipped. It "...vanished after being posted from London to Leicestershire, England." Parcelforce, the company responsible, agreed to pay £15,000 for its loss.
Knopfler released his fifth solo studio-album Kill to Get Crimson on 14 September 2007 in Germany, 17 September in the UK and 18 September in the United States. During the autumn of 2007 he played a series of intimate 'showcases' in various European cities to promote the album. A tour of Europe and North America followed in 2008.
Continuing a pattern of high productivity through his solo career, Knopfler began work on his next studio album, entitled Get Lucky, in September 2008 with long-time bandmate Guy Fletcher, who again compiled a pictorial diary of the making of the album on his website. The album was released on 14 September the following year and Knopfler subsequently undertook an extensive tour across Europe and America. The album met with moderate success on the charts (much of it in Europe) reaching No. 1 only in Norway but peaking in the Top 5 in most major European countries (Germany, Italy, The Netherlands). The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard European Album chart and at No. 5 on the Billboard Rock Album chart.
Knopfler's solo live performances can be characterised as relaxed—almost workmanlike. He uses very little stage production, other than some lighting effects to enhance the music's dynamics. He has been known to sip tea on stage during live performances. Richard Bennett, who has been playing with him on tour since 1996, has also joined in drinking tea with him on stage. On 31 July 2005, at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, BC, the tea was replaced with whisky as a "last show of tour" sort of joke.
In February 2009, Knopfler gave an intimate solo concert at the Garrick Club in London. Knopfler had recently become a member of the exclusive gentlemen's club for men of letters. In 2010, Knopfler appeared on the newest Thomas Dolby release, the EP Amerikana. Knopfler performed on the track 17 Hills. In February 2011, Knopfler began work on his next solo album, Privateering, once again working with Guy Fletcher. In July 2011, it was announced that Knopfler would take time out from recording his new album to take part in a European tour with Bob Dylan during October and November. The next year Knopfler covered a Bob Dylan song, "Restless Farewell", for an Amnesty International 50th Anniversary celebration record.
On 3 September 2012, Knopfler's seventh solo album, Privateering, was released.This was Knopfler's first double album solo release and contained 20 new songs. After a further tour with Bob Dylan in the US during October and November,[52] the Privateering tour of Europe followed in Spring/Summer 2013. A short run of five shows were played in the US that Autumn. Knopfler began work on another studio album in September 2013, again at his British Grove Studios in London with Guy Fletcher co-producing. On 16 September 2014, it was announced that this new album would be entitled Tracker, and that it would see a release in early 2015. European tour dates were also announced for Spring/Summer 2015. In 2016 he collaborated with the Italian bluesman Zucchero Fornaciari playing in Ci si arrende and Streets of Surrender (S.O.S.) contained in Black Cat.
With the November release of 2018's Down the Road Wherever, a Mark Knopfler world tour in support of the new album was announced for 2019. During interviews, Knopfler hinted it would be his last one. The tour started with a show on April 25 in Barcelona during which Knopfler confirmed to the live audience that the on-going tour would be his last tour ever. However, during the tour this statement softened, stating he will continue as he loves touring so much, joking he'd be unemployed and doesn't know what else to do. Besides, Knopfler penned the score for the musical version of Local Hero, including new songs alongside adding lyrics to the original instrumental music, reuniting again with Bill Forsyth.
In addition to his work in Dire Straits and solo, Knopfler has made several contributions to country music. In 1988 he formed country-focused band the Notting Hillbillies, with Guy Fletcher, Brendan Croker and Steve Phillips. The Notting Hillbillies sole studio album, Missing...Presumed Having a Good Time was released in 1990 and featured the minor hit single "Your Own Sweet Way". Knopfler further emphasised his country music influences with his collaboration with Chet Atkins, Neck and Neck, which was also released in 1990. "Poor Boy Blues", taken from that collaboration, peaked at No. 92.
Knopfler's other contributions include writing and playing guitar on John Anderson's 1992 single "When It Comes to You" (from his album Seminole Wind). In 1993 Mary Chapin Carpenter also released a cover of the Dire Straits song The Bug. Randy Travis released another of Knopfler's songs, "Are We in Trouble Now", in 1996. In that same year, Knopfler's solo single "Darling Pretty" reached a peak of No. 87.
Knopfler collaborated with George Jones on the 1994 The Bradley Barn Sessions album, performing guitar duties on the classic J.P. Richardson composition "White Lightnin'". He is featured on Kris Kristofferson's album The Austin Sessions, (on the track "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends") released in 1999 by Atlantic Records.
In 2006, Knopfler and Emmylou Harris made a country album together titled All the Roadrunning, followed by a live CD-DVD titled Real Live Roadrunning. Knopfler also charted two singles on the Canadian country music singles chart. Again in 2006, Knopfler contributed the song "Whoop De Doo" to Jimmy Buffett's Gulf and Western style album Take the Weather with You. In 2013, he wrote and played guitar on the song "Oldest Surfer on the Beach" to Buffett's album Songs From St. Somewhere.
Knopfler is left-handed, but plays the guitar right-handed. In its review of Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms in 1985, Spin commented: "Mark Knopfler may be the most lyrical of all rock guitarists." In the same year, Rolling Stone commended his "evocative" guitar style. According to Classic Rock in 2018: "The bare-boned economy of Knopfler's songs and his dizzying guitar fills were a breath of clean air amid the lumbering rock dinosaurs and one-dimensional punk thrashers of the late 70s. He was peerless as craftsman and virtuoso, able to plug into rock's classic lineage and bend it to sometimes wild forms. He wrote terrific songs, too: taut mini-dramas of dark depths and dazzling melodic and lyrical flourishes."
Knopfler is a fan of his local football club Newcastle United F.C.. "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)" is used by Newcastle United as an anthem at home games.
He has a collection of classic cars which he races and exhibits at shows, including a Maserati 300S and an Austin-Healey 100S.
Knopfler was estimated to have a fortune of £75 million in the Sunday Times Rich List of 2018, making him one of the 40 wealthiest people in the British music industry.
Solo albums
Golden Heart (1996)Sailing to Philadelphia (2000)
The Ragpicker's Dream (2002)
Shangri-La (2004)
One Take Radio Sessions (2005)
Kill to Get Crimson (2007)
Get Lucky (2009)
Privateering (2012)
Tracker (2015)
Down the Road Wherever (2018)
Soundtrack albums
Local Hero (1983)Cal (1984)
Comfort and Joy (1984)
The Color of Money (1986)
The Princess Bride (1987)
Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989)
Screenplaying (1993, compilation)
Wag the Dog (1998)
Metroland (1999)
A Shot at Glory (2002)
Altamira (2016) with Evelyn Glennie
Other Soundtracks not released
In Private In Public: The Prince and Princess of Wales (1987)Swan Hunter Shipyard documentary (1995)
Robbie the Reindeer: Hooves of Fire (1999)
Honours and awards
1983 BRIT Award for Best British Group (with Dire Straits)1986 Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Group (with Dire Straits) for "Money for Nothing"
1986 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance (with Chet Atkins) for "Cosmic Square Dance"
1986 Juno Award for International Album of the Year (with Dire Straits) for Brothers in Arms
1986 BRIT Award for Best British Group (with Dire Straits)
1987 BRIT Award for Best British Album (with Dire Straits) for Brothers in Arms
1991 Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Collaboration (with Chet Atkins) for "Poor Boy Blues"
1991 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance (with Chet Atkins) for "So Soft, Your Goodbye"
1993 Honorary Doctor of Music from Newcastle University
1995 Honorary Doctor of Music from the University of Leeds
1999 Order of the British Empire". BBC. 31 December 1999. Retrieved 28 November 2013
2001 Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a species of dinosaur, was named in his honour
2003 Edison Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Music Industry
2007 Honorary Doctor of Music from the University of Sunderland
2009 Music Producers Guild Award for Best Studio for Knopfler's British Grove Studios
2009 ARPS Sound Fellowship
2009 PRS Music Heritage Award
2011 Steiger Award
2012 Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award
The asteroid 28151 Markknopfler is named after him.
2018 Dire Straits inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
2018 Living Legend Award Scottish Music Awards