Interview with Mark Knopfler
On March 25, Mercury will release Golden Heart, the new album by Mark Knopfler. This time it's not a film soundtrack, or a star-studded collaboration, and it's most definitely not the new Dire Straits album. After nearly 20 years making records (and selling 85m of them), each one built around his songs, his voice and his distinctive guitar playing, Knopfler has finally decided to drop the disguise.
"You've got to answer your own heart," he says emphatically, and the 14 songs on Golden Heart are a clear statement of a new musical identity. And the shift of emphasis is paralleled by Knopfler's decision to play relatively small venues on his upcoming tour, not the superstadia he became used to with Dire Straits. Golden Heart was recorded in Nashville, Dublin and London over the three years since the end of the last Dire Straits tour.
The project was originally conceived as a guitarist's fantasy featuring the world's best players, but from the first recording sessions in London - in January 1993 - a new inspiration appeared. "It's all to do with the connections between black music and Celtic music," says Knopfler. "My idea of musical bliss is the place where the Delta meets the Tyne. We started in January at Air Studios, spent a couple of great days recording in Dublin, then there was a big long gap [due to the death of his father], then to Nashville, then down to Lafayette in Louisiana and back to Nashville to finish the album."
His simple explanation doesn't take into account the nine completed songs recorded in London and scrapped, or the meticulous, almost fanatical hand-picking of musicians for the project. In Nashville, Knopfler recruited A-list session players like drummer Chad Cromwell, steel guitar player Paul Franklin and veteran guitarist Richard Bennett, who will also form the core of his new live band. "Nashville musicians just love to play with Mark," says Golden Heart's co-producer and engineer Chuck Ainlay. "It became clear that Mark was really into capturing a real band feel. A lot of the tracking was done live - I think Mark just wanted to really enjoy making a record again."
The reasons for Knopfler's new found enthusiasm aren't hard to find. The last Dire Straits tour stretched to 20 months on the road, played to more than 4m people and elevated the group into the touring superleague. But massive success clearly brought Knopfler less and less pleasure as the touring juggernaut ground on. "We took 47 trucks on the road, and 19 of them were full of scaffolding poles," says Knopfler's long-time manager Ed Bicknell. "It was costing us ??,000 per show just to set up."
"The sheer costs of large-scale productions now are ridiculous," says Knopfler. "And the music starts to lose its spontaneity. It becomes an event and you lose that wonderful interaction with an audience." And yet the principal promotional tool for the new album is another tour. But this time on a much smaller scale. "We're still at the formative stages of the campaign," says Mercury managing director Howard Berman. "But our key input for Mark is to provide appropriate and efficient presentation. It would be presumptuous of us to push Mark in any particular direction, so touring is the key part of the mix."
And Knopfler and Bicknell came up with a solution that kept the fun, and fitted into the Nashville session musicians' tight schedules. "I'd love to have invited the Irish players as well, but the size of show I want to play just won't support a huge band," says Knopfler. "I've never thought it necessary to explain myself to other people, but the idea of playing live and losing a fortune is stupid - the principle is just offensive." Bicknell says there will be no huge venues this time. "We've gone for the middle ground and chosen venues that will pay for the kind of show we want to put on," he says. "No stadia, lots of multiple shows in one town, maybe some bull-rings and Roman arenas in the south of France."
This search for intimacy is part of the new album as well. Even when Knopfler sounds most like Dire Straits, as on the the lead single, Darling Pretty (due February 26), the pomp of much of Dire Straits' later material has been radically streamlined. Despite the success of the guitarist's Celtic stylings on the soundtracks to Local Hero and Cal, this is the first time that Knopfler has tried to unify the blues-based rock of Dire Straits with the folk roots he absorbed in his Newcastle and Glasgow childhood.
And suddenly Knopfler is being generous with his ideas. Listening to the jazz noir feel on the 12-year-old song Rudiger, the cajun crossover ballad Je Suis Desole or the Celtic sway of A Night In Summer Long Ago gives you five-minute versions of songs Dire Straits might well have stretched to 11. "We went for feel every time," says Ainlay. "Mark's having a lot more fun in his life these days, and that shows in the record."
"If you can't please yourself you can't please anybody," says Knopfler repeatedly. "Try as much as possible to do every thing on your own terms - and that means getting some fun out of it." As Knopfler enters a new phase of his recording career he seems to be reassessing his priorities. He's also rejected what he describes as the "steady growth of corporatism - that focus on short-term profits, on profiling and market research is a drastically awful way to go about life," he says.
"Even if I wasn't in this band, me and my mates would pay money to see these guys play. At my time of life, I wouldn't dream of taking a tour out unless I was desperately excited about it." So if you're sitting in a beach-front bar this summer - almost anywhere in the world - and Knopfler's instantly recognisable vocals and guitar follow Sheryl Crow or REM on to the sound system, it may still be Money For Nothing or Twisting By The Pool, but it could also be the crunchy riffs of Golden Heart's Darling Pretty, the cajun shuffle of Cannibals or even the delicate atmospherics of A Night In Summer demonstrating Knopfler's global appeal one more time.
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