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Dire Straits: straight On Up From Deptford To Dylan - Archive, 1979

20 June 1979: The band is one of the most successful British rock exports ever.

When up-and-coming cartoonist Keef Knight has a traumatic run-in with the police, he begins to see the world in an entirely new way.

Robin Denselow meets lead singer and songwriter Mark Knopfler.

Less than two years ago, back in the summer of ‘77, an English teacher called Mark Knopfler started a rock group at home in a council flat in Deptford. This was “what I’d always wanted to do, and there was a bit of ‘now or never’ about it. But I wasn’t hectic or desperate. I just enjoyed playing.” He brought in his brother David, a Deptford social worker, to play guitar, and his flatmate John Illsley on bass. John was then working in a timber yard and studying at Goldsmith’s College. The fourth member, drummer Pick Withers, had been “doing session work, just for tobacco. He was starving to death.”

Twenty three months later, and Dire Straits are the most successful brand new band in the world. They are at Hammersmith again tonight, and if the show is anything like Sunday’s brilliant effort, it should finally guarantee their reputation back home. It is ironic that Britain has been almost the last place where their albums and the Sultans of Swing single became best-sellers.

After the Hammersmith show, Knopfler sat in the dressing room contemplating where he’s supposed to be going next. “We have to be everywhere. The record is triple platinum in Australia, double platinum in New Zealand, top ten in Japan, Greece, Scandinavia... still near the top in Canada, and in Germany the new album came in at No. 1 and the first one is still 3. It’s ridiculous. Then there’s the States, of course....”

The band’s first-ever tour of the States, earlier this year, started with Sultans already topping the charts and ended with Mark and Pick Withers being asked to form the basis of Bob Dylan’s band for his next album.

Dire Straits started off organising their own concerts around south London, printing the tickets themselves, or playing for charity. Rock writer Charlie Gillett put them on his Sunday show on Radio London, a record contract followed, and as soon as Sultans started being played on the radio all over the world it started to sell.

It was as simple as that, with success for once based on the music and the music alone. Tight, melodic and fresh, with Mark’s Dylanesque drawl and classy guitar work matched against slick, sometimes gently mesmeric but always insistent rhythms, Dire Straits’ style is like an English interpretation of an all-American fusion, from J.J. Cale to Dylan.

Mr Knopfler didn’t fully agree. “There are American influences but there are English influences, like the Shadows. But they in turn were influenced by Americans like the Ventures. It’s a great global jigsaw, and it’s a fool’s idea to try to make sense of it.”

In America – predictably – the style has already been given a name, “brainwave music”. Mark sees the success more as a reaction against the “sleepy, super-cool, LA session-man set-up. The American DJ’s welcome a group who have just got together and played and come out with a record. What we were doing was never intended to make massive inroads into a complacent scene, though.”

In America, some of the DJs have naturally found it easy to slot some of the Straits’ tracks into the “classy easy listening”, AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) category, along with the Fleetwood Macs and Eagles. Mark would prefer to be classed with the do-it-yourself energy of the punk aftermath. “Punk was the best thing that happened to music since Elvis did the Sun sessions. The stuff that excites me most is when a small group of people just get together and play, and something good comes out. That’s what the rock scene for kids should be about. It’s daft that it should be anything else. People think we’re supposed to be ‘good music’ but a lot of technically clever musicians leave me stone cold”.

Dire Straits are a very long way from punk – though the energy is all there on stage, more so than on record – but they have opened the way for a new post-punk English invasion of America. The Police, Elvis Costello and now Joe Jackson have repeated their success to a lesser degree.

Bob Dylan, always aware of the trends, was at the Straits’ LA show and asked Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers to record with him. Mark was reluctant to discuss the results “because I don’t really feel it’s my place to talk about someone else’s record”, but was able to say a little about the next Dylan offering.

He recorded with a very small band compared to that used for Street Legal on last year’s tour, just a simple four-piece of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards, with a little brass and girl singers added in. Dylan sounds pleased with his new Deptford connection. If Mark sounds Dylanesque on stage, he can imitate the man even better when he’s talking about him. “I remember Bob saying ‘hey man. this is a professional record – I’ve been making like home records’.”

Dire Straits have achieved a lot, very fast. For Knopfler – who studied English at Leeds, and was a journalist there on the Yorkshire Evening Post before becoming a teacher – the change was surely extraordinary. “There’s been no time to take stock of it. We’ve been shattered for months, and we’re working so hard we don’t seem to be thinking what everyone else is thinking. But I object to the fact that if I want a beer now, six people go scurrying off to look for one. That, and all the analysis that goes on. If I got on stage and sang Hot Water Bottle, someone would say something meaningful about it.”

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