Mark Knopfler: A Life in Songs

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Let's go with that.

Mark Knopfler is one of the most successful musicians in the world.

During the past 30 years, he's written and recorded over 300 songs,

including some of the most famous in popular music.

# A love-struck Romeo

# Got his serenade

# Laying everybody low

# With a love song that he made. #

# That ain't working That's the way you do it

# Money for nothing and your chicks for free. #

# You do the walk Do the walk of life

# Yeah, the walk of life. #

# With the sultans

# Yeah, with the sultans of swing. #

# We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms. #

Mark Knopfler has sold over 120 million albums,

both with Dire Straits and as a solo artist,

yet on the afternoon of a sell-out concert in Lisbon,

he's able to sit unrecognised outside a city centre cafe.

For him, it would seem, it is all about the songs.

He doesn't like fame, it's not about the money.

And unlike most artists, he doesn't choose to live in his past.

It's not Dire Straits anymore, but it's still...

It always was him and his songs.

# The chisels are calling

# It's time to make sawdust

# Steely reminders of things left to do

# Monteleone

# Mandolin's waiting... #

I think he's one of the greatest living songwriters going right now.

# My fingerplane's working

# Gentle persuasion

# I bend to the wood and I coax it to sing

# Monteleone, your new one and only will ring

The excitement is the creating - there's nothing like it.

It's the best feeling that there is - when it's working.

# I'm better with my muscles

# Than I am with my mouth

# I work the fairgrounds in summer

# Or go pick fruit down south

# When I feel them chilly winds

# Where the weather goes I'll follow

# Pack up my travelling things

# Go with the swallows

# And I might get lucky now and then

# You win some You might get lucky now and then

# Yeah, you win some... #

I was born in Glasgow because my dad had gone up there to work,

although my mum's family are from Newcastle.

My dad was a refugee and he was Hungarian,

and he came to England in 1939.

He was a firebrand young socialist and he was expelled from Hungary.

He did about three stretches in prison.

He never hurt anybody, of course, he just probably

handed out pamphlets or whatever he did, and he escaped to Czechoslovakia

and he got out of Czechoslovakia and made it to Britain.

Pretty soon after that he got a job in Glasgow.

He wanted to work as a city architect,

he wanted to try and serve society as best he could.

I suppose having a sense of what's right and wrong is just something

that you grow up with in your family, if you're lucky enough to have that.

I really can't say any more than that,

other than that I had a good upbringing.

Both parents did a good job, I like to think. I hope so anyway!

When Mark was eight,

the Knopfler family upped sticks and moved south to Newcastle.

It was here that Mark's love of music was fired up

by his boogie-woogie piano playing Uncle Kingsley.

My mum's brother Kingsley had a banjo and he played boogie-woogie piano.

And the boogie-woogie was very important to me,

because it made a real connection with me.

The sort of big blocks just moved into place,

and I realised that that was for me.

With Uncle Kingsley's boogie-woogie piano ringing in his ears,

and the rapidly-emerging beat group scene,

the young Mark Knopfler soon developed an obsession with guitars.

I used to haunt the music shops long before I even had a guitar.

And the music shops in Newcastle, I knew every inch of them.

I would probably be the little lad in there

who was too nervous to take a guitar down.

I didn't know how to play anyway.

I remember once, it was overpowering, and there was nothing I could do,

and I just picked up this Spanish guitar and took it off the hook

and took it down, and a voice behind me said,

"If you drop that, I'll drop you."

For the 11-year-old Mark Knopfler,

only one guitar would fit the bill, and that was the Fender Stratocaster

as used by his hero, Hank Marvin of The Shadows.

Back then, I wanted to have a Strat

just because of The Shadows' sound and the twang, that's what it was.

It's just really pick and tremolo arm, that twang.

And not everybody can just get that.

Sometimes you get people that are more hammy on it,

so everybody's got a different touch on it.

And Hank had a beautiful vibrato on it.

So that sound thankfully just came kind of naturally.

Just that sound.

And I still wish I could get a guitar to sound the way he gets it to sound.

So here he is, one of the all-time favourites,

the man himself, Hank B Marvin.

Hank used to come down and play with us on our encores.

If he was about, he would come down and do Local Hero and stuff.

MUSIC:
"Going Home"

It's always very nice to complete the circuit with your childhood.

# Bye-bye, love

# Bye-bye, happiness

# Hello, loneliness

# I think I'm a-going to die... #

In his early teenage years, another sound Mark found hard

to resist was the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers.

A good friend of mine called Vince, who I'm still friendly with,

we used to play Everly Brothers records together and things

that belonged to his big sister Francine.

# There goes my baby with someone else, yeah, yeah, yeah

# She sure looks happy

# I sure am blue. #

And when the Everlys recorded a song that I wrote,

I got the chance to play it with them at this TV special

in Vanderbilt in Nashville.

And the Evs came along,

and it's a real thrill to be playing your song with the Evs.

# Why worry?

# There should be laughter after pain

# There should be sunshine after rain

# These things have always been the same

# So why worry now? #

By the age of 16, while patiently waiting to go electric,

Knopfler could be found finger-picking his way

around the folk clubs of Newcastle.

Doing things like,

# I'm going down that road and I'm feelin' bad, baby

# Going down that road and I'm feelin' bad

# Ain't gonna be treated this way

# These two darn shoes kill my feet, baby

# Daughter's shoes is killing my feet

# Ain't gonna be treated this way. #

So this kind of duality going on

where I'd be playing in folk places at the age of 16

and wanting to play electric music as well.

For a kid growing up in Newcastle in the '60s,

no music was more electrifying than that of the blues.

One bluesman in particular, BB King,

would create a lasting impression on the young Mark Knopfler.

He had a record called Live at the Regal

and that was really, really important for me.

It was a very definite thing happening.

This relationship between the voice, the guitar and the audience

that I'd never heard before and made a big impression on me.

# The way I used to love you, baby

# Baby, that's the way I hate you now. #

And then Bob Dylan, of course, changed it all for me.

As far as realising that you could write about anything.

# Oh, my name, it ain't nothing.

# My age, it means less.

# The country I come from is called the mid-west

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