Strait Talker

As Brothers in Arms marks its 40th anniversary with an expanded reissue, Mark Knopfler breaks his silence on the songs that ate the Eighties. From his lucky '83 Les Paul and Fleetwood Mac-inspired soloing to “getting away with murder” at the sessions, this is the Dire Straits legend at his most open in years

- BY HENRY YATES

BEHIND AN UNMARKED door in a nondescript West London street, you'll find the recording studio of the world's most reluctant rock god. Do this job long enough and you'll learn to spot the artists who project a carefully cultivated aura of false modesty, often blended with a phoney man-of-the-people vibe. With Mark Knopfler, you can tell, it's absolutely genuine. Over the course of our interview at the British Grove facility he founded two decades ago, the 75-year-old former leader of Dire Straits will tell us, with unblinking sincerity, that he considers himself a mediocre player who struggled among more capable studio musicians and squirmed every time he was anointed as a guitar hero.

We must respectfully disagree with our host, of course. Anyone who followed his band from the South London ratholes of the late Seventies to the stadiums of the mid-Eighties would agree that Knopfler is a contender for the most beautiful, lyrical, shiver-and-tingle guitarist that Britain ever produced, the sound of his bare fingers dancing on the neck of his preferred '61 Strat one of the era's most magical sounds.

The evidence for his brilliance is writ large across a five-decade catalog, from the bob-and-weave outro of 1978's “Sultans of Swing” to the metallic resonator pluck of 1980's "Romeo and Juliet” and all over a 10-album-strong solo career that makes his peers look sluggish with its breadth and quality.

But if a Knopfler fan were to pick his or her desert island album, it would surely be 1985's Brothers in Arms. Flowing from the Synclavier quack of “So Far Away" to the stormy title track's molten solo - via the zydeco tootle of "Walk of Life” and the hairy-backed riff of "Money for Nothing” - this is Knopfler's masterpiece. Riding the CD boom to sell 30 million copies, it made Dire Straits the biggest band on the planet, but it also drove the guitarist to overload and exhaustion.