1 August
Dear Mark Knopfler,
I have been a great fan of your songwriting and guitar playing since I was a teenager. I was fairly new to guitar when my mother suggested I listen to Romeo and Juliet. I heard that sparkling fingerpicking on your National resonator, then the casual, lilting vocal teasing out memories of passion and loss, and I was hooked. I duly devoured the whole Dire Straits discography and learned the guitar parts to Sultans of Swing, Money for Nothing, and Brothers in Arms, like a million kids before me. But it was when I arrived at your solo work that something very particular struck me about your songwriting.
As you moved things in a slower, quieter, more contemplative direction, with production generally pared back and more acoustic-based tracks in the mix, I found I was paying more and more attention to the lyrics, to the stories you were telling. In particular, I loved the character studies you would make of ordinary people, giving us the richest of glimpses into a particular person’s world: “Don’t begrudge her the Merc; it’s been nothing but work in a hard life, losing her looks over company books – the scaffolder’s wife.”
I also think of the wily fast-food vendor in Boom Like That, the hedonistic seamen in Privateering, “not quite exactly in the service of the crown”, the “German building British men” of Why Aye Man, the self-analytical agony uncle in Heart Full of Holes, and the weary admonishment of the creative aspirations of a young artist in Let It All Go. These songs, along with others by the likes of Ralph McTell and Dylan, exposed me to that great folk tradition of singing about the everyday but elevating it through its humanity. Within the mundanity of lives quietly lived, there are experiences and feelings worth exploring, observations to be made about human behaviour, and lines of sympathetic relatability to be connected up. You are a master craftsman in this art of extracting the essence of people’s thoughts, actions and emotions and distilling them into a song that can speak to anyone.
Sometimes you have painted us a setting and breathed life into it through its characters. I think here of the drunken disorder about the town in What It Is, set off against the lone Scottish piper in his parapet, showcasing the individual and the universal: “Everybody’s looking for somebody’s arms to fall into, that’s what it is”. There’s the balladeer drowning his sorrows at Madame Geneva’s as the town prepares for a hanging, then there are the “men with no dreams around a fire in a drum” in the industrial wasteland of Silvertown, echoing the growth and decay of the Telegraph Road.
A smattering of your character songs are clearly biographies or tributes to specific, real people – Mason and Dixon in Sailing to Philadelphia and Beryl Bainbridge in Beryl, for example – and sometimes the personal relevance is clear, as with the emigrant Geordies in Why Aye Man. But in so many cases, I have wondered: “Where does he get his ideas from? How are these characters and scenes inspired?”
I know from past interviews that you have sometimes taken direct lyrical fuel from things you overheard people say, no more so than in that fateful visit to an electrical shop that ostensibly gave you most of the lines for Money for Nothing. But many of your songs are set in different times and places to anything you could have experienced yourself and the characters seem fictive, though relatable. So, I wonder if you could shed any light on this for all of us aspiring songwriters: How do you conjure these vivid people and places and what is the process of developing them into a song?
Many thanks and best wishes,
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton