Mark Knopfler

Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds

Mark Freuder Knopfler was born in Glasgow on 12 August 1949, to Louisa Mary Laidler, an English teacher from Northumberland, and Erwin Knopfler, a Hungarian Jewish architect who had left Hungary in 1939 to escape the Nazis. He grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne and went to Gosforth Grammar School. At thirteen he took a Saturday job at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, where he met the poet Basil Bunting.

He became a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds in 1968, later took an English degree at the University of Leeds, and played in a duo there with Steve Phillips. He later said reporting taught him to get organized and condense things. In London he joined Brewers Droop in 1973, led the Café Racers and lectured for three years at Loughton College. Left-handed but playing right-handed, he credited Chet Atkins with shaping his fingerstyle, and told Guitar Player that his thumb and two fingers could do things a pick could not.

Dire Straits and the scores

In 1977 he formed Dire Straits in Deptford with his brother David, John Illsley and Pick Withers. Sultans of Swing broke through on its reissue early in 1979, and Brothers in Arms (1985) sold more than 30 million copies, with Money for Nothing a US number one.

Alongside the band he scored films, starting with Local Hero in 1983 and going on to Cal and The Princess Bride. He produced Bob Dylan's Infidels and wrote Private Dancer for Tina Turner. In 1987 he first met Emmylou Harris on a Chet Atkins television special. He dissolved Dire Straits in 1988, saying he needed a rest, then formed the Notting Hillbillies and made Neck and Neck with Atkins, which won two Grammys in 1991. Dire Straits re-formed for On Every Street and a world tour that ended in 1992, and the band ended for good in 1995.

Solo

His solo debut, Golden Heart, came out in 1996, with Nashville players alongside Irish musicians including Paul Brady and Liam O'Flynn. Sailing to Philadelphia (2000), with James Taylor on the title song, had sold more than 3.5 million copies by 2002. The Ragpicker's Dream followed in 2002, but in March 2003 a motorcycle crash broke his collarbone, a shoulder blade and seven ribs, and its tour was cancelled. He recorded Shangri-La in Malibu in 2004 and toured it through much of 2005, including five nights at the Royal Albert Hall.

With Emmylou Harris

At Thanksgiving 1998 in Nashville, Harris sang on Red Staggerwing and Donkey Town, two songs meant for Sailing to Philadelphia, and the session grew into a duets album. They recorded it in stages in 1998, 2002 and 2004, around their own records. All the Roadrunning appeared on 24 April 2006, went to number one in Denmark, Norway and Switzerland and reached number eight in the UK. Earlier that year he had won the Grammy for Best Surround Sound Album with the twentieth anniversary edition of Brothers in Arms.

The pair toured for twenty-three shows from Brussels to Berkeley that May and June. Each night Harris sang her own songs inside his set, among them Red Dirt Girl and Boulder to Birmingham. The show at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, Los Angeles, on 28 June was filmed and recorded, and came out that November as Real Live Roadrunning. In February 2007 All the Roadrunning was nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album.

When you combine two unique voices it creates a third, phantom voice.

Emmylou Harris, on All the Roadrunning

British Grove and after

He built British Grove Studios in Chiswick, which holds two historic EMI consoles and is also hired out to others. Kill to Get Crimson (2007), Get Lucky (2009), the twenty-song Privateering (2012), Tracker (2015) and Down the Road Wherever (2018) each went out on tour, and in 2011 and 2012 he toured with Bob Dylan. Dire Straits entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, though he did not attend. The Down the Road Wherever tour closed in New York in September 2019 and was his last.

In January 2024 Christie's sold more than 120 of his guitars and amplifiers for over £8 million, with a quarter going to charity. That March more than sixty musicians, billed as Mark Knopfler's Guitar Heroes, re-recorded Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero for teenage cancer charities. One Deep River, with the Tyne Bridge on its cover, followed in April and topped the charts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He told Rolling Stone Italia that month that he would not tour again and saw himself as a songwriter rather than a musician.