David Knopfler, Interview April 2022 With Susana Rizo for ZendaLibros Magazine in Spain
David Knopfler, Interview April 2022 - With Susana Rizo for ZendaLibros Magazine in Spain
Dear David, what a great pleasure talking to you. Let's start with your beginnings. How do you remember when you started your first concerts as a teenager?
I think my first gigs were as a guitar accompanist to a girl singer round the local working men’s clubs of the North East doing spots when I was about 14 - then we had a not great rock band when I was 15 or 16. I started playing in the folk clubs too on my own at around 21 - just little three song spots and of course then my brother Mark and I started working together - first as a Duo and then as Dire Straits.
From your album Release to the most recent Shooting for the Moon, almost 40 years have passed. Did you ever think you would do anything different from what you do?
That’s a good question. Do I wonder what I might have done differently? When I was still trying to get record deals I probably had to compromise too much to get the finance in place to allow me to do my art. I made several early albums that were not as effectively executed in their production as I might have liked - but each relative failure to perfectly express yourself gives you impetus to do better next time. I’m not sure that it’s really possible to serve two masters - It’s Mammon or the Muse. If you decide to fully embrace your inner Artist and (as Joseph Campbell puts it) “follow your bliss” there may well be a thorny path of obscurity on your horizon. Only you can then decide if despite a wall of indifference to your work you think it’s worth dedicating your life to it. I never really felt I had a choice. An artistic sensibility is almost a personality defect - if you have it you aren’t likely to be really naturally great at something else - Art chooses you - not the other way around.
What is your creative process like when you compose?
I generally don’t set out with a purpose to say something specific - I just let the process of making the work take me on an adventure. There aren’t really any formulas - Sometimes you get a decent piece of work out of it sometimes you don’t. Sometimes I start with a partial lyric - sometimes with a musical idea. It’s fairly instinctive initially - the craft of knowing what to save and what to jettison and how to best get to where the embers song seems to want to go does most of the rest.
What do you need to get away from in order to write and compose?
I like to have a quiet place - but it’s not essential - I can be creative almost anywhere. In recent years I’ve become very dependent on my computer and its music software as I tend to take my work to completion largely in my own studio - but you need a lot of things to be working for you - good original ideas - good guitars - a grand piano - great microphones - A list session players you can call on for overdubs - It’s no one thing really - and even then you almost need the angels to offer some help to make a song really talk to you.
You are a pianist, a guitarist, do you play bass, drums... Which musical instrument do you feel most comfortable with?
I think I like the piano best but sometimes I have periods of really loving the guitar too. I was a dreadful drummer and still am - though I do just about get away with it.
Music is a sublime art. How do you feel when you perform a piece of music?
Two forty-five minute sets - this shouldn’t be too hard - Thank God I’ve got Harry Bogdanovs with me.
I remember the beautiful lyrics of The King of Ashes from the Wishbones album. Do you feel that, like the protagonist of your song, you are also reborn?
LOL - I don’t think you should really ever assume that the tale and the teller are the same thing. When I listen to myself playing back at me through the speakers with my producer’s hat on I ask “Do I believe him?” A good song has to have something that feels honest about it - Like a novelist, you take aspects of yourself and then play around with them. Sometimes they can be close to autobiographical - other times the song insists on being its own creation.
Are your lyrics reflections of personal states?
Probably - mostly - yeah.
David, your music seems very honest to me. Is it necessary in Art to go through the process of opening up to the public, even if it means shedding the armour we all wear?
Well you have to take risks and expose yourself to some degree. Springsteen called it “that honesty thing.” I think its has to have the feeling of authenticity but the imagination can fill in a lot of blanks. I’ve got a song called "Hard Times in Idaho” and I’ve never been to Idaho that I can recall, but it conjures an image of an old chap on a horse in a cold snowy place... Well I’ve never ridden a horse either. Does that render the song inauthentic? ... I don’t think so... Songs can be all kinds of things... and sometimes a mixture of those things. It’s endless... Thankfully... because I love the journey and the only destination will be a dark silence so don’t be in too much of a rush to get there.
Your compositions have a lot of spiritual references. What is spirituality for you, how does it help?
I don’t really know. I’m a bit lapsed at present - but if anything can rekindle it it’s probably music. Love brings contentment - and contentment makes the need for the hunger of a spiritual element in your life less pressing. I’m going to be 70 at the end of this year... it doesn’t seem remotely real or possible... but it’s true nevertheless... Just getting through the miasma of stuff ordinary living requires of us these days is almost enough to be going on with. It constantly stops me from getting into the studio where I’d generally rather be.
I understand that you are a practitioner of the Eastern philosophy iChing?
I lost my excellent coins on our last move about five years ago - and I haven’t been near it since. I was never a true believer - just a dabbler. I wish I could find those coins though. They were nice and solid and came with a set of iChing Cards - though I’ve only ever used them with various iChing books. I’d buy the cards again if I could remember who manufactured them - just to have the coins, if I hadn’t also lost them.
You are quite active on social media where you speak frankly and openly about aspects of your country's politics, and you have been particularly critical of Brexit. No doubt Boris Johnson wasn't thinking of musicians when he led your country into this closed relationship with Europe.
Fixing the world one facebook post at a time ;) - The only good thing to be said about our opportunistic clown, Boris Johnson, who put his career advancement ahead of our nation’s best interests, is that we still live (just about) in a country where I can safely compare him to a Shakespearean villain like Richard they Third or Claudius (Hamlet) without a knock on the door from the secret police. Unlike Russia, we have so far managed to avoid an overly totalitarian grip by the State over us - but that doesn’t mean we can take our liberal democracies for granted - though I imagine Spain, with her troubled history, of civil war and then Franco’s brand of fascism, probably understands that better than most and therefor embraces its EU membership with a greater measure of enthusiasm than the UK has. The EU has been a precious gift; To so wantonly throw it away, as the UK has done, is frankly an absolute tragedy.
There is also a lot of poetry in the design of your album covers. They are suggestive and evocative. They have something of Bilbo Baggins' There and back again. I don't know if you would agree.
My lovely love Leslie, my wife, has taken on the role of Art Director to my Digipacs. She’s probably the one who leans more to pastoral themes than urban ones. There is a very special track on the Heartlands album, called Waiting for the call. What is the story behind this emotional song?
I would guess it’s a bit of a meditation on death - several elderly folk were on my mind when I wrote it - but particularly my mother, who I think had recently died at the time I was writing it. I expect that bled into the creation of the song in some measure... bit it’s also a meditation on our own mortality - something that tends to go with the territory of advancing years.
What is poetry for you, what does it represent in your music, in your life, what do you do to capture the magic of a special moment?
It’s a magical life saving thing is poetry. Like music it has a many purposes it can fulfil. Where to begin...
Could you please tell me the story behind the song you wrote Only a miracle? It is one of my favourite songs.
That’s a real mystery song - I could write a paragraph for almost every line in it. It’s a good illustration of the work of an artist. I like that one a lot too. I don’t think I want to unpick it really. At the heart of a good song or a good poem there are usually unanswered questions. That’s good because it then propels us forward to do our own reading and research and make our own work, whatever it might be. I got a bit lucky with that one - things just came together very easily and very naturally.
These dark days of war remind me of the refrain ‘the darkest hour is gone with the dawn’ from your song Carry on. What can music contribute to history in these days?
Music is a universal language of the emotions. It can provide the soundtrack to our lives. We can all universally feel equally moved by a piece of music wherever we happen to be born or where we live. I’m not sure what it has to say to history - I suppose it could provide some social history. It’s such a big subject — and you would need to define which kind of music? There are protest songs about a raft of different things - just as there are personal and intimate songs.
What advice do you have to help us cope in this adverse time?
Take care of your body and your mind will fall into line. With that you can attempt many of the things you feel inclined to do - Be brave - be fearless - doors will open before you even knock on them once you tell the universe unambiguously how you want to serve it.
Thank you very much, David. Your music has been a part of my soundtrack during this pandemic, and it is now, in times of war.
May Ukraine prevail in this murderous period of 21st Century History. Hitler was supremely confident and only a couple of years later Berlin was completely flattened. Moscow need to be aware both of the forces Putin has unleashed in his intemperate impotence and of who they, the people of Russia, are allowing to be their, rightly despised, bully boy. May his intemperate, illegal endeavour fail comprehensively and irreversibly.