2008 marks the 25th anniversary of David Knopfler's debut album, Release...

Rob Quicke: So David, thank you for joining us on Britsound.

David Knopfler: It's a great pleasure to be here, thanks.

RQ: You're just about to go off to Australia...

DK: I am indeed.

RQ: And do a tour. Is that the first time you've played in Australia?

DK:  You know it is. It's frightening to think about, but I've never played there before. It's the first time I've ever played in Australia, yes, indeed. It should be very exciting though, because it will be very fresh and very new. Kind of like being a newbie all over again.

RQ: How do you feel about when you go to places where you've never played before? What kind of reaction do you expect?

DK: It's very different. I mean when I'm doing Europe I already have a profile and people have seen me on TV. I've done radio and all the rest of it. But when I play somewhere, like the States or Canada or Australia, it's kind of like going back to the beginning again. You have to go back and kind of explain that you were that bloke who founded Dire Straits and yes I've made ten albums. You're really starting from ground zero each time.

RQ: Is that a burden?

DK: No, it's alright. I mean, the work's the same. When you get on the stage it's kind of funny, because you can say, "This is a song from my new album", and they wouldn't know any different whether it was from a new one or an old one, because they haven't got any of your albums. You're really playing to a new crowd. You have to win them 'round. It's a challenge, but it's also fun.

RQ: Is that something that over the years has gotten easier?

DK: Yeah, I suppose it has. I mean you still get nervous before a show just the same way, but you kind of put it into a box so that it doesn't debilitate in anyway or anything.

RQ: Let's talk about next year, because next year marks the 25th anniversary of Release, your debut album.

DK: Yes, I thought that I might bring out a Best Of in honour of that. I thought it was going to be a compilation. It will be 25 years indeed, 2008, from 1983.

RQ: Now let me take you back 25 years. What do you remember about making that debut album?

DK: It was a thrill. I mean when you finally get your first record released it's a blast isn't it? I wanted a gatefold sleeve and I had my favorite photographer and it was a single album. It's just exciting. It's like kind of getting a trophy really. I got a bigger thrill from that than all the platinum discs that had already piled up in the cellar from the Straits.

RQ: Obviously, it was very important for you because you were striking out on your own to a certain extent.

DK: Well, it didn't feel like that to me. It felt like I was returning to where I'd kind of...what I'd put on hiatus for three years while I had been in the Straits. But yes, commercially speaking I was ‘striking out’. An unfortunate expression really!

RQ: You've now made ten albums. And I want to speak to you about those albums, about your journey over the ten albums. I want to ask you about something that occurred between 1991 and 1993. In '91 you released Lifelines recorded at Real World Studios…

DK: A rock 'n' roll album. My last rock 'n' roll album.

RQ: Yes, very electric with lavish production too…

DK: It had a big sound, big drums, lots of money, lots of preproduction, too.

RQ: Yet two years later you released, The Giver which was completely different in approach and in its production. What happened in that time to cause that change?

DK: I was working on Lifelines and I was with a songwriter composer named David Arnold who's subsequently gone on to fame and fortune in Hollywood for doing soundtracks, but at the time he was my production assistant. We were just sitting there programming away this high hat which was taking forever to program. We'd spent about three days programming it. It just went on and on and on. And I just thought that this thing was never going to be finished, you know. I really got fed up and browned off with it. And I was thinking what was the matter? This is madness. It takes five minutes for a real drummer to put down a drum part and we'd been spending days just messing about with it. And I just made a vow then, which took us four months with pre-production, that I'd never again spend six months making a record. I'd spend six weeks and that's what it's been ever since.

I think The Giver was probably made in four or five weeks. And you know, you spend a few three or four days rehearsing it with a band. You can have the backing tracks down in less than a week. Then you have the overdubs done in a week and you mix it in a week and you're in and you're out you know, three or four weeks, which is all it actually took for the first Dire Straits album. I think we were getting a budget of 12,000 pounds which in those days was about $18, 000 and three weeks to make it. I don't think it sounds anything worse for it, you know. You just get on with it that way.

RQ: It sounds a lot more organic, a lot more ‘natural’ so to speak.

DK:Some of my heroes’ records I tend to come back to time and time again, like Dylan's Blood On The Tracks or Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview, or one of those kind of albums. I mean they are mid-70s albums that were well produced but kind of timeless in their production because they don't date consequently. Records that you tend to make with lots of drum machines and synthesizers are just... they tend to last about a fortnight and then you begin to wish you'd not done them that way. You regret it leisurely.

RQ: Let me ask you about your early albums before The Giver. Are you proud of them?

DK: For the first nine albums I think there's been a general arc of improvement across my work. I think the songwriting's been getting better, the production's getting better. I may have slipped slightly on album 10, but that was an experiment. I think the writing keeps on getting better regardless of the production anyway. I feel like I'm still kind of improving. As long as that's the case I shall carry on making them.

RQ: You once said in an interview that “the possibility of me ever becoming a mainstream artist now escapes my consciousness”

DK: Yeah, absolutely.

RQ: Is that something that was always the intention?

DK: To be a mainstream artist?

RQ: No, to avoid the mainstream.

DK: [laughs] Probably more of the latter! Well neither really. Truthfully, you have to just make the work you love to make. It didn't surprise me that when I went from album 5, Lifelines to album 6, The Giver, from the Real World studios production to the acoustic production - it didn't surprise me that my sales consequently fell by about 75% as a result of that shift. I mean an awful lot of that core hardcore rock audience in Germany in particular didn't really get it, you know.

RQ: Really?

DK: Sales there fell from about 50,000 units to about 20,000, but you know that's ok. You do what you have to do. You can't make records to please other people. You've got to please yourself first and foremost. And I just haven't felt any great urge to go back to that 1980s ‘big drums’ sound. It doesn't interest me. I've just kind of really stayed true to the spirit of the songwriting ethos really that was around when I was growing up which was really you know the Asylum Label and everything that they believed in and all that 70s kind of singer songwriter thing. It's really where my heart still is and I haven't really wanted to push the envelope much beyond that. I think that is what excites me and what defines my aspirations I think.

RQ: You said in an interview once that you work in the margins and the margins are where you find the nice people. You find real friends. You'll find honesty.

DK: And the margins are wide, too. They're wider than people will have you believe, I mean politically speaking. When Bush and his friends took office we were kind of hood-winked into trying to believe this very, very extreme form of neo conservativism was a mainstream phenomenon, which it certainly isn't, you know. The margins around that are massive. I would say that the vast majority of Americans and everybody else on the planet are not fundamentally in agreement with those values. I mean I don't have a problem about being in the margins. They can make you feel like you're being marginalized, but truthfully you're not. It's just that the corporate interests have nailed some of the timber into place that says ‘you can't walk here’, but you can still make your work. To be honest I don't think it works that kind of corporate thing in the end anyway. Sooner or later it implodes because it doesn't give people what they really want.

RQ: Let me ask you about that though. Do you think in many ways the reason why you can continue making the music you do is because of the internet and word of mouth online?

DK: I don't know to be honest. That’s the honest answer.  I think the internet has helped in some respects and I think it has damaged in others. The cloning and the downloading and the CDR-ing and all the rest of it has been a death knell for CDs and for making a living that way. But it's produced an enormous impetus for people to get out and play live and perform honestly, which is probably a good thing. It doesn't seem to have discouraged the younger artists from coming through in any shape or form. It's just harder to make a living now, but it's wiped out all those fat cat excesses of the kind of the cocaine-fueled 80s and that's probably not a bad thing. I don't know really. It would be nice if copyright could have been protected, but it's far too late to worry about that now. The record companies should have been proactive about it fifteen years ago and they weren't.

RQ: Let me ask you a question about your website knopfler.com. The reason why I love your website, it's like a curiosity shop.

DK: Some of that stuff is pretty old! A lot of it got written in the 1990s and just never got updated.

RQ: The reason why I like it so much is that it's full of so much interesting stuff some of it highly unusual. Was that your intention?

DK: It wasn't my intention. It just evolved. In the days when I took the name there wasn't even a charge for having a domain name you could just take it.

RQ: Wow!

DK: I mean I very nearly collected a bunch of them like cars.com and hotels.com.

RQ: Well, you'd be a millionaire now.

DK: I thought what am I going to do with all these? And so I didn't. And now they're selling for a million dollars each. That's the way it goes. I just set it up because I just needed a vehicle for my fans first of all and secondly because I needed a vehicle for selling records that where in territories where I didn't have any labels. There was a grey market in those days where small labels would bootleg and release records they didn't have the rights to. I would do a three year licensing deal and these record companies would go release them 10, 15, 20 years after the event. Unless I released them myself and kind of put my own work out there into the margins, these companies would just go on milking it forever and I would never see any royalties and it was a way of stopping that too.  I had already had my own label with Paris records way back from Release. I actually released that on my own label in a number of countries anyway. I had major labels for some territories, but a lot of it was done DIY – Do It Yourself. It's been an ongoing process of selling my own records really

RQ: Listening to your brother's latest album, Kill To Get Crimson…

DK: I haven't heard it actually so I can't make any comment about it

RQ: Right. But your brother has returned to a style that in many ways is the music that you were making nearly 15 years ago with The Giver, acoustic based stripped down songs…

DK: I was hoping it was something that he would do so that sounds promising to me, but it depends on how good the songs are at the end of the day. I haven't heard it so I really can't comment about it

RQ: Right sure. But is it not ironic, because this is the music you were making nearly 15 years ago?

DK: I'm not in a competition with anybody.

RQ: Right.

DK: Least of all my brother. You know people should just make their work they way they want to make it. I mean that we're family doesn't make it competitive. I mean I'm not in a competition with anyone. I'm just making my work and enjoying it. I've got a lot of respect for Mark's talent as an artist. I think he's a fine, fine guitarist. And without that talent I certainly wouldn't have made a living with Dire Straits.

RQ: From all of the interviews I've read with you, you do seem genuinely happy that you left Dire Straits when you did.

DK: More than that, yeah, absolutely. I've never regretted doing anything when it comes to making decisions and moving on. I mean I've left a number of jobs in my time before Dire Straits when I had day jobs. I walked out on them when they didn't make me happy. You've only got one life. You'd be a fool spend a day with something that doesn't make you happy or being a strummer for somebody else's dreams when you've got dreams of your own.

RQ: I'm going to ask the question. A lot of bands are getting back together again and working with people they haven't worked with for years…

DK: I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'm very envious of Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. I think it's a fantastic idea, I would do it tomorrow. One tour? Yeah. I'd take advice from my best buddy Harry, which is I'd go out and say nothing and keep on saying it, but of course I could go through the motions and enjoy myself and do that for a month. I'm not a great believer in going around a hamster wheel in order to get happiness tomorrow, but I'm not completely stupid, either. If someone said, "how'd you fancy making 10 million dollars and it would only take you a month to make it", you'd be crazy to say no. But no one's ever going to ask me. It's never going to happen. I can joke about it because I know that there's no way Mark's ever going to do that.

RQ: But isn’t it interesting that many fans do hold up the first two Straits albums, Dire Straits and Communiqué, as the 'real' Dire Straits?

DK: Yeah I don't know. I can like some of the other stuff too. I do get a lot of that feedback too. But then, that’s what people want me to hear isn't it?

RQ: I suppose so.

DK: You wouldn't want to hear people saying, "Well that stuff was rubbish but when they got to Brothers in Arms that's when they really were cooking". It was different. It was an era. It was very innocent music for its day.

RQ: Let's talk about the future. You're going to Australia. When you come back from Australia what are your plans?

DK: Well, I'm going to take a little holiday and then I'm going to go and have some more time in the sun, which would be great. Then I'm going to do a tour of Europe in February or March 2008 with the band. Australia's just me and Harry, which is good fun because we have no crew and we can just rent a four wheeler and truck around on our own and we can just start and stop as we please. And then we have this more orchestrated thing in February/March where we have a tour manager and crew and a promoter who takes care of us. And then we'll do that and then I'll probably I'm going to go into the studio with Harry and make another album. I think we're going to try and make an acoustic one.

I was recently in Nashville working with Max Starks again and we'd written a couple of really nice songs that I'd like to try and record.If I can find the budget for it I'll perhaps come to Nashville and do some work there as well on some of it. Trying to make a record nowadays days when there's no sales base and there's no advances and there's no way to finance it, it becomes really quite a struggle when you don't have a budget. People are re-mortgaging their houses in order to make records and it doesn't make sense really.

RQ: But it sounds as if you're making an album that might be even more stripped down in sound?

DK: Well exactly. I think that that's the way to go. I think I'm going to go down to three mikes and two guitars.

RQ: But you know some artists actually fear that. Some artists would fear being exposed so much.

DK: Sure, it’s harder. The smaller the gig, the harder it gets. There's less work with a band. I toured recently with a very big band, like a twelve or fourteen piece band, and I was just a bit part extra in the big cogs, you know. I had a couple of songs of my own. It was kind of like one of these all star festival bands in Europe, the big double drum kit and all that nonsense.  Lots of pomp and circumstance.You can stop playing in a band like that and no body will notice. It isn't going to matter. There was a strange augmented chord and I turned to the arranger and said “what chord's that?” And he said “I haven't a clue. Just find the note that fits and play it.” I turned to the Hammond player, Tony and said, "What are you doing?” He said “that’s exactly what I'm doing.”

I asked three different musicians.  We can’t hit they chord and I played one note of the chord and it was fine.  The thing was so big and so thick.  One musician it’s hard to hear.  When it’s just you and its sort of you and your guitar up on the stage or you and your piano you’ve got nowhere to fall.  You’re on the tight rope and there’s no safety net.  So yeah, you need to be a lot braver to make records that way and to play live that way. There’s not many people that can carry it off.  I love going to see someone like Randy Newman just play on his own with just his piano.  Because his songs are so damn good.  Every Randy Newman song is good. There are almost no bad…his hit ratio of getting it right when he writes his own is so high.  Then you take the cream of that to a live gig and he’s got so much personality anyway, some kind of genius really I think.  It’s just very easy to enjoy something like that.  You don’t need the orchestration.  If you go back to his records and listen to something like Louisiana that has the big lush strings on it, it’s wonderful to hear.  You don’t have to have it, because the songs can carry it without it.

RQ:  Let me ask you what it was like working with Chris Rea.  I interviewed him a couple of years ago a lovely guy who’s been on a very interesting journey of himself more recently.  What was it like working with him?

DK:  It was easy.  Chris is just a very nice a very generous guy who has always been kind of batting for me.  We shared a drummer in common with Martin Ditchum.  I knew through Martin that Chris had offered his services anytime and when I wanted him to come play guitar on my record I only had to say the words. So I did say the words and he came through for me.  We really enjoyed what he did as well.  A Good guy. On the next record his manager actually wasn’t terribly keen on him doing it.  But Chris sort of buttoned him to the wall and said “well I’m doing it anyway!”  He’s worked on two of our records now.  Great guy, Chris.

RQ:  Well, final question.  What would you say was the best piece of advice you were ever given?

DK:  Gosh, so many good pieces of advice.  “Say nothing and keep on doing it” is a pretty good piece.  “Look after the money,” someone once said that to me. There have been lots of people who’ve given me good advice although I haven’t always taken it.  I don’t know that I could come out with just one phrase.

RQ:  Overall though, you’re pretty happy with the way you are?

DK:  Overall, I’d like to be making tons more money and be able to be just as creative.  You can’t have your cake and eat it.  You make your bed and you lie on it.  I’m exactly where I’ve chosen to be.  I’m not bitching about anything.  It’s just is how it is.  I mean it would be nice if Clear Channel was full of progressive liberal thinking people who are really into the music.  It would be nice if we had a President who played the saxophone, but it isn’t the way the world works.

RQ:  It will never happen.

DK:  Well, it happened once, but you know lightening isn’t likely to strike twice.

Links:

http://www.knopfler.com