Mark Knopfler: "My time in Ireland is associated with nothing but joy"

He’s won multiple BRIT, Grammy and Ivor Novello awards, been to the palace to receive and OBE from the Queen and collaborated with the heavyweight likes of Dylan, Van Morrison and Tina Turner, but the best moment of Mark Knopfler’s life might just have been last Saturday when he trod the hallowed St. James’ Park turf ahead of Newcastle United’s game against Wolves.

“I did a very enjoyable Q+A session beforehand with Alan Shearer in charge – he was ever so kind and ever so nice – and then Newcastle won 3-0, so it was a wonderful day altogether,” Mark beams. “He could have chopped me up if he’d wanted to but didn’t! We had a really good time. Then, to hear the fans reacting the way that they did – it’ll stay with me forever.”

The reason for Mark getting the VVIP treatment was the first public airing of a new version of ‘Going Home’, the instrumental he wrote in 1983 for Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero film and which quickly became the music his beloved Toon walk out to.

‘Going Home’ 2.0 features over sixty – yep, you read that right – of Mark’s guitar heroes with all proceeds going to the Teenage Cancer Trust.

“You don’t know how insane it got!” he resumes. “Guy Fletcher, who did a lot of the putting it together, now knows what it is to sleep under a recording console. It’s warmer down there on a cold night and he loves editing.

“Anyway, I said to Guy, ‘How long is this thing going to be?’ and he was like, ‘Very!’ As well as coming into the studio for sessions, people were sending things via-the internet, so we had all this good stuff that needed adding.”

As star-studded as those Band Aid and U.S.A. For Africa sessions were, they’ve nothing on the A-List cast that Mark and Guy assembled.

“I’d come in to the studio to find that Bruce Springsteen or Hank Marvin or Joe Bonamassa had sent in beautiful sections,” Knopfler marvels. “It started with Pete Townshend coming in with a guitar and an amp and just going to town on it. That first Pete power chord… wow! That was really symbolic given The Who’s association with the Teenage Cancer Trust and all the work Roger Daltrey does for it.

“A few days later Eric Clapton was in playing one tasty lick after another followed by David Gilmour. This thing was getting longer and longer, which is why we had to do a five-minute edit for the radio and the much longer one that seems to go on forever.”

Credit: Murdo MacLeod

Poignantly, it also features Jeff Beck’s very last recorded performance.

“When I heard Jeff on the beginning, it was so emotional,” Mark reflects. “Beautiful, beautiful playing from a beautiful, beautiful man. He was just something ‘other’ as a guitarist. Jeff was in a place of his own.”

I can never refer to Beck or Bowie or any of the other legends in the past tense.

“You’re so right, you’re so right,” Knopfler agrees. “The thing about being a musician is that your work lives on.”

Taking part in last year’s Nothing Compares St. Brigid’s Day event in Kildare, Imelda May spoke very touchingly about being at Jeff Beck’s bedside when he succumbed to bacterial meningitis.

“She’s wonderful too,” Mark offers. “Imelda did some great stuff for me in the studio, oh my god. Say ‘hello’ to her from me when you see her.”

Will do. With Joan Armatrading, Sheryl Crow, Ron Wood, Joan Jett, Brian May, Nile Rodgers, Sting, Tony Iommi, Joe Walsh, Buddy Guy, Slash and Peter Frampton also doing their respective six-string things on it, Ringo Starr adding drums and Peter Blake coming up with a cover collage to rival his Sgt. Pepper’s one, the new ‘Going Home’, on vinyl especially, is a thing of true beauty.

The city of Newcastle is also the inspiration for ‘One Deep River’, the title-track from Mark Knopfler’s tenth studio album, which like the ‘Going Home’ reboot was recorded in Mark’s own British Grove Studios in West London.

“In many ways, crossing the river Tyne becomes a mythical thing – a little mini Tyne bridge would be a good badge for me if I had to have one,” he proffers. “I’ve talked about this quite a lot with Brian Johnson; you feel great coming back every time but you have to get away again, especially if you want to make it. After leaving Newcastle in the ‘70s, I started having a romance with London, of course, because it’s so connected with music and everything else. That’s where you’d go to find a band that would maybe give you a shot at a career and all of that. It’s the same in America – kids would leave their small towns and try and make a life in New York or Los Angeles or Nashville. No matter how far you roam, though, home will always be home.”

Hitting smallish screens on April 25 is Johnson And Knopfler’s Music Legends, a Sky Arts six-parter featuring once-in-a lifetime jam sessions with Tom Jones, Cyndi Lauper, Nile Rodgers, Carlos Santana, Emmylou Harris and Mark’s fellow Geordie, Sam Fender.

“We’ve had a good time with our guests and I dare say, our guests had an unexpectedly good time too,” Mark enthuses. “ We went to some great recording studios like the Power Station in New York. It was wonderful to walk back in there; that’s where we went to make records, that’s where I met Bruce Springsteen. And that’s where Bob Dylan came to say ‘hello’ again, and we started talking about doing another record at the studio. So, it’s come up and down in my life a little bit, the Power Station – it’s great to know it’s still there.

The theme of having to leave to pursue your dreams extends to another of One Deep River’s standouts, ‘Ahead Of The Game’.

“In some way, I was thinking about Nashville, because when I first went out there, it must have been in the early ‘80s and all the bands in the bars downtown were playing the hits – and that’s fine,” Mark says of the song. “What I was trying to say is that’s an achievement to actually get to a place where you’ve got employment, and you’ve got yourself a gig. I mean, statistically, what are the odds of making it? If you stopped to think about that, you’d hardly take a step further, would you?”

Despite his six decades of stardom, album opener ‘Two Pairs Of Hands’ finds Knopfler still wrestling with this rock star malarkey.

“It’s trying to explain what it’s like coping with all of the info and collating everything when you’re standing in the middle of the stage with a huge band,” Mark explains. “You’ve got a big audience around you and you’re just trying to process all of this stuff at the same time.”

Thursday July 28th, 1977. That was my last time being in the same room as Mark Knopfler. Him and Dire Straits, the band he went on to sell over a hundred million records with, were opening for Squeeze in the Albany Empire, a ramshackle venue in the equally ramshackle London borough of Deptford.

“Only a few weeks ago I played on a song for Squeeze’s Chris Difford called, funnily enough, ‘Deptford’,” Mark shoots back. “He probably doesn’t want you to know that! I never thought it would happen but, along with Walthamstow and Peckham, it’s become somewhat gentrified compared to when you and me were running around it.”

While definitely not of the punk persuasion themselves, Knopfler and Difford’s respective mobs gleefully followed the Pistols and the Clash through the door they’d blasted open.

“I went to a party a year or two ago and the band playing were The Blockheads – what a rave up that was! – who did a similar thing to us and Squeeze with Ian Dury. I asked their terrific drummer, John Roberts, if he’d come up to Newcastle and do a charity thing with me which he very kindly did. Those ‘70s London clubs were a mixed bag, I’m telling you, but some amazing people emerged out of them.”

Deptford, along with lots of the other places Dire Straits went on to play, was also namechecked on Mark’s 2018 track, ‘One Song At A Time’. The title coming from something the legendary Chet Atkins once said to him. What was it like to be in his orbit?

“He just called me up on the phone and said in that Tennessee drawl of his, ‘Hey Mark, this is Chet Atkins, do you want to be on this record I’m making?’” Knopfler reminisces fondly. “So, I got the next flight out and we became friends. He told me how, as a child, he didn’t have a winter coat to go to school in because they were so poor. It was music, he said, that allowed him to pick his way out of poverty ‘one song at a time’ and that struck a chord with me – as did him saying, ‘Let me tell you, a guitar can be a friend for all of your life!’”

Mark Knopfler’s Irish connections aren’t confined to Imelda May. Has he run into Van or Paul Brady recently?

“Yeah, every now and again I exchange emails with Paul who I owe for introducing me to the serious heavyweights of Irish music back when I was doing my Golden Heart record. He connected me up with some wonderful musicians who became good friends. I also had the privilege of playing with The Chieftains, so that was a very productive period which enabled me to increase my vocabulary a bit. My time in Ireland is associated with nothing but joy, really.”

• One Deep River is out now. Johnson And Knopfler’s Music Legends is also available now on Sky Arts.