"No." "It's a good sound." "Maybe I'II stick it back." "But the thing is I never had..." "I never really had an acoustic guitar all the time." "Cos the..." "Like, cos the..." "This..." "A copy of one of these was the first one and it didn't have an amplifier, you know!" "So there..." "I'm playing..." "I'm playing one of these like this at home." "Doing, sort of, you know..." "Trying to Iearn how to play and..." "I didn't have an amp." "It was the sort of thing like," ""Dad, what have you bought me one of these for?"" "This is what I really wanted." "But now you need an amplifier." "I used to use the radio and just wreck the radio set and, you know..." "You used to borrow amps and you used to play with your mates." "Same as thousands of other kids." "Just the same." "Just bands." "Hey!" " Hi!" " Hey!" "How are you?" "AII right!" "It's gonna be a silly one tonight." "Thank you!" "AII kinds of nonsense happening." "This..." "We wanna get some new songs in too, if we can, and some stuff and we'd Iike to see you jumping about a bit." "You just wanna hear some songs!" "You just wanna hear something." "You just call 'em, you know?" "." "You call 'em!" "We'II try and play 'em!" "AII right, I get it." "No." "I had it the other way round." "In fact, you might be better just playing..." "Let it..." "let it go." "Let it come around." "We'II just do it, the three of us, and then you come in." "I'II show you what I mean." " It needs to roll." " I wouldn't, I wouldn't..." "I suppose it was something I'd always wanted to do." "I fell into it backwards, really." "Mark and I played together late at night, usually after the pubs closed, with acoustic guitars." "Just not necessarily playing a song." "Just playing for the note and the sound, rather than putting on records and talking." "So we had this very quiet thing going." "And then John and I found that we could play together when I moved in with John." "We found that there was some natural dynamic there." "In terms of the personalities," "John and I seemed to match quite well." "That was how the three of us got together." "Mark came down to the flat in Deptford where John and I were living." "And Mark had worked on a previous session with Pick and brought Pick in and that worked really well." "It was really exciting when we got a drummer." "Let's..." " Let's do it later." " I just don't wanna forget that..." "I remember many, many years ago, when I was probably about six or seven, that on the first Sunday of every month there would be this marching band from the Boys' Brigade playing with the drums, big bass drums," "and the bugle was at the back." "AII the young fraternity of the street, would turn out and mimic the band as they were marching along on the pavement." "I think this is probably initially where the seed was fermented." "And I knew somehow I always wanted to play in that band." "For some reason, I wanted to get that drum." "I had to go through a Iot of red tape." "You had to be in the Boys' Brigade company for a year before you were eligible to be in the band." "Then they had it really sussed because after a year everybody put their applications in to be a drummer." "They had far too many drummers." "You had to play the bugle for a year." "So I did that, you know, and all that bit." "My great piece was playing the Last Post at the camp." "You get this fart coming at haIf-past ten!" "And I did that a year and then I was eligible to play the drums." "I had to wait for a vacancy and I finally got this drum." "I used to drive my parents mad." "I mean, it was really funny because you'd always get a good solo drummer that would lead the band." "They had these drum solos to give the buglers a rest cos they were blowing their guts out." "You always get this pristine clear rendition from a drummer where you go..." "And you go through a little routine." "End off with a roll." "The whole ensemble would come on and it wouId have gone..." "I was one of those in the mêIêe." "You know, Iike, "Way!"" "That, and then the B. Then it's a middle eight there." " It's a bit like you're doing..." " Oh, sorry, yes." "Yeah, that's right." "Two of those." "For some strange reason," "I asked my mother and father for a guitar when I was five and...they didn't know why I'd asked for one and I didn't really know why I'd asked for one." "This appeared in my Christmas stocking." "It wasn't in the stocking." "It was under the cushion on the chair." "Cos we all had a chair each when we were kids." "It was an elvis..." "Not an elvis presley thing." "It was plastic, white plastic, with red strings on it." "It was terrible." "You couldn't tune it at all." "I bashed the hell out of it and smashed it in about three weeks!" "AII right, folks, well, this is a..." "It's a couple of pieces of wood with some pickups on it." "It's a Fender Stratocaster and..." "It's..." "The whole thing about a red Fender Strat is that it's a kind of a joke." "I mean, it's such a ridiculous object looked at in a certain way." "It was designed in about, I think it was 1954." "And it's the sort of thing that that me and my mates used to dream about." "And it was, you know..." "I mean, it's like the ultimate..." "Then it was like the ultimate sort of, I don't know," "california hot-rod machine, you know." "It didn't look hardly like a musical instrument at all." "I mean, the first...guitar that I got..." "I used to...eat the catalogues." "It was one of those "Dad!" "Dad!" things!" " "Any chance?" - "No." "No, son!"" "So the first guitar that I got was a copy of one of these." "A red one." "It had to be a red one." "It's a joke!" "It's the sort of thing, if you're a rock and roll star, and really into being a rock and roll star, it's the kind of guitar that you'd play cos it's so extreme." " You after the solo?" " What's the matter?" "OK." " You doing it the same time?" " Yeah" " Same sound?" " Yeah." "shall we do the guitar on "solid Rock"?" "We can always do this." "It's probably a better usage of time." "Yeah, don't keep anything from the fact you don't..." "I don't think there's a Iot there." "OK, we'II play "solid Rock" now." "I don't hear the guitar, really, and yet down on the floor, I'm playing it." "And I shouldn't be..." "I shouldn't be in!" "It sounds really bad to me." "Very slight." "And when there's..." " And when the solo is..." " OK, chaps, carry on." "There we go." "Leave the solo things." "It's maybe too..." "It's maybe just not..." "Everything that's happened in the Iast two years has just seemed like going from one step to another and hasn't..." "I've never felt that it could have happened any other way." "When you get down to the statistics, when you get down to the numbers that you're talking about, yes, it's a bit surprising." "You look at a sheet of paper and you read all this stuff off and it's quite...well, it's quite staggering, I suppose." "It's nice." "Can you giive me some examples?" "well, the combined sales of the two albums are, to date, about 6.5 million." "On top of that, we've sold about two-miIIion singles worldwide." "The first LP is the biggest-seIIing debut album by a British band since Led zeppelin, as far as we can tell." "I mean, they've gone from playing to 300 people or less, at somewhere like the Hope and Anchor, to playing to headline shows to 60,000 people within 18 months." "obviously, the income that all this is generating is quite substantial as well." "Makes your eyes water and your hands sweat!" "The idea never was to do it to make $1 million." "It never was that in the first place." "It might be a part of it from when you're a little kid, wondering what it's like to actually be in that situation." "And I'm sure that..." "people who read their daily paper and stuff, a Iot of people have an idea of what it must be like." "I remember..." "They have their own ideas of what it is like but they have ideas that are given to them of what it's like." "AII the things people read about and I read about as a kid, all the things you read in the music papers about what happens to people, you somehow think that you're immune from that." "You assume that because you start from a different place that you won't find yourself going in that direction." "And it doesn't seem to be the case." "I remember John Lennon or somebody saying," ""To a Iot of people, we're the boys who won the pools and met the Queen."" "Now I'm sure that a Iot of people don't see it like that but, again, I'm sure that a Iot of people do see it like that." "You start out with one idea and lose sight of it as the pressures just lead you along that path towards the same old bullshit that every other band's been through." "Here we have a small selection, and I stress a small selection, of some of the awards that the band has received over the Iast couple of years." "I'II just pick out a few of them." "This is the first gold album we ever received from holland, which was a total surprise and which has a market value of about 25p!" "This is the platinum record for the first LP in Germany, which is only the fourth ever awarded in that country." "These two here are the platinum and the gold for the first LP in America." "Here we have two interesting items." "This is your first ever assembIe-your-own gold disc, which came in a kit form from New zealand!" "And this one is the silliest award we've ever had." "It's for the Number One Disco Band, 1979, from France's top radio station, Europe 1 ." "And this is for numerous disco versions of "SuItans of Swing," "Water Of Love"" "and "Where Do You Think You're Going?" etc, which we didn't record but we got the award anyway!" " What's the matter?" " I went, "Oh!"" "So let's try a stop play one." " Are you putting a C in there now?" "." " No." "I'm trying to get that more..." "It should be there!" "You always have an idea of what it'd be like to have your own place and this is the first house I've ever bought." "Before that it was always just odd flats or wherever." "especially, with the band situation." "It always comes back to the band situation, of...being..." "I've said it before and I'II say it again." "300 shows in two years means 300 hotels." "It puts such incredible pressure on you, that sort of work." "Pick described it to me like an obstacle course the other day, which, I suppose, really sums it up." "You're a bit crazy for a while." "One minute you're in America, the next minute, Germany." "Then you're making an album and then you're making some more music somewhere else." "You never have time to actually stop and think about very much at all." "So for two years we've been in turmoil, just working wherever we can, as hard as we can." "And we've just decided now that that's..." "We've just got to come back and look at what we've been doing for the Iast two years because the whole nature of the band and the way we play music together has changed." "We were totally unprepared for what was gonna happen." "We had no way of anticipating the events that were gonna take place." "That's what I tried to explain to you earlier about the idea that we just got together to play and then, suddenly, voom, all this happened." "There wasn't the anticipation at all." "We were swamped by this mountain of experience without any pause to reflect or assimilate any of it." "There's been far too much experience and far too little reflection." "With that date at the playhouse in Edinburgh, we'd Iike to take the 1st." "They want to take the 1st, yeah." "No extra dates can be added at all." "Tim, look, we've had this discussion innumerable times." "There are no extra dates possible." "We should be thankful for what we have." "What you're capturing is...everybody off work recovering from just about the most gruelling two years that any of us have ever experienced." "In a sense, what happens is that you get sucked into a kind of vortex of that kind of thing." "And it's not an inevitable process but it's a very difficult process to resist because there are all sorts of functions that you have to attend." "There are meetings that you have to go to." "There's saying hello to publishing companies, saying hello to record companies, saying hello to journalists, saying hello to Arena, and so on." "And that process can be very alienating because your natural contacts with people become distorted by it and you lose touch with the friends that you had." "I mean, I've lost touch with probably 90%%% of the friends that I knew before the band started." "And that's really bad." "I have a certain perception of what I think is good for their career." "They might have a different perception of that or a different perception of how it could be done or achieved." "Now I happen to think that you have to, at Ieast in the initial period of a group's career, you have to have a certain profile." "You have to be there, be prepared to do interviews, to play to people who have bought your records, to do TV, etc, etc." "If all that works successfully, you should be able to put yourself on a plateau where it becomes less necessary." "There are many, many superstar acts, of which Pink floyd is an example I can immediately think of, who don't tour very much and it doesn't affect their record sales." "But they've been going for ten years." "We've been going, really actively, for 18 months in the public eye." "I'm not satisfied that they've done enough yet to put them on the level where they can ease off." "But I've held back." "I would have pushed them harder." "Last one." "I mean, I think I've tried to protect myself...unsuccessfully by saying, "Oh, it's just a bunch of songs." ""I don't know..." "I don't know where they come from."" "You know, all that stuff." "But, I mean, again, that's understandable when you've been suddenly pushed into an arena." "You feel almost as though you're fighting a small war on the other side of the world somewhere." "And you don't necessarily want to be exposed." "But, in fact, that kind of protection doesn't work." "I think..." "People are inevitable gonna read into the songs about you." "Yeah, and then they're gonna read the wrong things, if you try and cover up like that." "This is the kind of nonsense..." "This is the way some people earn their living, right?" "It's..."Sucker for Punishment."" "It's, "I see you in the alley I see you in the hall" ""rolling back like a bowling ball" ""So I pick you up Throw you on the floor" ""And all you say is 'Give me some more'" ""Your eyes are black Your nose is bent" ""Have you been in an accident?" ""You've gotta be a sucker for punishment" ""That's what you are" ""You like it ready You like it rough" ""You're one of those people that can never get enough" ""You're all punched in You're all punched out" ""You're the one they're laughing about" ""You're just an embarrassment You must know it's time you went" ""You've gotta be a sucker for punishment" ""That's what you are" ""I wouldn't call you fancy-free I wouldn't call you frigid" ""It wouldn't be so bad for me if you didn't bore me rigid" ""So on you walk in the name of love" ""Straight into my boxing glove?" ""You ring me up and I say, 'Hi' You bring me down, I say, 'Goodbye'" ""Now I'm not too intelligent but it's you that I resent" ""Cos you're just a sucker for punishment" ""That's what you are"" "So...it's just complete rubbish!" "Super!" "Same again?" "But is it super?" "Oh, it's super!" "Super!" "A while ago I wrote this thing and I didn't really understand why I was writing it, which was a song called "Making Movies."" "The song, "Making Movies,"" "is really something to do with the process." "And, I think, the idea was triggered off a while ago when a girl in Deptford said something like," ""Sometimes I feel I'm in a movie."" "And I'd..." "And it triggered off a whole thing about putting certain other things right into context." "So I wrote down these words." "I'm in the process of putting it together which is like..." "That's kind of the way I'm playing these days, on the Iower-string side, a robotic sort of feeling." "What about this?" "That's before." "Then I go..." ""By the pool" comes in then." "Take one!" "By the pool." "Take one." "If you can get used to just coming in on that "Whoa, yeah" at the end of there." "After your E and your F and your C and your D, which is..." "You've got a nice high one." "actually, the verse after that would be..." "We're stopping a hell of a Iot of times." "No, it's only the stop there." "There's one stop there." "Before we worry about that bit, can we go right back to the start?" " Oh, yes." "OK." " Cos I haven't got a clue where..." " It starts with a chorus, does it?" " What?" " It starts with that chorus thing." " Yeah." "Yeah." "No, keep going!" "Take one!" "I'd have thought that two brothers to both be playing the guitar is..." "It's the classical brother situation, for sure." "We're still coming to terms with that now." "I think two years on the road has been very hard for both of us and for everybody else that's been in the firing line of it too." "Pick, John, girlfriends, Ed - our manager - the whole thing," "paul - our tour manager - road crew, everybody." "It's had a spin-off effect all around." "But it's for Mark and I to sort out." "Sorry." "And then he'II come..." "And then you can come in." "What's that line?" ""Case of the right place, wrong time."" "You write the songs, you're the lead singer." "In a sense, you're the lead performer on the stage." "You're the front man for the band." "To what extent is Di're Straits a support band for you, Mark Knopfler?" "To no extent." "I think without..." "without the group..." "I mean, the whole point is it's the band." "collectively we do..." "collectively...you get all the right kind of elements in to make an attempt at a whole." "And that's all that a band is." "At the root of it, there's the rock and roll you're playing." "That's what you're there for." "Take one." "My plans are to continue the escalation of their career, which is very much locked up with the next LP because the first one came out of the gun like a bullet." "The second one...in a way, I suppose, you could say got its impetus from the first one." "Now it's questionable as to whether the fans that they've acquired on the first two records will carry on and stick with them through a third LP and beyond that, if their musical direction changes, which I think it will and, in fact, which I hope it will." "I'd Iike to think that we were planning to be around for a while." "I mean...it's too compulsive." "You just like it." "You just like rock and roll." "And..." "That's...that's what you do." "That's what you do." "This was the Iast time David KnopfIer played publicly with Dire Straits." "During recording sessions for the third album, he left the band to follow a solo career as a record producer." "I certainly wouldn't be prepared to go back into that lifestyle again and not let the pressures that occurred on the first two albums occur with the third one." "Not allow the touring schedules." "300 gigs since the band started has just been impossible." "I don't think we're equipped for it." "Our music will suffer if we don't do something about that and we'II suffer."