Mark Knopfler: A Life in Songs Page #2

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in Vanderbilt in Nashville.

And the Evs came along,

and it's a real thrill to be playing your song with the Evs.

# Why worry?

# There should be laughter after pain

# There should be sunshine after rain

# These things have always been the same

# So why worry now? #

By the age of 16, while patiently waiting to go electric,

Knopfler could be found finger-picking his way

around the folk clubs of Newcastle.

Doing things like,

# I'm going down that road and I'm feelin' bad, baby

# Going down that road and I'm feelin' bad

# Ain't gonna be treated this way

# These two darn shoes kill my feet, baby

# Daughter's shoes is killing my feet

# Ain't gonna be treated this way. #

So this kind of duality going on

where I'd be playing in folk places at the age of 16

and wanting to play electric music as well.

For a kid growing up in Newcastle in the '60s,

no music was more electrifying than that of the blues.

One bluesman in particular, BB King,

would create a lasting impression on the young Mark Knopfler.

He had a record called Live at the Regal

and that was really, really important for me.

It was a very definite thing happening.

This relationship between the voice, the guitar and the audience

that I'd never heard before and made a big impression on me.

# The way I used to love you, baby

# Baby, that's the way I hate you now. #

And then Bob Dylan, of course, changed it all for me.

As far as realising that you could write about anything.

# Oh, my name, it ain't nothing.

# My age, it means less.

# The country I come from is called the mid-west

# I was taught and brought up there The laws to abide.

# And the land that I lived in has God on its side. #

Obviously, your childhood influences, they all help, but what they all did,

they all made a song person and not an instrumental type person.

They made me much more of a song person.

Not somebody who wanted to play in an orchestra.

# Southbound again

# Don't know if I'm going or leaving home. #

After finishing school at 18,

Knopfler left home and journeyed south to Essex to train as a journalist,

only to return north a year later

when he was offered a job in Leeds as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Musically, I was slowly starting to put together a couple of songs.

But the journalism was a really great thing for a kid to do,

because it toughened me up and it meant that you had to get yourself organised half way.

Not that I ever really did.

In fact, I don't know whether I was tough enough to be a newspaper man.

I didn't have the printer's ink running in my veins and I think it has to.

During the six years Knopfler spent in Leeds, he continued to play music in various line ups.

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