Bjørn L. Drengsgaard ● Görgengasse 23/8/6, 1190 Wien, AT ● Phone: +43 677 61915756 ● Email:
[email protected] The guitar guru By Bjørn L. Drengsgaard Many consider him one of the greatest guitar slingers in the world. Others think that his songs are best used as sleeping pills. The British musician Mark Knopfler has a tendency to make people dis- agree. He has done that ever since he entered the international music scene with a red Fender guitar around his neck more than 25 years ago and started creating a name for himself. What Knopfler’s fans especially admire him for is his elegant fingerpicking technique and his melancholy, personal songs that he sings with his subdued, hoarse voice. In the general public he is probably most well-known as the frontman of Dire Straits, one of the world's biggest rock groups up through the 1980s. Mark Knopfler was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1949. Later, the family moved to northern England, where Knopfler studied to become a journalist and later an English teacher. Although he did use both his educations professionally, the guitar appealed more to the young Knopfler. As a teenager, he fell in love with the instrument and managed to save up £50 for his first electric guitar. From the mid-1960s he played in various local groups in Leeds, and in 1973 he went to London to try his luck as a rock musician. Here his guitar was heard in various contexts, but without great success. In 1977 he moved into a flat with his brother David, who also played guitar, and the bassist John Illsley.