The guitar lick Mark Knopfler needed to be perfect: “Those four notes”
While rock and roll hasn’t always been a style of music that is reliant on the utmost precision, often favouring feeling over flair, guitarists like Mark Knopfler will undoubtedly make you question whether a lead part would sound better if played perfectly every time.
Of course, this approach leaves little room for improvisation, and that can also be a vital part of any musician’s creative freedom and expression. If you’re listening to a guitarist and it seems as though they’re playing it safe and completely by the book, it’s going to become a little tedious for the listener after a while, with there being a distinct lack of excitement.
But, if there’s a part that’s been written a certain way and becomes ingrained in the listener’s mind, then there’s absolutely no need to go off piste and try to invent new elements of it. For example, ‘Smoke On the Water’, perhaps the most instantly recognisable guitar lick of all time, given how it is so frequently used as an introductory song for beginner guitarists, leaves no space for improvisation because of how immediately the listener is able to identify it in its original form.
In the case of Knopfler, and especially in his work with Dire Straits, some of the parts that he plays are so iconic that improvising a lead line that doesn’t match the original recording is going to sound off. The lead break in ‘Sultans of Swing’, for example, could reasonably be changed in places, but the lick in the chorus isn’t going to sound tame if tampered with.
However, there’s one particular song from their catalogue that stands out above all of the others for how instantly recognisable it is, and playing it any other way is either going to make it sound inaccurate or even alienate fans who are desperate to hear it as it is meant to be.
The band’s fifth studio album, 1985’s Brothers in Arms, is frequently regarded as one of the most perfect and precise rock albums of the era, and its title track is not just beloved by all fans of the band but by rock fans worldwide for how inimitable the guitar part is. It’s for this reason that Knopfler is loath to change it when he plays it live.
During a 2025 interview with Guitar World, Knopfler acknowledged how little he’s able to change the famous lead-in of the song. “If you think about the first four notes I play on guitar – I’ve tried doing other intros live, and they just don’t work,” he stated.
“People have bought tickets, and you can see them thinking, ‘That’s not ‘Brothers in Arms,’’ he continued, before caveating his statement. “That’s not to say you have to play the guitar part the same way every time. Once I’ve played those four notes, then I can start to improvise.”
Knopfler may have found a way to inject a bit of personality and variation into the song when he plays it now, but as long as he doesn’t change those four notes that make it such an instantly recognisable opening, then whatever he does should be enough to please crowds.
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