The story behind Mark Knopfler’s first ever guitar
As with any legendary rock guitarist, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits drew inspiration from a vast acreage of the musical map. His style was most heavily influenced by rhythm and blues music of the 1950s and ‘60s. Knopfler was born in Glasgow, Scotland, but his family moved to Blyth, England, when he was just seven years old. In the 1950s, Knopfler listened to Elvis Presley and became enamoured with guitarists like Chet Atkins and B.B. King.
Knopfler came from a musical background and was always impressed with his uncle Kingsley’s harmonica and boogie-woogie piano playing. While he was intrigued by numerous styles and instruments, it was the electric guitar blues that really tickled his fancy.
Perhaps the guitarist that Knopfler idolised the most throughout his teen years was Hank Marvin from The Shadows. As an impressionable youngster, Knopfler saw Marvin’s bright red Fender Stratocaster and set every ounce of his being towards acquiring the very same model for his first guitar.
During a performance at London’s Wembley Arena in 1985, Knopfler invited Marvin to share the stage with him. As he announced his special guest, he explained that, as a young teenager, he used to nag his father incessantly for a Fiesta Red Fender Stratocaster.
“All I wanted was a red electric guitar, and the only reason I wanted a red electric guitar was because of the sound made by one of my all-time favourite guitar players,” Knopfler said on stage. “And I still wish I could get a guitar to sound the way he gets it to sound. And he actually recorded this tune, so he knows it. So here he is, one of the all-time favourites, the man himself, Hank B. Marvin!” The pair then played Knopfler’s ‘Going Home’.
In 1985, Knopfler explained that his father wasn’t particularly well off, and so, managing expectations, he begged his father to buy him a twin-pick-up Höfner Super Solid for £50. “I remember standing outside music stores with my nose pressed up against the glass, just staring at those electric guitars,” he told People Magazine. “I used to smell Fender catalogues, I wanted one so bad.”
Fortunately, Knopfler’s father granted the wish, but before watching his son rise to superstardom with Dire Straits, he would have to endure a broken radio first.
“This is the one poor old dad got me when I was 15,” Knopfler remembered in Guitar Stories: Mark Knopfler while handling his first guitar. “It was as close as he could get to a real Fender Stratocaster. It’s called a Höfner Super Solid (…) I absolutely love this, even though, of course, it wasn’t the real objective desire.”
After managing to get his father to shell out £50 for the guitar, Knopfler realised it would be a tall order to ask for an amplifier. “I didn’t have the nerve to ask poor old dad for an amp,” Knopfler continued. “I blew up the family radio in fairly short order. You get a little coaxial and a red and a black and stick it in the back of the radio so you could have one and a half watts of pulsating power, you know?”
“I remember not wanting to let go of it the day I got it,” he added. “So, it’s possible I slept with it… It was certainly by my side.”
Later in Guitar Stories: Mark Knopfler, he talks Dire Straits co-founder John Illsley through some of the other guitars that shaped his life and career. Watch the full documentary episode below.
