The song that pushed Mark Knopfler to the edge: “Sweat would be stinging your eyes”
Why do I love music? A question that was emphatically answered at a recent gig. See, I am neurologically wired to be a bit of a clean freak. In fact, it can be quite debilitating, preventing me from relaxing or embracing any sense of messy spontaneity. But I was in the depths of a mosh pit recently, sweating profusely and ruining every fibre of the clothes I was wearing, I realised that live music allowed me to feel free.
In the modern world, it’s perhaps the only place that allows me to wholeheartedly embrace that feeling. Aside from my own complexities, where else in the world do strangers, who are sweaty, embrace one another like that? Only in the depths of an enthusiastic music crowd can the traditional constructs of social norms fall away.
Music is the great uniter, and while the artists we love may stand high above us, on top of a stage, they are usually just like us, giving everything they’ve got to the performance of their music and dripping in sweat in the process.
Because music performance is brutally physical, especially when you’re Mark Knopfler. The Dire Straits axeman was responsible for playing some of the most intimidating solos in music. And while ‘Sultans of Swing’ and ‘Money For Nothing’ required maximum concentration, it was another song that made him particularly nervous.
“Playing the beginning of ‘Telegraph Road’ always seems hard when you’re going from a spiffy electric to that old war horse,” he said. “You’ve just got to brace your hands for an old guitar from the 1930s. So that’s all part of the challenge of that song, when the guitar itself doesn’t want to play pretty.”
But it wasn’t just the old dusty guitar that made it challenging; it was the more elaborate production that came with the band’s growing popularity. And so if Knopfler wasn’t already sweating at the prospect of playing ‘Telegraph Road’, then the roadies would get involved.
“The old lights generated so much heat. We were always drenched when we came off-stage, literally soaked to the skin,” he continued. “Sweat would be stinging your eyes, so you learn to play with your eyes squeezed shut. I’m pretty sure I played a lot of that stuff without looking. That’s all part of the fun of it: figuring out ways around things. I remember someone putting a little note up at the front row that said, ‘More liquid gumption, please’. I was spraying the audience with so much sweat that it was stinging them. I always used to think, Only rock and roll could do this.”
All of these challenges made Knopfler a master guitarist. But while the drips of sweat that rained on the crowd were indeed a product of rock and roll, he didn’t quite extend to the lengths of, say, an Iggy Pop or Flea and start disrobing on stage. Nevertheless, Knopfler’s fans were there to see a technician at work, and so luckily, added rock and roll thrills weren’t, in fact, needed.
