The Notting Hillbillies: The roots group that re-connected Mark Knopfler with his own roots
Mark Knopfler was a profoundly busy man in the late 1980s and wasn’t actively looking for any new gigs.
Even with Dire Straits on hiatus after 1985’s titanically successful Brothers In Arms album, the frontman had booked himself into tours with Eric Clapton, record producing responsibilities with Randy Newman, and film scoring duties on Uli Edel’s Last Exit to Brooklyn.
In the middle of that activity, however, Knopfler did agree to lend a hand to an old friend from his university days in Leeds. Steve Phillips, a country blues guitarist whom he had first met and collaborated with way back in 1968, was interested in recording a new record, and Mark said he’d produce it, and as work on that project unfolded in 1989, another of the duo’s old guitar-playing chums, Brendan Croker, stopped by.
“Then it became Steve and Brendan,” Knopfler told the Associated Press a few months later, “I started making suggestions, throwing in songs. We realised we had lots of gems from the past we wanted to give an airing to. I started to play.”
Once Knopfler’s Dire Straits cohort Guy Fletcher joined the festivities, the new quartet “really became a band by accident”, and thus the Notting Hillbillies were born: a bluegrass country Americana band featuring four British blokes and named after the section of London (Notting Hill) in which Knopfler and his wife lived. Despite the name, the Notting Hillbillies were really a continuation and celebration of the music Knopfler had first started playing as a student at the University of Leeds in the early 1970s, when he used to book pub gigs with Phillips as a guitar duo known as the Duolian String Pickers.
“We played a lot of country blues, ragtime and Western swing,” Knopfler recalled, “There was kind of a little university at Steve’s house. I always wanted to play electric. Steve never did. The day I graduated, I left for London and joined a professional rock band [Brewers Droop]. It failed miserably, and I proceeded to starve to death for a while. Brendan Croker took over playing with Steve pretty much after I left.”
Knopfler was careful to point out that Phillips and Croker, who’d gone on to found the Packhorse pub in Leeds and carry on with their music well into the 1980s, were self-sufficient as recording artists.
“They don’t need me,” he said.
Still, once it became clear that the singer/guitarist from Dire Straits was putting out a new album in 1990, a country folk record, no less, a whole new level of attention was given to his old college buddies. Rather than putting the Notting Hillbillies record out on a small indie label, as planned, Warner Brothers offered to release the album, which was ultimately titled Missing… Presumed Having a Good Time. Next thing you know, it was the number two album on the UK charts. It was also the start of a new chapter in Knopfler’s career, as he fully returned to the type of music that had been his first love; something he would continue to do over the next 30 years.
Despite the goodwill coming his way from fans and critics, though, Knopfler was convinced that ‘bluegrass purists’ would probably hate the record. “We did traditional arrangements on one or two,” he said, noting that some of the tunes were too old to have any publishing, “But if we felt like slinging in African influences or a set of vibes or a bit of metal or some reggae, it would just go in. Whatever worked.” The Notting Hillbillies never put out a follow-up to Missing, but they did reunite multiple times across the ‘90s and the early 2000s for small UK tours.
