By the time it reached us we were in senior school or college. First album, 1978, we were in Class VIII. I also realised that for us music lovers born in the mid-60s in Calcutta, India, and fortunate enough to have been born in houses with a record player, Dire Straits was a band we literally grew up with. It’s about the music more than anything else and about the people who made that music. I think that for a lot of people who’ve been on that journey with us with the music, the concerts, the book would help them solidify some ideas about what it’s like from our point of view to do that. I am very proud of what we achieved and I think it needed writing down. What did it mean to me? What did it mean to other people? It’s (the book) a kind of celebration… of those incredible 16-17 years. It was interesting to go back and think about those days. I found that once I started talking about it, it started to flow and I managed to get it down in some kind of order. I did have to check a few dates and names. It’s quite difficult to get the right tone with some of these things, and I had to go back quite a long way to get my memory working again.
John Illsley: I am very pleased you enjoyed it. Great fun to read, and it is very well written.
In an interview with The Telegraph Online all the way from UK, Illsley talks about the music of the time, their incredible journey, the highs and the lows, and why, as Mark Knopfler says in a succinct foreword to the book, they were lucky not to have been teenagers when confronted with the professional music game. Several misadventures later Illsley finds himself in London only to become friends with the guys who would soon become Dire Straits, the name that we also discover is anecdotally connected to Lindisfarne, a popular UK rock band of the time. Put it back on please,” he told the surgeon who said he wasn’t sure whether to take it off or sew it back on. But not before starting off as a bank clerk and then moving to a new job at a soup factory where one day he found his right thumb hanging off just below the nail after a cleaning accident _ ‘I am a guitar player.
There are many facts about this song, but we would be glad to leave you to enjoy listening to this wonderful song and lyrics, down below.At 72 Illsley, the band’s bassist and the only other founding member after Mark to stay the full 15-year course, recounts with understated humour and heartfelt love, their friendship, their ambitions, the discipline with which they went about things, and above all, the many people that crossed their paths and helped them achieve the pinnacle of success.Ībout his early beginnings in Middle England, Illsley writes: “…this is the world that shaped who I became, a small world that brought great comfort and security but a world that made me yearn for the distant shores of somewhere way more exotic.” That dream was fulfilled. Also, Mark has described the experience of walking in South London one cold winter rainy night, listen to it up a sound and how he knew that there is a “hot jazz” gig.
Mark Knopfler derived the name of this song from watching another band perform and referring to themselves as the “Sultans of Swing.” There are clear facts into this song from the night when Mark Knopfler was at the pub where the anonymous band was playing in a style similar to jazz, i.e.
If you want to know the story behind the song “Sultans of Swing,” keep up with reading and click here.ĭire Straits’ 1998 Greatest Hits compilation named as Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits was named after this hit song. The demo tape included five songs “Water of Love,” “Down to The Waterline,” “Wild West End,” and David Knopfler’s “Sacred Loving.” They used to get their record deal, and the tape got played on the London radio station and started a bidding war for the band. This song was Dire Straits’ first single and it was one of the five songs on the demo tape of the band. The idea for writing this song came up to Mark Knopfler one rainy night during he was in Deptford, UK. This song has many covers by other artists, musicians, and bands.