Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopfler is one of the most admired guitarists and songwriters in rock — the creative force of Dire Straits, a band that sold well over a hundred million records — and he was born in Glasgow. In honesty, the city can claim his cradle more than his making: his family left for the north-east of England when he was a boy, and his musical life took shape in Newcastle, Leeds and London. But Glasgow was where he came into the world, in a very Glasgow way — the son of a refugee — and his story begins on the Clyde.

Born in Glasgow

Mark Freuder Knopfler was born on 12 August 1949 in Glasgow, the son of an English schoolteacher, Louisa, and Erwin Knopfler, a Hungarian Jewish architect and chess player who had fled his homeland in 1939 to escape the Nazis and made a new life in Scotland. The family lived in the Glasgow area — his younger brother David, later his Dire Straits bandmate, was born there in 1952 — until Mark was seven, when they moved to his mother’s home town of Blyth, near Newcastle. It was in the industrial North East, and then as an English student at the University of Leeds, that his music grew; before it paid, he worked as a newspaper journalist and a college lecturer.

Dire Straits

In 1977, in London, Knopfler formed Dire Straits with his brother David, the bassist John Illsley and the drummer Pick Withers — the name a rueful joke about their finances. Their sound was gloriously out of step with the punk of the moment: no aggression, no gloss, just a clean, fingerpicked Stratocaster, a tight rhythm section and Knopfler’s laconic, half-spoken tales of failing bands and late-night bars. A demo of ‘Sultans of Swing’ caught the ear of the DJ Charlie Gillett, a record deal followed, and the song became a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Across albums including Making Movies and Love over Gold Knopfler emerged as a songwriter of rare craft, his ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Private Investigations’ taut little dramas of melody and regret.

Brothers in Arms

The peak was Brothers in Arms in 1985 — one of the best-selling albums ever made, its single ‘Money for Nothing’ carried by a pioneering computer-animated video into the heart of the MTV age. It made Dire Straits one of the biggest bands in the world, and made Knopfler, improbably, a stadium rock star; the group toured itself to exhaustion and he wound it up in 1995 to return to a quieter life. Ranked among the finest guitarists of the rock era and a four-time Grammy winner, he was inducted with Dire Straits into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

The Craftsman

Since then Knopfler has followed his own road as a solo artist and a much-sought collaborator — band-leader for Bob Dylan, duet partner for Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris, the writer of Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ — and a distinguished film composer. Fittingly, one of his most beloved scores was for Local Hero (1983), Bill Forsyth’s tale of a Scottish coastal village, its closing theme ‘Going Home’ now an anthem of the game and the road. Appointed OBE in 2000, he has stayed the same unshowy craftsman he always was — the quiet Glaswegian-born guitarist who let the playing, and the songs, do the talking.

His page sits a little apart in this chapter, and honestly so: Glasgow gave him his birthplace rather than his upbringing. But in a city that has scattered its sons across the world, the guitarist born on the Clyde and raised on Tyneside belongs to both — and the cradle was here.

The Glasgow connection

Knopfler’s Glasgow is, candidly, a birthplace more than a home: the city where he was born in 1949 and where his refugee father, an émigré architect, first settled and where his brother and bandmate was born — the Clyde beginning of a life whose music was made on the Tyne, in Leeds and in London.