During his Dire Straits years, Mark Knopfler graduated briskly from the pubs and clubs of the post-punk era to the stadiums and signature sweatbands of the 80s and early 90s.

He played them all, large and small, which is why, as he applies himself to his third full solo outing – 13 years after breaking up the band and 30 years since his first record – he’s earned the right to tour how he wants. And that’s exactly what he’s doing, down to the last detail.

That means the right sound, the right look, the right transport, the right dates, the right venues – even the right weather, if that can possibly be arranged.

“A tour like this sort of books itself, in a way,” explains Paul Crockford, Knopfler’s manager since the departure of Ed Bicknell in 2000. “We have a certain window of opportunity because he always has August off. And also, we don’t like to tour anywhere too cold. That sort of dictates where we start and the end date.”

For both band and management, the privations of the road are held well at bay with the aid of a private jet and some of the world’s finest hotels. For the crew on the tour’s two buses, there is the satisfaction of knowing they are working at the top of their game, within a set-up in which excellence is well rewarded and anything less not contemplated.

After 30 years of touring, Knopfler is not one to compromise. Consequently, this is not a tale of seat-of-the-pants touring, desperate trouble-shooting and all-round relief when it goes right. Instead, this is touring in its most professional, methodical and downright comfortable sense.

Focussed Effort
The Kill To Get Crimson tour, in support of last year’s 1.2 million-selling album of the same name, is a focused, detailed sweep across Europe and the US. It kicked off on 29 March in Amsterdam and will end, with impressive precision, on 31 July at the Jackie Gleason Theater, in Miami Beach.

The time in between stands as a fourmonth testament to Knopfler’s personal high standards, as seven-piece band and 21- strong crew hammer out six shows in the average week, all of them offering some of the best live sound – and most elaborately discreet visual production – you are ever likely to encounter.

Behind the scenes, the effect is of one of the slickest and most good-natured tours to hit the road since the last time the Knopfler show went out.

“It is a very civilised tour,” says production manager Pete Hillier. “It is professional and it is a good-looking show, but it is what I call old-school touring. We have a system that works, and once we get into the rhythm, we will be flying through those dates, no problem.”

As on previous outings, Knopfler is exercising the superstar privilege of basing himself in a central position for several days at a time and shuttling to gigs in surrounding cities by air.

“We are going down to Barcelona after the show in Rotterdam, and that means we can fly to Madrid, fly to Granada, and always back to the same hotel,” says tour manager Tim Hook. “It means you can get a really nice hotel, you can unpack your bag, travel to the gig at about two or three in the afternoon and back again.”

If it all sounds too comfortable to count as real rock ‘n’ roll, it is worth asking yourself how often a 58-year-old rock star, with nothing to prove, takes on a tour of this kind of intensity.

“He is doing 63 shows in 80 days [on the European leg],” says agent Andrew Zweck, a veteran of all Knopfler’s live work since 2001. “Nobody works that hard anymore, certainly not of his vintage. There’s no one like him. He is doing what other artists would take double the time to do. His best ever run was a few years ago when he played 14 nights on the trot, of which 12 were in different cities.”

Burning Out
 Heavy touring, to a lesser or greater extent, has always been a part of Knopfler’s approach. Compared to the Dire Straits years, his workload these days is positively light.

No one should forget just what a big draw that band were. Numerous promoters along the current route harbour fond memories of Dire Straits’ last hurrah in 1992 when, according to Doctor Music’s Neo Sala, the band played to as many fans over the course of just 21 dates in Spain as Knopfler will during his entire current tour. “We sold half a million tickets,” he says. “For an English or American band to do more than three or four nights in Spain at that time was unique.”

André Béchir, chief executive of leading Swiss promoter Good News, promoted Knopfler’s date at the Hallenstadion in Zurich in mid-April. Theirs is another lengthy promoter-artist association, displaying the same easy harmony as the Knopfler team appears to enjoy with its many long-term associates.

“We have worked with him since Dire Straits days and we have done every show since then whenever he has come to Switzerland,” Béchir says. “He is very easy to work with, very professional – he takes his business very seriously. He is a detailoriented man, which is great. He is a great musician and a great person as well, and he has never changed since the beginning.”

Knopfler’s promoter-friendly character and high technical specifications aside, the quick-fire, four month Kill To Get Crimson tour would appear to owe comparatively little to the 18-month trek with which Dire Straits effectively bowed out in 1991 and 1992, when records were broken across the world, even as the band itself was playing itself out of existence.

“Those days are definitely gone,” Zweck says. “They used to do all that sort of worldwide stuff, where they stayed out of Britain for extended periods. I think they did 38 shows in Australia on the last Dire Straits tour, or some ridiculous number.”

Tour Template
n his solo incarnation, and particularly as a touring entity, Knopfler is a man who has clearly found the level at which he operates best. This tour – his third full-scale outing since 2001, not counting a month-long trek in support of All The Roadrunning, his 2006 collaboration with Emmylou Harris – follows a template laid down by its immediate predecessors.

“He did about the same number of dates on the 2005 tour and about the same in 2001,” Crockford says. “He would have done about the same in 2003, as well, but the tour was cancelled because he was knocked off his motorbike.”

The accident, widely reported at the time, remains the stuff of promoters’ nightmares. It came the day before rehearsals and put the star out of circulation for months as he recovered from a broken collarbone and six broken ribs [see breakout]. But a cancelled tour apart, the bike accident has not damaged his momentum in the longer term. “Ever since he recorded and finished Sailing To Philadelphia in 2000, he is in a bit of a cycle,” Crockford says, apparently intending no pun. “He has always regarded it all as a cyclical process where you write, you demo, you record and you promote, and the final element is that you go out and play the songs live in front of an audience.”

The band with which Knopfler completes this circle has many familiar elements to it. Guitarist Richard Bennett, a Nashville session great and, incidentally, co-writer of Neil Diamond’s Forever In Blue Jeans, has been Knopfler’s second guitarist of choice since 1998’s Wag The Dog soundtrack album, as well as a fixture on all recent tours.

Keyboard player Guy Fletcher is Knopfler’s musical lieutenant, having co-produced Kill To Get Crimson and worked on every Knopfler project since the Dire Straits days. He is also one of only two musicians whose tenure dates back to the Straits themselves; in fact, he goes right back to 1983, with credits including Brothers In Arms and On Every Street, as well as 1990’s prophetic spin-off project, the Notting Hillbillies’ Missing…Presumed Having A Good Time.

The band is completed by long-term percussionist Danny Cummings, another Straits veteran, who has painstakingly made the transition to drums for the purposes of this tour; keyboardist Matt Rollings, on board since 2005’s Shangri-La trek; Nashville bassist Glenn Worf, himself a Knopfler sideman since 1996; and just one all-new contributor, the Scottish fiddle and cittern player John McCusker.

The fact that the core of this unit has remained so constant is one of the tour’s stabilising factors, along with the roughly familiar itinerary.

With each jaunt, there are a few – but not too many – tweaks to the formula. “We always like to try and do some places we haven’t before,” Crockford says. “This time, for instance, we are going to Athens, Istanbul, Zagreb and Belgrade.”

Also on the menu are ten dates in Canada, which hasn’t been so blessed since the final Dire Straits tour, as well as certain staples, such as Newcastle City Hall, which is close to the artist’s heart. And after all, an artist who has enjoyed the kind of success Knopfler did at his commercial peak, when Brothers In Arms inspired tens of millions of dads to buy CD players on impulse, really doesn’t need to follow anything but his heart.

“He has a very good live career in a lot of different markets,” Zweck says. “All the promoters wanted him to go back to Asia and Australia this time. I was hopeful of getting him to South America, where he hasn’t been since 2001. We had plenty of good offers but he restricts his time on the road – I guess because of family, but I don’t really know.”

The considerations that dictate just where the tour touches down tend to owe something to Knopfler’s own preferences but there is a careful commercial logic at play too, even for an artist who can hardly be accused of saturating the market. “We went back to Australia in 2005 for the first time since 1992 and it is a long old jaunt to get down there,” Crockford says. “We broke the trip, we went to Dubai and India and across, and all those places were fantastic, but Mark doesn’t like to rush back into it. We tend to be mindful of not schlepping into these places too often and becoming the unwanted dinner guest who never leaves.”

The choice of venues, too, is not purely an emotional one. “We are at the level where there are only certain places you can play,” Crockford says. “We are at that level in between theatres and stadiums, so we are playing big theatres where we can get them, and otherwise anything between 5,000 and 15,000.”

Setting an Example
Tim Hook has heard tales from the late Dire Straits days of a fiery, demanding Knopfler but he doesn’t recognise that character now, even if Knopfler remains exacting.

“With Mark, he’s not difficult, he’s easy to work for. He likes things in a certain way and you have to get it right but that’s not difficult to achieve – you just get to grips with what the artist wants and make it happen.”

In common with most of the touring party, Hook attributes the buoyant spirit of the crew to the example set by the boss. “That always comes from the top downwards,” he says. “If he was a grumpy old git,” he adds, “it would be really hard.”


ADAM WOODS