Biografia Parte 2 - inglese - Mark Knopfler's World

Mark Knopfler announces his wish to continue his career my himself. After three years from On the Night, Golden Heart comes out. Critics are favorably impressed by Mark's new job, and also the public will be enthusiastic, but the numbers are not those of Dire Straits: some sources report about sales for 3 million copies, others for a million and a half. They are enough numbers to understand that there is a public of acolytes that keeps on and it will keep on following Mark in anything he does or writes, but it is clear that it's about a more selected community compared to the oceanic crowds of 1985.

This album offers more rarefied atmospheres, more and more Celtic and folk sounds, collaborations that keep almost nothing of the previous experience with Dire Straits. Only Guy Fletcher keeps on following Mark in this third adventure (after Dire Straits and the Notting Hilbillies). The most significant pieces are the easily listenable "Golden Heart", the bittersweet Rudiger, Imelda, in which Mark makes his Les Paul resonate once again with distorted sounds similar to"Money for Nothing" but absorbed by a more peaceful composition, and I'm the Fool, almost entirely sung on an entirely acoustic accompaniment. The text of this song holds several interpretations. Mark talks about abandoned dreams, about having to learn to walk alone, about not feeling like a superman or a Mr.Wonderful, but just a fool. These are hard years for him: after closing of the experience with Dire Straits, on the threshold of the 50 years of age he also separates him from the second wife Lourdes Salomone, and the lyrics perhaps reflect the bitterness for two events that will mark forever Knopfler's professional and artistic path.

As far as the Dutch Walk Of Fame was the biggest in Europe, with 235 tiles dedicated to show system's stars, in February 2010, Rotterdam's municipality will decide to move it in another district, allocating only 60.000 euros for the transfer. In the end, those funds will be enough to move only 50 tiles. Mark's tile will be excluded from the 50, and it will be auctioned together with the other 185.

On the 30th of March, 2000, Mark receives an OBE from the Queen (Order of the British empire, in picture).

The reason? Double: in the first place, it seems that Mark's music gladdened the researchers of the Malagasy expedition during the excavating operations under the scorching African sun; in the second place, maybe more curiously, its music seemed to bring good luck. Every time Mark's music was played in the excavation sites, the researchers discovered more bones. Curiously, the Knopfleri Masiakasaurus was carnivorous, it had an estimated length of nearly 2 meters, it walked on two feet,and weighed nearly 35 kilograms.

At the end of the visit Mark is awarded with a great recognition to his artistic career. On April the 18th, 2002 Mark gets another prestigious prize. It is necessary to say that in past (1990) Mark collaborated with Chet Atkins, and among the two a deep respect was born, proved by an exchange of gifts and guitars between the two artists. On the 30th of June, 2001 Chet passes away, and to commemorate him Mark will give an exclusive Gibson Chet Atkins SST (received as a gift and autographed only for him, in photo) to the museum of Nashville, which celebrates his life and his artistic path. The dedication on the guitar says: "To Mark, a great friend and musician, Chet Atkins, CGP '99."

Kill to Get Crimson, as already said, confirms Mark's intention to experiment in a genre of little popular music, even if he drwas its roots from the people: the folk and country genres But this time the disk proposes less American sounds, and as in some tracks in "Golden Heart" and "The Princess Bride" (soundtrack of the same film) Mark proposes Celtic and tradtitional sounds, sometimes medieval, with the help of some instruments as flutes, accordions and vibraphones. The known cover, which portrays some red Piaggio Vespas, is drawn by a picture of John Bratby.

The album is launched with a promotional minitour from July to November 2007, almost entirely in Europe except the American date of October the 5th. In 2008 the real tour starts, that will keep Mark committed from March to July of 2008 with some concerts in Europe and in the United States. It will be an intensive tour, on the same level of Shangri-La 2005 album launching tour.

The same script is proposed for the new album promotion in 2009, named "Get Lucky". The album confirms that Mark is more and more away from the sounds and from the arrangements of his musical adolescence with Dire Straits, and as far as its guitar is often emphasized in pieces as "Before Gas and TV", "Cleaning My Gun", "Remembrance Day" and "So far from the Clyde", the sounds remain those of the previous album, therefore oriented to the popular and traditional European genre. Interesting to notice that one of the songs of the album, Piper to the End, is dedicated to the memory of an uncle who passed away during the Arras tragic battle of 1917' during World War I. It's about an epic battle, fought by frontal assaults and machine gun blasts on the soldiers literally sent to die, with the British and the German armed forces counterposing on the French front (stretching, back then, from Belgium to Switzerland). In summary, as much as the battle had been a success for the English troops, it caused tragic casualties (it has been calculated that England left nearly 158.000 men on the battlefield) without determining a real turn of the conflict. The promotional organization will also provide for a launch tour (one month and only ten dates) and a real tour that starts on April 11 th of 2010 with the first of many American dates, and it ends on the 20th of July of the same year in Europe (In the picture, the cover of the album and of the dvd of the concert of Cordoba).

The album, just as the previous ones, receives the most part of its success in northern Europe. In Norway, Denmark and Germany it's a best selling, in Italy it reaches the second place of the charts and in Norway it gets a platinum disk. Mark gracely gets these awards and looks at the next production, that will come to light in 2012: 20 new songs contained in a double album entitled"Privateering". In the meantime,he works together with many other artists as John Illsley (ex bassist of Dire Straits, at his third solo album) and Pieta Brown, for which he will play the guitar in the passage "So Many Miles" and that will to open his concerts in North America. "When Pieta sings, you feel like taking part to something natural, as the rain on the ground", Mark says about the singer.

1996 was the dividing year between the Mark of Dire Straits and the soloist one, who was about to become a performer, discoverer and popularizer of the Celtic ,American and British musical traditions. In 2012 Mark shows how ungenerous were the criticisms to the previous albums, telling about a weakened author, repetitive, absorbed by the folk-chic drift of the last albums. Mark presents 20 new tracks to the public, summarizing his 40 year long musical experience.

The acoustic arrangements of the last years place side by side to a couple of catchy rock songs, blues pieces as Hot or What coexist with unforgettable ballads as Redbud Tree, and songs as"Corned Beef City"recall Dire Straits' last sound textures. Mark reinvents himself one more time, and it shows that his music is nothing but a personal is only the product of a personal research that can't meet the crowd's approval, but that still remains a genuine and untamable expression, impossible to be reduced to a unique label or to be shaped on fashions or on the crowd's taste. "This is what I feel and what I want to be, just an old man playing guitar. If someone comes to listen, it is ok for me, but I am not too concerned about it: people can come or not, fact is that playing guitar is what I do and all I wanna do".

Interviewed by Mike Ragogna, Mark talks about an amusing disk to compose and to record, in which the songs have come out in a clean way, and they have exactly been recorded in the way they were imagined. A mature awareness emerges from the Glasgow composer, a need of truth converted in very realistic lyrics, impressionistic according to some, focused on real stories of people living as losers, in the society's borders. "When you get older, you look at the past with a different point of view. When he you're young, you look ahead and you know you have a long time before you. When you get a liittle older, you can look at the past in a different way and time becomes more and more interesting."

The album reaches the first position in Austria, Holland, Germany and Norway, the second in Switzerland, Denmark, Italy and Spain, the third in New Zealand, the seventh in Finland, the eighth in the United Kingdom and the tenth in France. It has been calculated that in 2013 Mark has sold almost 135 million albums all over the world. The Privateering Tour starts on April the 25th,  2013 from Romania and finishes on July of the same year with a series of five Spanish dates. On October the album is also launched in the United States, and Mark decides to hold a short series of concerts in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Oakland to promote the disk.