That was a seminal moment in musical history, let alone just for us. “To be honest after Brothers, and such a big break, I really was not expecting to do another album. “There wasn’t much more he and I thought we could do with it,” Illsley says candidly. For all the glory, it was to the extreme risk of the band’s physical and mental health. That was before Brothers In Arms reset the parameters and roared to 30 million sales. “The changes were quite dramatic, from Communiqué to Making Movies,” muses Illsley. Through all those early expressions of Knopfler’s dexterity as a guitarist and writer, and David’s departure after two albums, Dire Straits expanded their horizons to filmic scale and took millions with them throughout the 1980s. You had people about two feet away from you in those days.”Īs a fledgling reporter, one of this writer’s earliest assignments was to review one of those Rock Garden gigs in late 1977, where the band were already as tight as their counterparts in their centerpiece song, “Sultans Of Swing.” Says John: “I remember sitting down with Pick and thinking I feel like I’ve been playing with this guy all my life.” I looked to my right and went ‘Oh.’ You couldn’t move. We suddenly realised the sound had changed a bit. And somebody knocked the right hand side of the PA over, and nobody noticed. Hot as hell, no ventilation, everybody smoking of course. “I remember one evening we were playing in there, it was so packed. The ceiling in the Hope & Anchor was only about eight feet high. I’ll tell you what, loading it in was one thing but getting it out was another. So it was left to him and I to load the bloody bass bin in. “I don’t think Pick got involved and David was always doing something somewhere else. “We tossed a coin to see who was going to be at the top and who was going to be at the bottom, and it seemed to be just Mark and I doing it,” he laughs. There are vivid representations of the Straits’ early struggles to be heard, including at London gigs such as the Hope & Anchor in Islington and the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, with those onerous load-ins. Looking back I thought ‘What a place to be, at a particular point in your life.’” I took it for granted, because I grew up with it, of course. Some of that playing in the early days, when you go back and look at it, was absolutely extraordinary. “It’s got much simpler as he’s got older, that’s for certain. “His way of playing was very different from anything I’d ever seen, and still remains to this day,” he says. It wasn’t even a consideration about playing together at that point, I just felt this natural warmth and humor from him. Reflecting on that inauspicious introduction today, Illsley says: “I knew as soon as I met him that I was going to know about him for a long time, in one way or another. This must have been the brother he had mentioned.”ĭire Straits photo: Ebet Roberts/Redferns The guy had an electric guitar across his chest…his face, sheet-white, revealed a hint of my flatmate David.
“There was a man lying on the cement floor of our Deptford flat fast asleep…and his head, propped against the only chair, was at right angles to his body. He shared a flat with David Knopfler and writes specifically about his first meeting with David’s older brother. Illsley, born in Leicester in the English midlands in 1949, reminisces in the book about his musical education and an early job with a timber firm, before a Sociology course at Goldsmiths college brought him to London. He’s told the story in the songs, really, and he doesn’t need to do it any more than that.” “I thought, is never going to write this down, and it gives me a chance to say something about him which he won’t say. “The main thing for me is celebrating something, celebrating a friendship that I’ve had for 40-odd years, and a musical partnership,” says Illsley.