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. 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.
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