Mark Knopfler – The Man of a Thousand Musical Tales (2013)

Urban Bolta Last updated 29 May 2019

Location: Ljubljana / Arena Stožice / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 04.05.2013

It took almost exactly eight years for Mark Knopfler, the former frontman and voice of the legendary Dire Straits, to stop in Ljubljana again, only this time he traded Hala Tivoli for Arena Stožice. Bigger and more modern. As luck would have it, Dire Straits also played their one and only show here in May. That was 1985. But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that famous gig, enough for Mark Knopfler to establish himself in the meantime as a refined, stylistically open-minded musician of a thousand faces.

If the concerts after the opening of the Stožice arena (Joe Cocker, Leonard Cohen) left concertgoers in Slovenia convinced that the hall’s acoustics kill any authentic live experience, the people in charge of the venue have since managed to get the sound up to a better standard. It’s far from crystal clear, but it at least lets you follow a show properly, as the baptism by fire of some heavy rock act just a few days ago, when Rammstein played Stožice, ultimately proved.

At 63, Mark Knopfler is still going strong. In the solo career he launched in the mid-nineties after the breakup of his main band Dire Straits, he has put out seven studio albums, the latest of them, “Privateering,” last fall. As part of his world promo tour, the years of dodging us, when Knopfler would usually only play in our neighborhood in Italy, Austria and Croatia, have finally paid off with a return to the sunny side of the Alps.

A few minutes past nine in the evening, Mark Knopfler and his backing band spread out across the stage and opened the show without any pomp or glamour, kicking off with What It Is. The eight musicians onstage promised an organically rich sonic feast, of course with the unmistakable voice of six-string master Mark Knopfler right in the middle, who already showed a few moves from the rich treasure chest of his one-of-a-kind fingerpicking guitar technique in the intro.

Corned Beef City, on which he coaxed a slightly grittier sound out of his famous red-and-white Fender Stratocaster, was the overture to the middle stretch of the show, which served as proof that in his mature artistic years Knopfler sold his soul to folk, blues and country. Mark Knopfler cultivates a style closer to the traditional idea of American music, yet European audiences embrace it with open arms when it comes from his fingers. In Father and Son and Hill Farmer’s Blues, he went for intimacy with drawn-out instrumental moments, which demanded focus and concentration, something that during his rock’n’roll years with Dire Straits certainly weren’t top priorities for their audience. The backing musicians on keyboards, ukulele, rhythm guitars and strings took care of the rich sonic experience. Stožice drifted into some interesting typically country waters with I Used To Could, with Knopfler propped up by nothing more than the resonant thump of the upright bass and percussion. With Romeo and Juliet in the middle of the set, Knopfler returned to the Dire Straits era for the first time that night, but despite the crowd’s excitement, the ballad pick carried on the mood of refined musical storytelling.

The ensemble onstage breathed as one. The backing band, made up entirely of highly regarded musicians, gave Knopfler dependable support, and thanks to the harmonies required, they actually stood on an equal footing with their boss. Still, all eyes understandably stayed on the gray-haired Knopfler. He came across as a bit reserved throughout the show. It’s clear that an extensive tour of seventy shows makes it impossible to pour your heart out onstage every single day, but, greased by years of experience, he still put just as much effort into the nearly two-hour get-together as was necessary. Minor slips in rhythmic transitions or entries into solo spots he smoothly covered with pure improvisation, which was hardly a challenge for a master of his caliber. His vocal approach has settled comfortably into the singer-songwriter character of intense storytelling, a path he treads ever more firmly with every new album. The mood-heavy theme reached its peak in the performance of the cowboy march Marbletown, a composition of more than ten minutes weaving together acoustic motifs from world folk music, which, to be honest, was a tough one to swallow for many in the audience. The wide palette of audible effect, that is, creating atmosphere with just a handful of notes, continued logically with Telegraph Road, one of the most celebrated epic-length songs Dire Straits ever released. And so the main part of the show came to an end, and before the expected return to the stage, a chain reaction broke out like nothing I’d seen before, except at concerts by Patti Smith and John Waite. Fans in the floor section bolted from their seats straight to the front of the stage and, with raised hands and thunderous applause, let the folks onstage know they wanted some livelier numbers – the ones from the inexhaustible Dire Straits treasury! Brothers in Arms and So Far Away came as the cherry on top of the cake and finally turned the Stožice floor into a dance floor. Even though Mark Knopfler is an artist with a solo career worthy of all respect, the intense finish of the show revealed why his gigs are still so well attended – because listeners still see in him the former frontman of rock legends Dire Straits.

Not playing the most anticipated song of the night, the radio classic Sultans of Swing, drew plenty of grumbling in the reactions to the show. To be honest, every musician is the architect of their own fortune, and I personally back his (controversial) decision not to play his biggest hit, though it’s an open question how a repeated move like that would affect attendance at his concerts in the long run. Still, the two-hour journey through the legacy of one of Britain’s most celebrated guitarists satisfied the appetite of a hungry Ljubljana crowd, who gave themselves over to the melancholically mellow yet still majestic musical storytelling of Mark Knopfler.

author: Urban Bolta
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

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