By Bob Tallent<\/p>\n
This 63 year old man was born in Scotland and reared in the north east of England.\u00a0 He founded one of the most innovative and individualistic sounding bands in 1977 with his brother David and is a guitarist, singer, songwriter and record producer.\u00a0 In his late teens and early 20s, he worked as a reporter, graduated with a degree in English and taught as a lecturer.\u00a0 While he is left handed, he plays the guitar right handed.\u00a0 Even though the acoustic guitar is better suited to finger picking, he has perfected it on the electric guitar.\u00a0 He fingerpicks using a personal variant of the clawhammer style instead of using a plectrum. Fingerpicking is usually associated with acoustic guitar, but this man usually (though not always) plays an electric guitar. He has received 22 awards in his life including an OBE and owns over 70 guitars.\u00a0 His genres include Rock, Roots Rock, Celtic Rock, Country Rock and Blues Rock.\u00a0 He is known as the\u00a0\u2018quiet man of rock and roll\u2019<\/i>, is shy by nature and sips tea on stage.\u00a0 In addition to having a guitar named after him by Fender, he also has a dinosaur named after him because the researchers who discovered the bones from six specimens in Madagascar reported that they found the fossils whilst listening to his music.<\/p>\nI’m Talking about Mark Knopfler<\/h2>\n
Early Life<\/h2>\n
Mark Knopfler<\/span><\/span>He was born Mark Freuder Knopfler on 12th<\/sup>\u00a0August 1949 in Scotland.\u00a0 His father was a Hungarian Jewish emigrant who worked as an architect and his mother was an English schoolteacher.\u00a0 In 1956, when he was seven, the family moved to England and setup in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Does that make him a Geordie?\u00a0 His love of music came from his uncle.\u00a0 “I heard my Uncle Kingsley playing boogie-woogie on the piano when I was about eight or nine, and I thought that those three chords were the most magnificent things in the world – still do,\u201d he once said. A few years later, Mark began learning to play guitar, first on a \u00a350 twin-pickup Hofner Super Solid before moving up to an electric Fender his father bought for him.<\/p>\n At 16, Mark and some pals cut a demo single that was never released, and he performed in a vocal group with a school friend called Sue Hercombe that was successful enough to get an appearance on local television. Like many other schoolboys of the 1960s, he served an early apprenticeship by forming and joining anonymous schoolboy bands and listening to singers like Elvis Presley and guitarists Chet Atkins, Scotty Moore, Jimi Hendrix, Django Reinhardt and James Burton.<\/p>\n When he was 17 he enrolled at Harlow Technical College, where he studied journalism, and a year later he got a job at the\u00a0Yorkshire Evening Post<\/i>, where he covered general news and was a music critic. After two years at the\u00a0post<\/i>, Mark returned to college, studying English at Leeds University. While there, he became friends with a fellow guitarist named Steve Phillips, and they began playing under the name of the Duolian String Pickers.\u00a0 It was during this time working with Steve that Mark began developing his finger-picking style which would later turn into his trademark. \u00a0Steve later turned into a famous bluesman.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Mark took a job restoring paintings and furniture at Leeds City Art Gallery and Temple Newsam House.<\/p>\n As a coincidence, Mark’s boss was also called Stephen Phillips. This caused some confusion over the years and a number of Steve Phillips biographies have mistakenly claimed that Steve himself worked as a journalist. Mark and his boss – the other ‘Steve Phillips’ – went to see Steve playing in Leeds. Steve fondly recalls how Mark’s first words were “Steve Phillips, meet Steve Phillips.”<\/p>\nPre Dire Straits Years<\/h2>\n
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