Alan Clark - new interview

[dmg]

I would happily have loved Planet of New Orleans and You and Your Friend to go on another few mins of Mark's amazing playing.

Yeah, PONO seems to fade out just as it's really warming up.  Back in the day I used to go to the amplifier and turn up the volume so I could catch every last drop of goodness! 

[KnopfleRick]

I would happily have loved Planet of New Orleans and You and Your Friend to go on another few mins of Mark's amazing playing.

Yeah, PONO seems to fade out just as it's really warming up.  Back in the day I used to go to the amplifier and turn up the volume so I could catch every last drop of goodness! 

Same for me with "Piper". I hate these early fadeouts.

[qjamesfloyd]

As an example of where a song had a good definite ending is Fade To Black.

[Love Expresso]

Yeah, or My Bacon Roll with both, fading out into a very silent proper ending. 

LE

[JF]

I always found strange to fade out a song and in the same the time keep the proper ending like on Spingsteen's "Glory days" or Stones' "stray cat blues" for example

[Rail King]

To me, Terminal of Tribute To has always seemed overly vitriolic. I can see where Mark is coming from - they are his songs and those are his former bandmates - but from a multi-millionaire, and one who will never resurrect DS, it just seems uncalled for. No one would consider such bands a threat to Mark, or expect him to voice an opinion of them, if he hadn't written, recorded, and released a long song about them.

Overly vitriolic ... maybe, yes. But Mark has always written songs about people in desperate and/or ridiculous situations. It's one of his specialties. With Terminal, he wrote about his former bandmates for once, but if you disregard that fact, it's just a typical Mark Knopfler song. And a good one, as far as I'm concerned.

Mark knows perfectly well that it's not illegal for ex band members to form tribute bands. It's just a bit ... sad.

[Chris W]

Mark knows perfectly well that it's not illegal for ex band members to form tribute bands. It's just a bit ... sad.

Mark's a multi-millionaire who never needs to work another day in his life.
The better 'tribute' bands are entertaining many thousands of people and keeping the music alive - that mark no longer wants to play.
If you work in a factory or office, sure you have no need to join a tribute band and play the music of Dire Straits, but these people still need to pay their bills and it's more fun to play great songs in front of 3,000 cheering fans than toil away on the 250 capacity club circuit, or retire from music completely.
If you went to a DSE show you wouldn't see anyone looking sad, audience or band.

[Jules]

To me, Terminal of Tribute To has always seemed overly vitriolic. I can see where Mark is coming from - they are his songs and those are his former bandmates - but from a multi-millionaire, and one who will never resurrect DS, it just seems uncalled for. No one would consider such bands a threat to Mark, or expect him to voice an opinion of them, if he hadn't written, recorded, and released a long song about them.

Overly vitriolic ... maybe, yes. But Mark has always written songs about people in desperate and/or ridiculous situations. It's one of his specialties. With Terminal, he wrote about his former bandmates for once, but if you disregard that fact, it's just a typical Mark Knopfler song. And a good one, as far as I'm concerned.

Mark knows perfectly well that it's not illegal for ex band members to form tribute bands. It's just a bit ... sad.

Any musician has to work to pay their bills, and the work is where the work is.

Also, most of those ex band members have other jobs as a musician, and playing in that DS tributes bands are another job, that if you know it has an audience, as a proffesional musician that have to pay their bills, you can say to that, of course, but it's another paid job.

Think that Danny Cummngs, still playing with MK, also plays with DS Legacy. It is a well paid job for a good proffesional musician.

[Pottel]

Latest interview.
Alan Clark gave an interview to "Teraz Rock" magazine. I thought this excerpt was interesting and perhaps a bit controversial and debatable: Alan Clark assesses the misguided direction Dire Straits went in

"I was not enthusiastic about it, although pedal steel guitar player Paul Franklin is an excellent musician and it was great working with him. In my opinion, however, there are too many country elements on the album. I generally saw it as the wrong direction for Dire Straits. But at the time, Mark was fascinated to the maximum by the sounds of Nashville...

I don't see the problem, it's just his opinion and nothing else, he didn't like the direction the band went but it was MK band so, they went that way.

What's wrong with that?

agree, do not see any controversy here.

[Love Expresso]

Tribute bands... the most boring topic on this forum for years and  years. Only sad thing about it is that Mark Knopfler doesn't stand above this stuff and wrote a stupid song about it to give them even more attention.

LE

[Jules]

Tribute bands... the most boring topic on this forum for years and  years. Only sad thing about it is that Mark Knopfler doesn't stand above this stuff and wrote a stupid song about it to give them even more attention.

LE

Totally agree.

[Beryl]

I think Terminal is the worst song ever written by MK just because it is unfunny, mean and cruel, and shoots from above, towards some people who are clearly in a less fortunate position. Totally unclassy move which buries any kind of musical quialities that Terminal could posses (couple of years after that, he stole himself the chorus of Terminal and reused mercilessly it at the verses of Back on the Dance Floor).

[quizzaciously]

Tribute bands... the most boring topic on this forum for years and  years. Only sad thing about it is that Mark Knopfler doesn't stand above this stuff and wrote a stupid song about it to give them even more attention.

LE

I think Terminal is the worst song ever written by MK just because it is unfunny, mean and cruel, and shoots from above, towards some people who are clearly in a less fortunate position. Totally unclassy move which buries any kind of musical quialities that Terminal could posses (couple of years after that, he stole himself the chorus of Terminal and reused mercilessly it at the verses of Back on the Dance Floor).

I can't agree more. But at the same time, I tried to think what other options were there... I mean, if you want to write a song that makes fun of your ex-band members, how you can write it to be obvious enough and not shooting from above? Anything Mark writes WILL sound like a big brother scolding his younger one and vice versa. So LE is right, in the sense this topic of tribute bands and ex-band members is so miserable it can't possibly yield anything good.

Maybe it would be better for Mark to stay silent on the matter, but as we know songs are "pushing" him. At least it was downgraded to merely a bonus track and wasn't present on the main body of the album. "Terminal" in the title expresses the useless nature of this nonsense, as in terminal illness. And I think everybody agrees with Mark that trying to dance in his old shoes with grey hair IS a miserable experience.

And another problem Mark would face with writing this song is to make clear it's not about tribute bands per se, just about... One in particular.

[Robson]

You might be outraged by MK's attitude (I'm not), but musically it's a great song.

[quizzaciously]

You might be outraged by MK's attitude (I'm not), but musically it's a great song.

In my mind, any song that is regarded as "disses" to other band members sucks by design. I hate John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" equally as Paul McCartney's attack on John. I even forgot the song's title, that's how much I don't care. It's incredible to see grown-up adults fighting like kindergarten kids. And especially stupid all these diss tracks sound after everybody in question has died. Like, what it was all about? Aren't there better things to do?