Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler has revealed he played “shockingly bad boogie-woogie” when he was a child and that he got his guitar-playing style from strumming tennis rackets with his sister.
The 74-year-old said he had always been left-handed, but said while pretending the racket was a guitar in his youth, his older sister turned it round and told him “That’s the way you play it”.
Knopfler was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, during which he explained his family had played a big part in his music career.
When asked by presenter Lauren Laverne about his guitar playing, he said: “Well, it’s because of my big sister Ruth, and I think big sisters are very important in this world.
“We had these dodgy little tennis rackets that you could get for not very much money, we used to use the tennis racket as a guitar.
“I was playing it, I was pretending it was a guitar, and she turned it round so that I was holding it right-handed, and she said that’s the way you play it.”
Knopfler explained that, as he was a left-handed man playing a right-handed guitar, this meant his stronger hand was forming the notes.
He said his sister turning around the tennis racket had given him “a little bit of flexibility”, and allowed him to do a vibrato (bending the strings vertically) on “two or three strings at a time”.
The guitarist began his career with Dire Straits in 1977 and continued with the band until their 1995 break-up.
He has also had a solo career which has seen him record the film score for 1983’s Local Hero.
Some of his most famous songs include Money For Nothing, Sultans Of Swing and Going Home: Theme Of The Local Hero.
Knopfler also explained that his mother and father “never stood in the way” of his music career, and added he “could not believe how patient they must have been”.
He said: “They never stood in the way (of his love of music), I played shockingly bad boogie-woogie piano, taught by my uncle Kingsley in the house.
“I played it and played it and played it, but I don’t think it ever improved.
“I could not believe how patient they must have been because as well, my brother David had a drum kit.
“The drums were in the garden shed, just in the little back garden there.
“The poor neighbours, and the poor parents with the boogie-woogie, and then later on when I got a guitar I’d be stomping and stomping on the floor.
“But they never stood in the way of it.”
The Glasgow-born star said his early career as a journalist on the Yorkshire Evening Post had also helped to “accelerate” his songwriting abilities.
He added: “The first job I got was on the Yorkshire Evening Post for under £10 a week.
“I didn’t know anything, but I think it grew me up quite a lot, the good thing about that is, it does give you a clue that you’ve got to get yourself organised.
“I think in some ways the songs got accelerated that way.
“I was sent to interview the cast of this pantomime in the theatre in Leeds, and I’d find myself talking to (people saying) we’re the oldest ugly sisters in variety.
“Anyway, I saw those lines in my notebook, years later and started thinking maybe this could be a song.
“And that became a song, and as I said I’m very slow, years later I wrote this song, and years after that it got on an album. It actually got on the Sailing To Philadelphia album, called One More Matinee.
“I started to call them portrait songs.”
