Legendary Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler has revealed he got his playing style from strumming a tennis racket as a child.
Knopfler, 74, said that he was left-handed, but while he was pretending the racket was the musical instrument in his youth, his older sister turned it round and told him: ‘That’s the way you play it.’
Asked by BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs presenter Lauren Laverne about his technique, 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.’
Glasgow-born Knopfler explained that, as he was left-handed playing a right-handed guitar, his stronger hand was forming the notes.
He said it gave 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’.
Dire Straits had five UK top ten singles and four No 1 albums, and worldwide hits with Money For Nothing and Sultans Of Swing.
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 at 10am today.
