Mark Knopfler,the Get Lucky tour rocked Murcia, Maestro, no te vayas.......

2010-07-25

 

The Get Lucky Tour reached Murcia last night, one more stop on a gruelling tour which has taken this group of musicians across the world on a punishing schedule which would have flattened many lesser men than a seasoned campaigner of the musical battlefield than Mark Knopfler.

 

The gigs started  back in April with a 28 stop tour of America and Canada, a weeks' break before 15 dates in the UK, then a 44 concert schedule spanning Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Poland, Monaco, Denmark, Sweden and across into Spain, with a concert virtually every day.

 

This week in Spain there are 8 concerts in a row with no break.

So why, at 60, does he still need to put himself through a schedule like that, when he's one of the most revered artists in the world, " Maestro, no te vayas, " they were calling around us in the crowd at the end of the concert,  Master, don't go........Master don't go.......

 

Mark Knopfler has got nothing to prove to anyone. He's earnt his place in history as one of the most distinctive  guitarists this world has ever produced and as an accomplished musician and songwriter who can effortlessly play masterful riffs without even being aware of it.

 

Since the Dire Straits days he has evolved as a solo artist, going where he wants to go, and this Get Lucky album is a masterpiece of skilful human portraits, real still life  painted by a musical journalist, who weaves history into art and fills our minds with images of ordinary people, and ordinary lives, graphic, sensitive and beautifully painted.

 

 

Which made last night a very sad occasion for us, lifelong fans who have had our own lives painted by his music.

 

Ask anyone to play you the ten pieces of music which have defined their lives, and tell you why these pieces mean so much to them. There'll be a smile at the corner of their mouths, as they remember their first kiss, that night when they met someone who became the mother of their children, their first car, those trousers, the months spent trying to perfect that guitar solo, acne, that birthday party.

And how many people would have Mark Knopfler somewhere in that list.

Well, both of us do.

 

To see him last night was a privilege, and to be able to photograph him, an intensely emotional experience for someone who has sweated tears over those solos and still can't work out how he makes it sound the way he does.

 

Standing in the crowd was surreal. The place was packed, with a mainly Spanish audience, mid 20's -40's the majority it seemed.

One third of our concert was spent hissing angrily at young spaniards nearby to shut up, as they chattered amongst themselves, yelling on their mobile phones to friends who hadn't bought a ticket, videoing the set and photographing it, even though they'd been asked specifically not to  by the organizers before the concert began. More than once we turned around and furiously asked people why they'd spent 50 euros on a concert ticket if they wanted to talk all the way through the music and were grateful when the volume cut out the buzz of the crowd.

They didn't want to hear Get Lucky, weren't interested in the soulful, melancholy pieces, the thoughtful and intelligent lyrics of this beautiful album, the masterful celtic instrumentation of accomplished musicians, they wanted Dire Straits.

When the familiar notes of Sultans of Swing rang out, the place erupted. The applause following this piece was ecstatic to the point where Mark swung around on his chair, shrugged, and the band started to jam to the chanting of the crowd.

He acquiesced, played a few Dire Straits pieces in amongst his better known solo pieces, but he fought it, defiantly playing those pieces the way he wanted to play them, not how we wanted to hear them, almost as a rebellion, yet knowing this is what the crowd wanted to hear.

 

And although we were screaming with the rest of them, it made us sad, because we're stopping him playing what he wants to play, we've got him trapped in an hourglass of sand, and no matter how he rolls and pours himself into an empty space, we've got him where we want him, in a glass jar on the shelf, caught up in the past.

And it felt sad, it felt like he was hurting. His back was bad, we knew that before the gig, but it hurt to see him sitting throughout the performance in obvious discomfort, and the  melancholy, wistful pieces which came straight from the heart seemed to dominate the song choices, the upbeat, witty songs we love so much absent from the performance this evening.

 

When I leave this world behind me

To another I will go

If there are no pipes in heaven

I'll be going down below.

 

 

And after that, I never want to see Mark Knopfler playing in a stadium again.

 

Next time I see him, I want it to be in a small, obscure folk festival and I want to see him playing for himself, playing what he wants to play, how he wants to play it and playing for the sheer pleasure of playing with fellow musicians because he wants to.

Not because he has to.

He's earnt the right to shatter that glass and never play Sultans of swing again as long as he lives, to write what he wants to write as an extraordinary artist in his own right and leave the past in the past.

Seeing him last night was a privilege, a superb concert, and we owe him so many thanks for the years of pleasure he's given us and for how he's painted our lives, respecting him as a musician who lives for music, loving what we're hearing now.

But it's time to move on and not have to go through an exhausting tour like that again, when bits have started falling off and you're old enough to do what you want to do because you want to do it.

Get Lucky is a superb album, it's the best work he's ever produced because it's honest, reflective and mellow and we want to hear the next one, as he enters the most creative and expressive chapter of his artistic career.

What do they say about growing up, good musicians are like fine wines, they get better as they get older, and Glasgow 1949  they say,  was a highly memorable vintage, one of the best.

 

 

 

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