Some thoughts on my way to office this morning

Someone says “you know there is something that sets Knopfler apart from his great contemporaries – the Yardbirds gang” and you go “OK that’s his voice”. I’ve myself done this a couple of times – thinking what is it that really makes him so different from the rest.

Watching him at the MMRDA in 2005, I felt like weeping. Here was a middle aged man in a white shirt and a blue jean, his spectacle strings underscoring the image of a College Professor. But this Professor was belting out such Rock classics as Sultans & Walk of Life. He sounded as good as ever. But surely, that wasn’t what set him apart.

So what is it that puts Mark Freuder Knopfler in a class of his own?

I guess it’s his Political consciousness & interest in History, the professor in him that raises its head time and again when he sits penning the lyrics.

Very early on, in Love over Gold, Industrial Disease was a hint of this. The song was an excellent attempt at criticising the evils of rising Trade Unionism in the early 80’s in UK. You couldn’t have missed a classic allusion:

The other one’s out on hunger strike, he’s dying by degrees
How come Jesus gets Industrial Disease?

Even the conversation with Dr. Parkinson in the song was a blatant ridicule of the crumbling work culture in the masses.

The Ragpickers Dream had a classic - Why Aye Man (or is it Wye Aye Mon) - that made a mockery of Thatcher’s policies of Denationalising the Yards that eventually led to the closure of some Yards and mass migration of British labour to the robust Industrial economy of Germany. It was the hurt pride of a Brit that said:

no more work in Maggie’s farm
we head away down to AutoBahn

Or, a little later in the song, the sarcasm takes a new turn with

There’s plenty Deutschemarks here to earn
And German Tarts are Wonderschon

As a migrant labour myself (though in my own country) I can pretty much associate with what he speaks of here -especially the one about missing the Tyne.

If these weren’t enough to get you thinking, there are others too. There are classics like the Iron Hand in On every Street that talks of the Orgreave Miners unrest. And one among the latest is Done with Bonaparte from the Album Golden Heart.

While he isn’t a Dylan, singularly focussed on changing the ways and means of the society, Mark Knopfler can indeed be an interesting read for the politically conscious.