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HISTORICAL FACTS: 2 - The Untold Story

“It’s a cheap guitar, it sounds very direct, I did everything wrong, but I think they’re perfect notes”: Mark Knopfler names his favourite guitar solo

“I just said what I had to say. I didn’t go too far”

MusicRadar

How Dire Straits outsold everyone, hijacked MTV, and accidentally made a classic: Only in the new issue of Classic Rock

Also in this issue: Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper, Mike Peters, Buckcherry, Adam Duritz, Battlesnake, Eureka Machines, H.E.A.T, Steve Lillywhite, Live Aid USA and more

Louder

“Playing four notes to the bar with your thumb... That changed everything for me, because that’s what I wanted to be able to do”: How Mark Knopfler grew up wanting to be Jimi Hendrix until he ditched the pick and went fingerstyle

Or how one lesson with a folk singer from the northeast of England (and a bunch of lost picks) changed the history of electric guitar

MusicRadar

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read the most diverse news in one place.

"Pure manna for a fanbase denied any whiff of a reunion": Dire Straits' 30-million-selling Brothers In Arms celebrates its 40th birthday with energised extras

Mark Knopfler’s crowning achievement: mildly dated, largely evocative, expanded with live shows

Louder

"Everybody was going 'Does anybody know how to work this thing?'": How Guy Fletcher and a classic ‘80s synth became Dire Straits’ secret weapon on Brothers In Arms, and helped to turn it into one of the biggest albums of the decade

“Without him there, we would have probably been completely lost"

MusicRadar

“I remember thinking: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could ask Sting to sing that line?’ Suddenly someone said: ‘Sting’s here on holiday! He’s on the beach!’” How Mark Knopfler got lucky with Money For Nothing

It’s amazing who you can bump into in the Caribbean…

MusicRadar

Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing: ‘I wrote it in the window display of a New York appliance store’

‘A big bonehead of a delivery guy was looking at all these TV screens tuned to MTV and the lines he was saying were too good to be true. So I borrowed a pen and paper, sat down and started writing’

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“He thought that the band should be a democracy, and it was more like a brutal dictatorship as far as he was concerned”: The tangled story of Dire Straits, the million-selling band who quit at the height of their fame

How Dire Straits went from the pubs of London to become one of the biggest bands of the 1980s

Louder

“What’s going through our mind is ‘What the…?’ And if you see Bob’s face, you could see he’s thinking the same thing”: When Bob Dylan played with an LA punk band to promote the album he made with Mark Knopfler

1983's Infidels, Dylan's first secular album in half a decade, was graced with a bounty of sweetly tasteful leads from the Dire Straits man. To recreate two of its songs on Late Night with David Letterman, Dylan hired LA punks the Plugz

Guitar World

“Jeff was playing through his dodgy Marshall and didn’t like the sound. He said, ‘We’ll do it again, later on…’” Mick Rogers may be in possession of Jeff Beck’s last-ever studio recording

Mark Knopfler’s charity single Going Home, released in March 2024, was widely thought to be Beck’s final recording, but Rogers says he has an unreleased studio track that may very well take that crown

Guitar World

“If you just want to see a YouTuber, then fine. But the people who know me, and have watched me for years, know I’m a little bit more than that”: Mary Spender on the tones, tunes and heartache behind her debut breakup album

Featuring a guest spot from Ariel Posen and some of the most gourmet tones you'll hear all year, Super.Sexy.Heartbreak. finds Spender processing a lifetime of broken hearts through fingerstyle guitar

Guitar World

10 huge hits given away from one artist to another

From Prince to Joni Mitchell and Macca to the Bee Gees, the stars who were in such a creative purple patch that they had classics going spare and shopped them elsewhere.

Louder

“I don’t think they do too well living in a case all their lives”: Mark Knopfler parted ways with his guitar collection – but he hopes they all get played

2024 Year in Review: The Dire Straits icon raised a huge amount of money for charity selling off 120 prized instruments, including his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard

Guitar World

"I remember saying to Eric, 'I'm going to play him off the stage one day'. But what Eric did was even more peculiar, he said, 'Well, I'm going to pretend that I am Jimi Hendrix!'": Pete Townshend looks back in this classic 1990 guitar interview

Best of 2024: "The thing that really stunned Eric and me was the way he took what we did and made it better"

MusicRadar

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Evening Standard

The big quiz of 2024: How well do you know this year's biggest headlines and memes?

It was a year defined by famous hippos, assassination attempts and Photoshop fails. Take our quiz to prove you can sort 2024 fact from fiction

Guitar World

“This year has been one long vulgar display of Bowers”: The best guitar songs of 2024 – as chosen by Guitar World editors and pro players

With the help of pals including Eric Gales and Vernon Reid, we run down the songs that lit up the guitar-o-sphere this year, including a remarkable hardcore breakthrough, a virtuoso collab for the ages and the prodigy that everyone’s talking about

Louder

“I grew up around rock stars. My dad’s mates were Mark Knopfler and Thin Lizzy… and Christopher Biggins was a mainstay in our house!”: the indie-pop superstar who had a slightly different upbringing than your average frontman

A famous frontman looks back on a childhood surrounded by rock stars, actors and welders that his dad had brought home from the pub.

Evening Standard

William’s ears left in dire straits thanks to Prince Louis’ drumming practice

The Prince of Wales spoke to musicians at the Tusk Conservation Awards.

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Guitar World

A master of making major key licks sound moody, Mark Knopfler is one of guitar’s true alchemists – take your melodic phrasing to new heights with this lesson in the Dire Straits icon’s soloing style

Few players can pick out the notes like Knopfler, and this lesson goes deep into his fingerstyle approach, and how he foregrounds melody to tell a story with his leads

MusicRadar

“What you’re about to play should be influenced by what you just played”: 5 tips for better solos and cover versions by master guitarist Greg Koch

He says: “The main things I work on are vibrato, bends and phrasing”

FourFourTwo

What song do Newcastle United play before kick-off?

Newcastle's St. James' Park is one of the most iconic venues in Europe

Guitar World

What if Jimi Hendrix jammed with Eric Clapton, or Gary Moore traded solos with Joe Bonamassa? We imagine 5 all-star fantasy blues jams and what they would sound like

Welcome to an all-star fantasy blues jam, featuring a greatest hits of blues players, their signature licks, and how to put them together and incorporate them in your own playing

Guitar World

“It’s probably impossible to prove, but it’s likely that the Martin dreadnought is the most recorded guitar in history”: How the Martin D-18 and D-28 changed the world –and became the definitive acoustic guitars

Loved by the likes of Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Mark Knopfler and more, these Martin dreadnoughts are arguably the most successful guitar designs in history. Here's everything you need to know about this steel-string icon

Guitar World

“When I picked up a guitar, I held it righty, but the pick never felt right in my hands, so I started to make up my own technique”: Jared James Nichols reveals how he developed his unique fingerstyle technique – and the perks of going pick-less

Nichols also demonstrates how to achieve optimum attack and dynamics with his fingerstyle technique, which was inspired by Albert King, Derek Trucks and Mark Knopfler

Guitar World

“The boutique amp market thrives and exists as it does today largely thanks to Mike Soldano”: From Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai to Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, the Soldano SLO-100 changed the sound of shred and blues alike

The SLO-100 made its bones in the hard-rock and shred scenes and yet found its true calling as the amp of choice for Clapton, Knopfler, et al. What makes it such an enduring, versatile model?

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