Dire Straits’ John Illsley: ‘We’ve been offered huge amounts of money to get back together’

One morning in the summer of 1976, John Illsley returned home from a night out to find a stranger asleep on the concrete floor of his flat on a sink estate in Deptford. The visitor’s head was resting at a 90-degree angle on a lone chair salvaged from a skip; an overstuffed ashtray and spent bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale were strewn by his side. Across his chest lay a Gibson Les Paul Junior guitar. “Cup of tea?” Illsley asked. To which Mark Knopfler replied, “Nice one”. 

The guest was in town to see his brother, David, Illsley’s flatmate. The following year, the trio, along with drummer Pick Withers, formed Dire Straits, perhaps the most dominant, and also the most curiously undervalued, English rock act of the eighties. Over the course of an 18-year lifespan, the group burned through more members than most, including David Knopfler, who left in 1980, and Withers, who exited three years later. John Ilsley, on bass guitar, however, retains the distinction of being the only musician in what he calls “the Straits” to remain stage right of Mark Knopfler from first note to last. 

“When I found him on the floor in the flat in Deptford, even back then I thought, ‘I’m going to know this guy for a long time,’” Illsley tells me. “I was very much aware of being in the presence of somebody who, through his observations of the world, could write remarkable songs, and play the guitar in a way that I hadn’t heard anybody else play it. And we made a good team together… If you look at the structure of any band, it’s got certain elements in it that make it very strong. And I think he and I together were quite a strong team.”

Evidence that this was a gigging rock’n’roll band even at the heights of vertiginous success is available in the form of the new box-set Dire Straits: Live 1978-1982. Featuring expanded and re-mastered versions of previous concert LPs Alchemy and On The Night, the voluminous 60-track compilation is to my mind most notable for a previously unreleased concert at the Rainbow Theatre, in Finsbury Park in December 1979, recorded at the exact point at which the group orchestrated the first of many notable transformations. Remarkably, the handover from roots rock to a kind of new wave cool appeared effortless.

Rather endearingly, John Illsley explains that he’s yet to hear the album. “I’ve been away over the summer so I really haven’t listened to anything,” he says. “But what we’ve basically got here, as far as I can gather, is basically everything, apart from bootlegs, that the band has recorded [live] over the years. And it’s a lot more than I realised, and probably a lot more than anybody realised… It’s literally just the band at its best, as good as you can get it, with nothing added.”

It was the decision to send the band’s demo tape to BBC Radio London DJ Charlie Gillett, with whom Illsley was acquainted, that first set the band on their way. With Sultans Of Swing bouncing across the airwaves, at once the attention of young listeners whose tastes may have fallen just short of punk’s year-zero sensibilities were captured by the accomplished but still energetic sound of these adopted South Londoners. Lyrically, Mark Knopfler’s vivid vignette about a honky tonk band failing to excite an audience in a thinly populated Greenwich club warranted comparisons to both Bob Dylan and, in its keen eye for local detail, Deptford neighbours Squeeze. Subsequently released as a single, the track became their first top-10 hit. 

By 1978, they were on their way. Dire Straits’ first national tour saw them supporting Talking Heads, with whom they shared a transit van and, subsequently, a friendship for some years afterwards. “They were very nice people to work with,” Illsley says. “They even gave us a sound-check, which we realised later was a very unusual thing to give a support band.” A self-titled debut album, produced by Muff Winwood for the Vertigo label, went double and single platinum in Britain and the United States respectively. 

“Those early days were literally non-stop touring, because that’s what you did then,” Illsley says. It was the only way of getting your name and your music out there. And so you go and play in the Hope & Anchor [in Islington] every Thursday night for six weeks. You go and play in the [Covent Garden] Rock Garden every Wednesday. You play at the Marquee every Tuesday for a month. As you see yourselves building up a following, it becomes incredibly exciting when you realise that a thousand people are cramming themselves into the Marquee, and filling the streets outside, just to hear you play. And you go, ‘Okay, this is interesting. Something is happening here.’” 

Rather nonchalantly, I think, he then adds how one night “Keith Moon turned up and said, ‘Oh that was a bloody good gig, boys’. And it was a case of, ‘Keith Moon’s just walked into our dressing room! And it only holds about five people! He’s come to see Dire Straits!’”

Appearing on my computer screen from his home in Provence, today John Illsley is a painter, a solo artist with eight studio albums to his name, the author of the memoir My Life In Dire Straits (published by Penguin in 2021), the owner of the East End Arms pub in the Hampshire village of the same name, and, for our purposes during an enjoyable hour’s conversation, the pitch-man for the band with whom he made his name and his money. At the height of their success, life in the Straits “was very lucrative, obviously,” he says. 

He also happens to be the first professional musician I ever met when, aged 14, I happened upon him and Dire Straits (minus Knopfler) enjoying a meal at a pristine hotel on December 16 1985. Approaching their table, I told the group that their appearance at the Birmingham NEC that evening would be my first ever concert. Noticing that I was limping heavily – days earlier I’d had a cast removed after breaking my leg – Illsley offered me the chance to watch the show from a special section at the front of the stage. It would be years before I discovered that not all musicians are as considerate as this.

“If you have the tools at your disposal to share what you do with other people, it’s a wonderful experience,” he says. “There’s nothing quite like it. Standing on a stage and playing in front of a lot of people who have spent very good money, and who have expended a lot of energy to come and see you, I think Mark and I both agree that you owe it to them to make that night the best it can possibly be. That’s the responsibility that he and I felt.”

Even as a young teenager, though, I preferred the group’s less immediate material to the well-honed arena rock that saw them fill Wembley Arena no fewer than 13-times in 1985 alone. The New York sizzle of Making Movies, from 1980, for example, effortlessly attained the kind of urban summer cool so gracefully represented by (them again) Talking Heads. Two years later, the patient virtuosity of Telegraph Road, the 14-minute 18-second opening track to Love Over Gold, rendered me permanently impressed. And although I liked the 1985 blockbuster Brothers In Arms well enough – I tried to like every album on which I’d spent my paper-round money – I just knew that my members-only cult band were about to go wholly mainstream. 

But at least they did it with grace. Mark Knopfler wrote Money For Nothing after transcribing a conversation overheard in a New York electronics store in which the sales people imagined the life of the professional musician while watching Motley Crue on MTV splayed across a bank of television sets. “That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it…” Songwriters are often hopeless when it comes to articulating the extraordinary degree of hard work required to become famous. As well as doing so adroitly – not to mention decades before the topic became normalised under the banner of mental health – Dire Straits did it on a song from an album that sold more than 30 million copies and essentially gave birth to the CD.

“I can openly admit to you that I really enjoyed the success of the band,” Illsley says, before quickly adding that it was easier for him because he could always go for a pint without being recognised. He goes on to say that “I’m speaking for Mark as well, we both really enjoyed [it]. It comes with a certain amount of stress, obviously. You’ve got to really dig deep sometimes to keep it working. I think Mark said – and I hope I’m quoting him correctly here – but he said that success is great, but fame is what comes out of the exhaust pipe of a car. It’s something you don’t really want.”  

Rather tastefully, they left their audience wanting more. A final go-round in support of 1991’s somewhat underwhelming On Every Street album – like many groups, this one’s best work was accomplished in the first eight years – constituted a 225-date world tour witnessed by an astounding 7.1 million people. By the time the caravan reached its conclusion, at the Estadio de la Romareda in Zaragoza on October 9 1992, the group’s principal players well understood that the ride had reached its terminus. 

“I sort of knew that things were coming to an end,” Illsley explains. “And I was pretty happy about that because we were exhausted. We were exhausted. Mentally, physically, emotionally exhausted. Most of our marriages were falling apart, we weren’t seeing our children very much – it was all wrong, basically. It’s the usual things that can happen to people in bands.

“But when you stop a machine like the Dire Straits thing, there’s a massive vacuum,” he adds. “There’s a massive vacuum. And you ask yourself if it was a good idea. And I had to keep telling myself that it was a good idea. Because you’re doing something else, completely different – I was in London studying painting, I got some lessons, made a terrible mess for seven or eight years, and then started doing art shows. I thought, ‘Okay, this is fun’. And I stopped playing music for quite a while. I leant the bass against the wall and said ‘Thank you very much but I’m doing something different now’.” 

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by just how often John Illsley mentions the name Mark Knopfler. Forty-seven years after discovering one of the most singular talents in the history of English music kipping on the concrete floor of a flat deep in Millwall Country, today the pair maintain what the bassist describes as “a lovely, lovely relationship”. They’re good friends who communicate, I’m told, over lunch “whenever we need to”.

Illsley sometimes breaks bread with his former bandmate’s manager, too. Without fail, during each meal Paul Crockford tells him something on which everyone concerned can agree. “Every time we have lunch [he] says to me, ‘I wish people would stop offering me huge amounts of money to put [Dire Straits] back together,’” he reports. 

Dire Straits: Live 1978-1992 is available now on Mercury Records