Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler: 'Our hits didn't all come out the way I wanted'

‘There’s music,” Mark Knopfler says, “and there’s the music business. They’re two separate things. You have to realise that and come to terms with it. But you can’t get too precious about it.”

That’s quite an admission from the guitarist, who always put his music first and for decades enjoyed a showbiz profile like that of the average hermit — he split up Dire Straits in the mid-1990s essentially because they had become so big he no longer knew the band’s roadies by name.

Yet, at 74, Knopfler has been flirting with the spotlight again. First, there was the January auction of more than 120 of his guitars, which raised £8.8 million at Christie’s. Last month there was an all-star version of his Local Hero