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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
You left Dire Straits before the success of "Brothers in Arms." Do you ever second-guess yourself for that?
Oh, no. It was the best decision I ever made in my life, and it wasn't really a decision. It felt like if I didn't take that step I would be crushed by a 1,000-ton weight. I felt this weight coming down towards me hurtling through the sky.
What made you feel that way?
I felt that I was losing myself in the process of the machinery of fame and celebrity and I didn't think that it had much to do with what I was interested in.
Which was what?
Songwriting and creative art -- the artist aspect of it. The Straits were meant to be a cult band. My ambition for the Straits was that we were going to be like an English Little Feat, not that we were going to be some sort of household name. I didn't ever want that for the band. It turned into this mega-million thing that was never meant to happen as far as I was concerned. It kind of failed when we did that. It kind of frightened me, our success.
Listening to your new solo album, "Wishbones," it actually sounds like Dire Straits' first couple of albums.
I haven't taken any great detours. I've just carried on doing what I do. All my albums are just a continuation of the same line.
Several songs on the record, such as "King of Ashes" and "Jericho," have these biblical themes. What led you to that?
We can blame St. Bob [Dylan] for that, I think. I think he kind of wrote the book on that one, didn't he? He was the first one there for all of us on that one. He was the one that sort of tipped us with songs like "Tell your Ma, tell your Pa, our loves are gonna grow ooh-wah, ooh-wah" [actually from the song "Talkin' World War III Blues"]. He opened it all up, didn't he? With songs like "Gates of Eden." He wrote the book on it. I was an 11-year-old just eating that stuff up. I think that's part of it.
The other part is that I do actively pursue the questions. I do investigate the issues of the questions. I've been reading Joseph Campbell for the last 15 years. I'm aware of those issues as long as I'm allowed to. In the 1950s you weren't allowed to -- the songs had to be in a cartoon formula. If you're writing "Spider-Man" comics and then one day someone says, "Have you ever seen this play by this guy named Shakespeare called 'Hamlet'?" You suddenly go, "You can write about that too? I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that the rules allowed it."
I think what the 1960s and '70s did do, to get back to your earlier question, was to open up the possibilities of what was legitimate and what was OK to call a song. Now there are no restrictions on what you can and can't do when you're making your work, so why not? If the shoe fits ...
In the United States in 2003, as far as religion and the Bible are concerned, the radical right wing has totally absconded with it and controls all debate about it.
Well, I don't think they do. I think that the margins are huge. What the right have done -- the extreme right I think they are really -- they've tried to con us into believing that this is mainstream. The truth of the matter is that the margins are now so big. I work in the margins. Anybody who works in art rather than commerce is working in the margins. I think the margins are now so huge that the mainstream is completely buried. They have to spend billions on advertising and marketing to bullshit us about the fact that they're the mainstream. They're not the mainstream. They're just pressure groups lobbing money and bullshit. The margins are going to win. The margins have got it. There are more liberals in the margins than there are right-wing people in the mainstream.
It was always the way. I mean Thatcher and Reagan were a minority clique that stole power just as this bunch have with their money and their oil. They're not going to thrive forever on this bullshit. They're just telling us bullshit and lies and expecting us to swallow it. George Bush is just bullshit from start to finish. He was bullshit before he was president too. Everything that he said and did was absolute bullshit too -- that's why I wrote "Karla Faye."
That was my next question. You chastise him pretty hard in that song.
I think he deserves it, don't you? I think that he got off lightly there. I think anyone who can sneer at somebody on death row, and anyone who has the possibility of offering a reprieve and redemption and just says "God bless you" after icing them, is going to go to a special kind of perdition. There's a special place in hell for someone who can do that.
