1937 D’ANGELICO EXCEL
John D’Angelico, one of history’s most influential archtop guitar makers, built only 1,164 guitars in his lifetime, starting out in a Kenmare Street, Manhattan workshop. Earlier pre-war examples of the Excel tend to have less ornamentation than the ones that followed later, so this example does not feature the ‘stairstep’ tailpiece that became a D’Angelico hallmark from around 1940, nor other Art Deco style appointments in the stepped Grover tuners used on the 1961 Excel in issue 421. We played Mark’s stunning 30s Excel and found its voice to be airy, sonorous and surprisingly versatile.
“I felt as though I had been working all my life towards that break with ‘Sultans Of Swing’”
wouldn’t give you any money for 18 months. I think they’re still like that today, actually. So it was No 1 all over the world, but I didn’t get any money from it for ages, and we were still living there for a good while. But I managed to move up the road after a few years. All those deals get renegotiated, in return for which you give them more albums, that’s how it works. And it slowly edges up to where you get a reasonable royalty.”
Nonetheless, he remains grateful for the lean years when there was nobody to carry your amp from van to venue for you.
“I know plenty of musicians who have never unloaded a lorry and I think, I’m sorry for them, because if you’ve never really done anything like that then you don’t really know what it’s about. What people are thinking, all the rest of it,” he says.
The new album isn’t all grizzled autobiography, however. There are moments of offbeat humour to be found in tracks such as My Bacon Roll, which gives voice to the frustrations of middle-aged men on corporate team-building days. Drovers’ Road, by contrast, is the kind of rugged ballad with a stirring Celtic inflection that Knopfler made his own from Local Hero onwards.
“I don’t think it’s ever very far from the surface,” he says of the Celtic influence on the track, but adds that he’s far from being a pious disciple of folk music tradition. “I’ve got to the stage where if there was a Celtic band playing I would spoil it with my Les Paul or something, you know? If I write something like that and if it’s got an instrumental coda that goes between the verses, something like Laughs And Jokes And Drinks And Smokes, I’m quite happy to put some guitar in there. I don’t mind sort of crashing in through the French windows of a folk tune that’s being played,” he admits.
“I’m not much of a purist, you know – I don’t really think there has to be a classical form for anything. I would put a concrete mixer on a record if I thought that it was going to help it. I don’t want to be orthodox necessarily. It’s like those people who say, ‘Oh, this is an English folk club,’ you know. You’re joking aren’t you? Go and fuck yourself! I’m not interested in that kind of thing.
“It’s like bluegrass. There are people who think, ‘Oh, well, it’s not bluegrass unless it’s got