STRAIT TALK
Dire Straits bassist John Illsley, who recently released a memoir and a new solo album, is showing no signs of slowing down. What was it like playing all those massive stadiums? Find out here…
One hundred and twenty million albums on this planet bear the bass parts of John Illsley, who recently released his memoir, My Life In Dire Straits. The autobiography traces his journey from the earliest days through the Eighties, when the Straits were an unstoppable, ubiquitous force – and beyond them, too. From the outset of the project, he tells us, he wanted to ensure his memories were contexted accurately.
“This is not about me scoring points,” says the bassist. “It is a celebration of the time we had and how we survived it. We stayed intact, and stayed friends – and a lot of people don’t. I decided right from the word go that I didn’t want people coming at me saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that – how dare you!’”
He adds: “I know some people will find glaring problems with my book, because their version of events is different from mine. This is my version of events. A lot of people did get hurt on the way, for various reasons, and you don’t want to get them to revisit that. I don’t think it’s fair.”
Aside from My Life and its associated audiobook, fans wanting a little more information can always nip down to the East End Arms, a pub and hotel that Illsley bought in 1990 in order to secure it for the local community. Situated in the New Forest National Park, the venue is renowned for its good food and great atmosphere.
“It’s basically a local boozer where you can get a good meal,” he says. “There’s also a public bar where the locals go in, and it’s like a mini community centre, I think. It’s nice when people tell me they had to come to the pub [because of John’s musical background], and people are a bit more respectful now than they probably used to be.”
You won’t see Illsley changing barrels or pulling pints, though. “I don’t do that,” he confirms. “I just take care of the feel of the place, like I take care of the feel of the music.”
That feel is crucial to the work he’s produced over the years. Although Illsley has bass chops to spare, he’s never been one to dominate a song with twiddly flashiness. “Like John McVie, I like to leave as much space as possible, because the essence of bass – as far as I’m concerned – is to make the rhythm section, the engine room, as tight as possible, particularly in Dire Straits.”
He continues: “That was my approach from the word go, to leave room for keyboards or guitars. I could have put in a whole load of other notes, but in a sense, leaving air around the bass had something quite significant to do with the Straits sound – certainly on the first two albums.”
That pair of late-Seventies releases – 1978’s self-titled debut and ’79’s Communique – put the group front and centre of the music scene. They were a band in the purest sense, too, with everyone pitching in to get the bandleader Mark Knopfler’s songs to sound the best they could.
The pinnacle of the Straits career was the remarkable Brothers In Arms, released in 1985 and soaring to number one in multiple territories. That LP alone has sold 30 million units – another unfathomable number. Dire Straits certainly put the hard work in to make that record shine, recalls Illsley, of the Caribbean-tracked release.
“There was a lot of preparation done before we actually went to the studio. We explored lots of different ideas, so that when we got to Montserrat there wasn’t a lot of messing around. We knew pretty much how we were going to put it down.”
As he explains, “Our band was really about feel, pretty much from the word go. The thing that I enjoyed, probably more than anything else, was trying to get that feel right. You know, sometimes you hit a string a bit harder than you would normally, or you hold back on it, or let it ring longer or shorter. You have to feel your way into the song.”
There is a purity to approaching music in such a way, and for Illsley it was key in him picking up the bass in the first place. “I started on bass in 1964 or ’65 and I thought, ‘Yeah, I feel comfortable in this space’. The space was the bass and I thought, ‘This is me’. I felt at home pretty much straight away, and then it was, ‘Okay, what can I do with this music?’”
As well as the aforementioned McVie, particularly on the early records, Illsley nods to a couple of the bassists that he admired at the time. “I thought Bill Wyman was perfect with the Stones, and Paul McCartney is always recognised as a fantastic songwriter. Some of his bass-lines are extraordinary. As for Jaco Pastorius, just watching him on one occasion was mind-boggling. It was at the Rainbow Theatre in London. He did a half-hour solo just on his own and I thought, ‘Well, I don’t