Did they just get tired of writing/touring? Lost the creative edge and thought it best to hang it up?
Check out I Tunes and “Song for Sonny Liston”...just awesome. I like “Cleaning My Gun” ,too.
(Just the band’s name implies hateful, exclusive rhetoric....”straights” ?? why not “Dire Androgynous People” ?)
"Since the break up of Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler has shown no interest in reforming the group. However, keyboardist Guy Fletcher has been associated with almost every piece of Knopfler's solo material to date, and Danny Cummings has made frequent appearances, including one on Knopfler's 2007 solo album, Kill to Get Crimson. In October 2008 Knopfler declined a suggestion by John Illsley that they should reform. Illsley said that a reunion would be "entirely up to Mark", while Knopfler is quoted as saying "Oh, I don't know whether to start getting all that stuff back together again", and that the global fame that came his way in the 1980s "just got too big"."
I know the Kill To Get Crimson tour ran in Europe until the latter part of '09. The guy's over 60 now, so maybe he's just kicking back :-)
Mark Knopfler has put out a lot of solo material since Dire Straits and it’s quite good. However, you won’t hear it on commercial radio.
Knopfler has been very prolific since Dire Straits, he’s done solo albums, the Notting Hillbillies, a collaboration with Emmylou Harris, an album with Chet Atkins.
It just got to the point where Dire Straits got so big, that Knopfler wasn’t comfortable with it anymore, and preferred to be more low-key, but his solo stuff is up there with any Dire Straits material, in fact, if they just simply labeled his albums as ‘Dire Straits’, they would have sold a lot more.
He's done a couple of movie soundtracks (don't ask which, I just remember saying "Hunh! Mark Knopfler!").
I'm sure that he could care what PC Canadian Radio thinks of a song that he wrote and performed more than 25 years ago.
Hardly. Knopfler has had a very successful "solo" career, releasing several albums and touring regularly after the dissolution of Dire Straits in 1995.