(Credits: Apple Music)
Fri 28 November 2025 7:30, UK
When archaeologists unearthed the bones of a new type of dinosaur in Madagascar in 2001, they gave it the name Masiakasaurus knopfleri (“vicious lizard of Knopfler”) in honour of Mark Knopfler.
The creature didn’t really bear a striking resemblance to the Dire Straits frontman; the digging crew had just been listening to his music at the time, with one of the scientists claiming, “Whenever we played him, we found more of the skeletons”.
Knopfler himself was arguably at risk of becoming a rock and roll dinosaur at the start of the 21st century, 15 years removed from the astronomical heights of Dire Straits, when Brothers in Arms had made them the top-selling rock band in the world. For much of the ‘90s, he’d turned his focus more toward film soundtracks and producing records for his friends. With the release of 2000’s Sailing to Philadelphia, though, Knopfler had returned to the spotlight with a strong album of solo material that scored him his first Top 5 UK album in many moons.
Like much of the work throughout his career, Sailing to Philadelphia pulled much of its inspiration not from Knopfler’s own personal roots in the north of England, nor from Madagascar for that matter, but from the good old USA. The title track, in particular, was a showcase of Knopfler’s entrance into true middle age, as his obsession with a very long novel about 18th-century American history, Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 book Mason & Dixon, gave him the idea of trying to interpret the entire massive story into a single song.
It was sort of like scoring a film, just instead of working alongside the director’s vision, Knopfler could bash and contort Pynchon’s 700-page epic into a bite-sized piece at his own discretion.
“It’s a massive book reduced to four verses of a song,” Knopfler told the Ottawa Citizen in 2001, “A two-minute take on a two-ton book.” Technically, ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’ is a fairly lengthy ballad of five minutes and 29 seconds, but compared to Pynchon’s 33-hour audio book of Mason & Dixon, it does save one some time. “Mason & Dixon is about America, which is one the most fantastic stories of the last millennium and one that continues,” Knopfler explained, as if he were providing a belated blurb for the book’s dust jacket.
In the song version, Knopfler casts himself as the surveyor and “Geordie boy” Jeremiah Dixon, who travels from England to America with astronomer Charles Mason, played by guest vocalist James Taylor. This was the real-life pair who established the famed Mason-Dixon line that would effectively divide the North from the South in colonial America.
“When Mason and Dixon were in America, it was a turning point,” said Knopfler, who appropriately read much of Pynchon’s book while jetting across the Atlantic himself, adding, “There was the beginning of the rumbles of independence. America was a colony of England at the time, and then it turned around and colonised the world with its music and films, and a great many other things. And of course, I was one of the victims of that musical influence.”
Somewhat ironically, Sailing to Philadelphia reached the Top 5 in a dozen different countries, but didn’t resonate quite as well on either side of the old Mason-Dixon Line, as the album topped out at number 60 in the States; a country not always in love with fact-checking its own history.
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