Gig Review: Mark Knopfler - Manchester Arena

It's been a long time since Mark Knopfler toured the UK, so it was with great anticipation that his fans awaited the gig. He still has some die-hard fans, some sat behind me from Germany, Holland and Poland were following the whole European tour.

A bald headed man wearing a Union Jack coat steps forward toward the stage, "Welcome back Manchester, Mark Knopfler" he announces to the mostly middle aged audience.

It was a minimal stage set - no flashy gimmicks like you normally get on the arena tours like the pop acts perform. Instead, he let the music do the talking. His 7 piece band are all accomplished musicians. You get the feeling that he could ask them to play whatever he felt like and they could with ease.

He starts off with Broken Bones, a track off his latest album, Tracker. The sound is crystal clear; he has obviously employed a good sound engineer. He revisits his album from 2012, Privateering to perform Corned Beef City (a song about his hometown of Glasgow) as the gig progresses.

New vocalist Ruth Moody joins Knopfler on stage to perform Skydiver, also a new track off his latest album whilst Nigel Hitchcock performs a great sax interlude with him on I Used To Could.

It was always going to be the Dire Straits tracks that were the best received songs of the night: Romeo and Juliet received a standing ovation. Sultans of Swing followed and that too received another standing ovation.

It wasn't over yet though as he still had some tricks up his sleeve such as Postcards from Paraguay and Telegraph Road (another Dire Straits number).

On Marbletown the fiddle playing of John McCusker embodied well with the bass playing of Glenn Worf turning the track on its head.

Keeping the faithful happy, So Far Away was an excellent way to start his 4 song encore. If people came to the gig expecting a lot more Dire Straits tracks they would have been disappointed, instead the night was more about his solo career which is just as good if not better than anything he wrote in his former band.