When he was developing his guitar playing chops as a teenager in the 1960s, Mark Knopfler thought his idols were the Everly Brothers.
It wasn’t until quite a few years later that he realised his reverence had been slightly misguided. Yes, the Everlys wrote great tunes, but that fantastic guitar sound on most of those records wasn’t coming from Don or Phil. It was, of course, the great Chet Atkins.
Once Knopfler understood the foundational influence that Atkins had on his own guitar playing, he eventually decided to take advantage of his Dire Straits cachet in the 1980s and connect with the Nashville legend about a possible collaboration. That led to some memorable jam sessions and a 1990 album titled Neck and Neck.
“Precision, feeling, melody, perfect accompaniment,” Knopfler told The Guardian that year, trying to succinctly describe what made Atkins so special, “He doesn’t just say ‘Hi, how are you?’ with the guitar, you get a really cohesive picture. He can play a guitar concerto, but we actually play a lot of very simple things in C, and getting the maximum expression and beauty out of simple things is what makes a musician.”
Atkins, in turn, felt like he could actually tell what sort of personality Knopfler would have just by hearing his playing on Dire Straits’ breakout single, ‘Sultans of Swing’. “I thought he was a nice guy by his playing,” said Atkins, who died in 2001, “You can tell what a person is like by the way he plays.”
Atkins might have been slightly biased. Since Knopfler had grown up emulating his style, he probably heard a bit of himself, a fellow nice guy, in those ‘Sultans’ solos. Both guitarists are masters of the finger-picking style, “a bouncing thumb for bass and two or three fingers for melody”, as Atkins put it.
Knopfler’s only regret about the Neck and Neck album was that, due to scheduling and geographical limitations, most of the songs were recorded in separate sessions, with Atkins in his studio in the States and Knopfler in his own in England. For that reason, the best memories from their collaborations weren’t necessarily captured on tape. They were the loose, “getting to know you” jams they had in the same space together.
“Chet was otherworldly,” Knopfler told Guitarist magazine in 2025, “I used to go round to his office and hang out, and I’ll never forget, we once played and sang the song ‘Kentucky’ all morning. Chet had such facility and knowledge, and yet what he wanted to do was play ‘Kentucky’, which has two chords, all morning long
“I only remember him being slightly put‑out once,” Knopfler added, “when John Fahey said he’d been double-tracking. Chet was not pleased by that. And he wrote to whatever magazine it was and said, ‘You can learn to do this with your own two hands; you don’t need double‑tracking’. I mean…he could play ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ at the same time.”
