I did have to check a few dates and names. It’s quite difficult to get the right tone with some of these things, and I had to go back quite a long way to get my memory working again. John Illsley: I am very pleased you enjoyed it. Great fun to read, and it is very well written.
#ROMEO AND JULIET DIRE STRAITS ALBUM PROFESSIONAL#
In an interview with The Telegraph Online all the way from UK, Illsley talks about the music of the time, their incredible journey, the highs and the lows, and why, as Mark Knopfler says in a succinct foreword to the book, they were lucky not to have been teenagers when confronted with the professional music game. Several misadventures later Illsley finds himself in London only to become friends with the guys who would soon become Dire Straits, the name that we also discover is anecdotally connected to Lindisfarne, a popular UK rock band of the time. Put it back on please,” he told the surgeon who said he wasn’t sure whether to take it off or sew it back on. But not before starting off as a bank clerk and then moving to a new job at a soup factory where one day he found his right thumb hanging off just below the nail after a cleaning accident _ ‘I am a guitar player.
#ROMEO AND JULIET DIRE STRAITS ALBUM FULL#
they had lived.At 72 Illsley, the band’s bassist and the only other founding member after Mark to stay the full 15-year course, recounts with understated humour and heartfelt love, their friendship, their ambitions, the discipline with which they went about things, and above all, the many people that crossed their paths and helped them achieve the pinnacle of success.Ībout his early beginnings in Middle England, Illsley writes: “…this is the world that shaped who I became, a small world that brought great comfort and security but a world that made me yearn for the distant shores of somewhere way more exotic.” That dream was fulfilled. A different interpretation of this song is that it's a sort of sequel, Mark Knopfler's (singer/songwriter of Dire Straits) extrapolation of events if things had turned out differently for Romeo and Juliet, ie. I've often thought the relationship described in "Romeo and Juliet", if it had been allowed to run it's course rather than been cut short by the characters' untimely death, would have burned out. Now it's the eighties, and poor old Romeo hasn't gotten over Juliet yet. If the song is at all autobiographical (and I haven't found any indication either way) the Angels song might indicate when the original romance took place, ie. The line, "He's underneath the window, she's singing, 'Hey la, my boyfriend's back' " is a reference not only to the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet" but also a 1963 pop-song by The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back". The first two verses (above) are the man remembering how things used to be. The Romeo and Juliet in the song didn't die rather they broke up and lived on. Rather than a literal interpretation of Shakespeare's play, the lyrics indicate that a man is pining for a woman who once loved him-presumably the love of his life-though it didn't work out.
You shouldn't come around here singing up to people like that.
He's underneath the window, she's singing, "Hey la, my boyfriend's back. Juliet says, "Hey, it's Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack!" Says something like, "You and me babe, how about it?" Laying everybody low with a love song that he made.įinds a streetlight, steps out of the shade A love-struck Romeo sings the streets a serenade