From Fender to Pensa, Gibson to Gretsch: every Mark Knopfler guitar tells a story

‘I was so in love with guitars that it was definitely unreasonable,’ says Mark Knopfler, ‘probably obsessional.’ It is a frame of mind that most collectors would recognise: the unstoppable desire to fill a gap, the sensation of falling in love with an inanimate object, the rush of joy when it becomes your own.

But a musician’s cache of instruments is not the same as a drawing room lined with paintings or a library of first editions, because instruments are practical things. His guitars, which will be offered in The Mark Knopfler Guitar Collection on 31 January 2024 at Christie’s in London, are not so much a collection as the contents of his toolbox. They are the rasps and chisels that he uses to shape his songs.

Like all tools, these guitars have been altered by use; they have physically absorbed the habitual gestures of the man who played them for so long. That makes each guitar a unique and intimate object — and that applies not just to the hand-crafted ones but to the factory-made models, too.

‘Why should these combinations of wood and wire have this mystery to them?’ Knopfler wonders. ‘Part of the answer, maybe, is that in the old days those pickups were wound by hand. The ladies who worked in the factory would be winding away, and they’d be talking to each other, so you might sometimes get extra wire on, say, a Telecaster pickup. I’ve got a ’54 Tele — and there must have been a couple of good stories going on when that one was being wired.’

It’s a wistful notion — typical of Knopfler — that stories could literally be hard-wired into the circuitry of a good guitar: all it takes to release those tales, like the genie from its lamp, is the touch of a lucky owner. And yet it is a fact that all the guitars in the sale have a history worth recounting. Here below is a selection of the more than 120 offered in the sale. Some of the guitars are precious collectibles; some are masterpieces of design and ingenuity; some hold a special place in Knopfler’s own musical journey. All of them will soon be a tool in the hands of a new player, which is what Knopfler wants for them, and why he is letting them go.

Höfner Super Solid

Mark Knopfler was a guitar fiend before he was an actual guitarist. As a boy, he used to mime to songs using his father’s set square as an instrument. Later, as a teenager, he pored over Fender catalogues for so long that even now he can remember the smell of the pages and the grain of the paper.

The red Fender of his dreams was out of reach, so his first guitar — a generous present on his 15th birthday — was a red Höfner Super Solid, an identical model to this one. It cost £50 in 1964, and was plenty good enough for a talented lad to learn on. From a design point of view, it is a strange beast. The double parallel inlays on the neck look like railway sleepers, diminishing into the distance. The ‘butterfly’ tuning pegs are slightly incongruous, as if they were borrowed from elsewhere — and in fact they are a feature of the sparkly blue Eko 700 that is also in the sale. The Höfner Super Solid may not have been Knopfler’s ‘true object of desire’, but he loved it instantly, and spent his apprentice years in its company.

Gibson J-200 Celebrity

Almost 17 inches wide at the hip, packing huge volume and presence, the J-200 is a guitar made for the stage. Early Country and Western artists such as Ray Whitley rated it; so too did the subsequent generation of rock ’n’ rollers and folk singers: the Everly Brothers (a Gibson J-180 Everly Brothers is offered in the sale), Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly. Emmylou Harris, Knopfler’s collaborator on the album All The Roadrunning, has said that the J-200 ‘represents the best of American art. Nothing else even comes close.’

In 1985, to mark Gibson’s 90th anniversary, the company produced an edition of 90 J-200s, called the ‘Celebrity’. It had the familiar bridge — its scrolls lending it a raffish look, as if it were sporting a villainous moustache — and there were also special decorative touches such as the floral inlays on the fretboard and the headstock.

Some of the Celebrities went to distinguished players of the day. Dire Straits bassist John Illsley had number 42, and later sold it to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd (it was included in Christie’s 2019 sale of his guitars). Knopfler received this one, number 40, in the middle of the Brothers In Arms Tour. He kept it with him on the road, sometimes using it on stage in place of his Ovation Adamas. And at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball in 1987, Knopfler and Chet Atkins, duetting on their J-200 Celebrities, performed a memorable arrangement of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.

Pensa-Suhr MK-1 Custom

The day that Mark Knopfler met Rudy Pensa was the start of a lifelong friendship. For more than four decades, Knopfler has been a loyal customer of Rudy’s Music in Manhattan, as well as a champion of Pensa’s work. In 1988, Pensa’s workshop made him a guitar from scratch: the Pensa-Suhr MK-1 Custom. Knopfler wanted ‘to cut down on changeovers’ on stage, and so required a guitar that had ‘both the sweet-sounding single-coil and the more explosive humbucker’. In other words, he was dreaming of a Fender-Gibson hybrid, an instrument that echoed the shape of a Strat, but had a carved top like a Les Paul.

It so happened that Pensa’s principal luthier, John Suhr, was working on just such an experimental body. Suhr had intended to keep it for himself, but now that half-made body was repurposed for Knopfler, who wanted to play the new guitar at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert in London in June. To meet Knopfler’s specs, Suhr fitted the body with a maple neck, single-coil pickups at the neck and middle, a humbucker at the bridge, plus gold-plated hardware.

Knopfler took possession of the guitar just in time for the Mandela gig, and in the years afterwards he used it on stage both for ‘Sultans Of Swing’, with its bell-like arpeggios, and for ‘Money For Nothing’, with its throaty, growling riff — proof, if it were needed, that this Pensa-Suhr masterpiece was two guitars in one.

Each subsequent Pensa commission was crafted to meet Knopfler’s special recording or performance needs — but one guitar came about differently. On an upper floor of the store on West 48th Street, in what was once a saxophone repair shop, Pensa found a forgotten block of wood that had long been used as a step by the saxophone cleaning tub. Once cut, it looked from the grain to be at least 200 years old, and so must have come from a tree that took root before the American Revolution. It had a wonderful ‘flame’ pattern in the grain, a kind of tiger stripe that made it perfect for a guitar top. Three caps were made from the block. One ‘flame redwood’ guitar went to Knopfler, who used it for tracks including ‘Golden Heart’. The name of the song isn’t a reference to the honey-coloured wood from the core of that ancient tree — but it easily could be.

Ormston Burns solid-body electric jazz

In the early 1960s, before Stratocasters became widely available in Britain, James Ormston Burns’s solid-body guitars were the best homegrown alternative. Knopfler’s first hero, Hank Marvin, played a Burns from time to time. Burns himself became known as the ‘English Leo Fender’.

Like Knopfler, James Burns grew up in the northeast of England, but made his name way on down south. As a young man, serving as an RAF fitter in North Africa, Burns constructed an electric guitar from aircraft parts and other military bric-a-brac. The guitars that he later manufactured professionally retained that ingenious spirit: innovation was his USP. The ‘split sound’ advertised in the name of this model was one such newfangled invention. It meant that the guitar has a setting whereby the bridge pickup channels the top three strings and the neck pickup the bottom three, making a sound that is simultaneously super-bassy and hyper-trebly.

Burns’s imaginative approach came with a wacky design edge. The headstock of this guitar is stretched to accommodate long, teardrop-shaped casings. The white scratchplate, like a bovine skull, accentuates the dramatic bull’s-head shape that is typical of Burns guitars (in particular the ‘Bison’). In this instance, the white-and-blue combination is strangely Wedgwood: it makes the guitar look quintessentially English, like the clever man who dreamed it up.

Fender Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster prototype
and Fender Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster with ‘lipstick’ pickups

Knopfler’s first vintage Strat was manufactured in 1961 — a very good year. So when Fender asked him to help develop a ‘signature’ Stratocaster, his aim was to capture the essence of his ’61. The only prototype was put together in 2002-2003. The physique of a ’61 model was achieved by combining a 1957-style ash body (actually manufactured in 1997) with a new neck that had the rounded ‘soft C’ profile characteristic of 1962. ‘The odds and ends that I thought would go well together just happened to work,’ says Knopfler.

When it came to the production models (of which there are two in the sale: lot 93 and lot 94) the challenge was not just to replicate the architecture of the crossbred prototype, but to make a new Fender that had the look and feel of a much-played 40-year-old quasi-antique. That meant finding authentic ways of recreating the effects of ageing and usage. To that end, the Signature was made to be slightly lighter than standard (because the body dries out over the years), and the neck was finished with a honeyed lacquer to mimic the patina of time.

Knopfler opted for Texas Special pick-ups, because they naturally possess the ‘microphonic’ quality that comes with years of playing. But he took one Signature model for himself, and had twangy Danelectro-style ‘lipstick’ pickups fitted to it, to see how their surfer sound sat with a Strat. He used that lipstick Strat regularly on the road with Bob Dylan in 2011. On the last night of the tour, when the final encore came round, Knopfler duetted with Dylan on the prayerful song ‘Forever Young’. His performance included a beautiful solo played on this guitar. In later years he kept the guitar at home and tuned it to open C, a favourite tuning of bluesmen and fingerpickers the world over.

The ‘lipstick’ Strat, like all Knopfler Signatures, has the guitarist’s autograph on the headstock. By coincidence, or else some subconscious act of devotion to the brand, the capital M of his name is almost identical to the large looping ‘F’ in Fender’s logo.

Schecter black Telecaster

This Schecter is a kind of four-handed collaboration. First came the blueprint of the guitar, which is pure Fender and has barely changed since its launch in 1950. The physical components, meanwhile, are the work of Schecter Guitar Research, a California-based company that made its name supplying high-quality spare parts to luthiers and repairers. The third mind involved in this guitar is Rudy Pensa’s: his workshop built it for Knopfler. Lastly, there is the input of Knopfler himself, who wanted a guitar that could stand in for his precious vintage Fenders on tour with Dire Straits. It had to be tough enough to take the knocks of life on the road.

The resulting guitar has real heft: it is physically weighty, and it produces a heavy sound. It is a sledgehammer of a guitar, perfect for a loud and grungy song such as ‘Solid Rock’. Knopfler used it both for the recording of that song and for live performances.

This Schecter was originally all black. At some point in the 1990s, Knopfler had an off-white pickguard fitted. With its new colour scheme, the guitar still had a ‘mean’ look, as Knopfler saw it, but now it was stylish with it — like a Chicago gangster’s two-tone spectator brogues.

Red sunburst Danelectro Hornet

Mark Knopfler is known for the thought that he puts into matching the guitar to the song. He works hard to find the guitar that speaks with the right voice for what he has to say. He made extensive use of this Danelectro on the album Shangri-La, where many of the songs are about American heroes and antiheroes: Sonny Liston and Elvis Presley, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, or the snake-oil salesmen of yore.

The Danelectro fitted the bill because it is itself a piece of Americana. Nathan Daniel, founder of Danelectro, began by making entry-level amplifiers for Sears Roebuck department stores. Later, he introduced an affordable guitar that could be sold alongside his amps. His guitars were targeted at teenagers with big dreams; a generation of American rock musicians learned their first chords and riffs on a Danelectro.

The guitar has a lovely, fluid shape — like an ink blot or an oil slick — but the most distinctive feature is the pickups. Daniel found an astonishingly cheap and simple way to produce them. It’s been said that he bought up quantities of surplus lipstick tubes, into which he inserted a bar magnet wrapped in wire. Danelectro’s first ‘lipstick’ pickups could not have been more basic, yet they turned out to have a unique tone — perfect for slide guitar and twangy surfer riffs, but also for the gentle, reflective fingerpicking that Knopfler deploys so often, and so effectively.

Gretsch hollow-bodied Chet Atkins

The Gretsch company was part of the 1950s boom in fine American guitar-making. It was a name to rival Fender and Gibson. This 1957 hollow-bodied 6120 is a thing of beauty as well as a masterful piece of musical engineering. It was originally sold with the endorsement of virtuoso player Chet Atkins, a man much admired by Knopfler.

Its visual appeal lies in the shape and the hue: the 6120 is as round and warmly coloured as a ripe apricot. The gold scratchplate, on its stilts, is like the raised lid of a tiny gilded grand piano, while the tremolo arm is a kind of super-ergonomic ring spanner, made to fit the contours of the palm. Knopfler has said that he likes to hold it loosely while fingerpicking, so as to let the natural movement of his hand create the vibrato.

He bought the guitar in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2004, during what he calls his ‘little love affair’ with hollow-bodied guitars. He owned another Chet Atkins Gretsch which is also in the sale: a plum-coloured Gretsch ‘Super Chet’ 7690. It dates from the mid-1970s, and came as a gift to Knopfler from Chet Atkins himself.

Martin 00-30

This Martin is the oldest instrument in the sale. Its serial number pinpoints the date of manufacture exactly: it is one of twelve 00-30s that Martin produced in 1917 at the factory-workshop in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. In total, only 101 exemplars of this model were ever made. Knopfler bought his 00-30 in California in 2007, and used it soon after on his album Get Lucky. The guitar seems designed for intimacy, so sits well with the folky vibe in that album’s musical tales of working men.

The 00-30 also exemplifies Knopfler’s special fondness both for Martins and for small-bodied guitars — for parlour guitars like this one, and even smaller instruments such as Martin’s Terz guitars. (‘It’s a mini-Martin, standard tuning but a third higher,’ he says. ‘I’ve found them so seductive for parts.’) The guitar made by Australian luthier Stephen Kearney fits this bijou category. It is based on Martin’s 000 body — more precisely, one that belonged to Stephen Stills and caught Knopfler’s eye.

And Knopfler’s own signature Martin, called the ‘Ragpicker’s Dream’ after his album of that name, feels like a distant descendant of his early-20th-century 00-30. The shared DNA is there in its modest shape and its unassuming character, recognisable like a familiar face in an old family photograph.

Gibson Les Paul ‘Gold Top’, signed by 33 music stars

The final lot in the Mark Knopfler Guitar Collection is special, because all the proceeds of its sale will go to the Teenage Cancer Trust. Knopfler is a patron of the organisation, which is the only UK charity providing specialised nursing and support to young people with cancer.

The guitar is a Gibson Les Paul Standard ‘Gold Top’. And what makes this one unique is the fact that it has been signed by many of the finest guitarists and best-loved rock musicians on the planet. On that gilded body are the autographs of David Gilmour, Ringo Starr, The Edge, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Sting, Roger Daltrey, Nile Rogers, Joan Jett and Pete Townshend, among others.

The figure in the sketch by artist Jamie Hewlett — co-founder of Gorillaz — is himself doing a Townshend: he’s about to bring that guitar down like a sledgehammer. On the back of the Gold Top are more famous autographs: Albert Lee, Joan Armatrading, Mike Rutherford, Duane Eddy and more. Ronnie Wood, alone among the 33 signatories, has written his name on the headstock.

But the guitar is not just a wonderful instrument; it is also a kind of golden key. Because the winning bidder for this lot will also receive two tickets to the launch of a new musical undertaking, the exact nature of which will remain a secret until some weeks after the auction. All that can be said for now is that Mark Knopfler is leading the project, which, like the guitar, has other names on it besides his own — and will be something to treasure.