Eye - 03 July 2015

From singing songs to sweet sounds

by Eye 3rd July 2015

Sing a song of Basil

A song on a recently-released album has been inspired by Quaker poet Basil Bunting.

Mark Knopfler, who first found fame with Dire Straits, has spoken of his inspiration for the song ‘Basil’, which appears on his new album Tracker.

‘I was about fourteen or so and I was a copy boy [for the Newcastle-based Evening Chronicle]. There was a rather forbidding figure who worked there and he wrote an epic poem called ‘Briggflatts’…