Tonight’s mystery artist says to get a record deal these days you need to have 10,000 Facebook followers and already be selling records and doing gigs, kind of a chicken egg situation. He is out on his own now but was a member of one of rock and rolls most successful bands.  Think you can guess who he might be??

This was told to The Telegraph by former Dire Straits bass man John Illsley.  He said:

Every schoolboy dreams of playing in a rock & roll band – and, I guess, owning his own pub – but it's much harder to make it happen these days. You don't get a record deal unless you have 10,000 Facebook followers, are already selling records and doing gigs. It's a chicken and egg situation. In the Seventies record companies would take you on and help you on a musical journey. When we formed Dire Straits in 1976, we simply recorded a demo tape with a few songs and gave it to Radio London DJ, Charlie Gillett, who played "Sultans of Swing" on his show. It went from there: we signed a recording contract with Phonogram a couple of months later and our first album went top 10 in every European country. We sold more than 120 million albums, won four Grammy Awards and three Brit Awards and spent more than 1,100 weeks in the UK album charts.

He goes on to tell how in 1993 Dire Straits was snowballing out of control. It had gotten too big and in his words “So we stopped”

These days John is an artist, pub owner, cancer survivor, husband, father, grandfather and musician still.  Here he is with Dire Straits with the song that started it all.

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