Creativity Quote by Mark Knopfler

There is a whole working-class romance baked into the phrase "when the theater let out". Knopfler isn’t mythologizing rock as destiny; he’s placing it in the unglamorous timetable of other people’s jobs. The King’s Head - a real pub-theatre in London - reads like a pre-fame coordinate on a map, the kind you only cite when you want the listener to smell the room: spilled beer, cramped stage, the audience drifting in from a play rather than a stadium.

The slip of "let nut" (almost certainly "let out") and the casual precision of "around 10:00 P.M". do important work. They make the memory feel handled, not rehearsed. This is how musicians talk when they’re remembering the hustle, not selling the legend. The subtext is discipline disguised as spontaneity: they’re "ready to go" on cue, because they’ve been waiting all night to earn their hour.

"Really get it on for about an hour or so" is classic Knopfler understatement. No talk of transcendence, just the physicality of performance and the limits of the slot. It hints at a scene where music is something you do after the respectable culture finishes - rock as the nocturnal afterparty to theater’s main event. In that framing, the thrill isn’t only the set; it’s the marginal space they carved out, nightly, before anyone knew the name on the guitar.