sorry I forgot to mention that to do local builds you will need to first manually install all the required packages listed inside "debian/control" file under "Build-Depends".
Ah! Of course, I realized I need to install package dependencies. What I did not realize is that I also need to install dependencies of the Amarok _source_ package - these are the ones I was missing. I installed all the packages in the control file and now I can compile Amarok without having to compile anything else.
Janek