Song of the Day: Dire Straits – Skateaway

Can’t you just see her? Somewhere in his travels, Mark Knopfler caught sight of this vision of urban kinetic art, a lithe, beautiful girl on rollerblades speeding her way against traffic down a one-way street, weaving her elegant, effortless way between the brutish trucks and honking taxicabs of the gridlock in lower Manhattan, or maybe central London, headphones on, music playing, fragile but untouchable, the star of her own movie, teasing, almost taunting all those stalled vehicles like a toreador toys with bulls, toro, toro, taxi, see you tomorrow my son. She must herself have been music incarnate to inspire such a wonderfully atmospheric, amazingly brief six and a half minutes of pulsing, rhythmic tone poetry that isn’t so much a song as a soundtrack, as befit an album titled Making Movies, pointing the way to the superb scores he’d soon be composing for films like Local Hero and Princess Bride. She’s just so free, this rollergirl, in her own world where nobody can barge in to spoil the mood, and in painting the picture Knopfler expresses something you almost never hear when guys talk about women: delighted admiration.