Telegraph Road: Difference between revisions

You mellow as you get older. It took me until my twnties: sometime, I think, in the 1990s. In this case enlightenment came by way of epiphany: watching a documentary about the Australian painter Brett Whiteley . In it, Whiteley was filmed at work in his studio, an enormous canvas on the floor, Jackson Pollock style (I recall it was of sea-birds, but I may well be confusing that with something else).  Before he started work, he cued up Dire Straits’ 1982 epic ''Telegraph Road'' on his turntable, and turned it up very loud. ''Seeing'' the song in this way — seeing how, a troubled, gifted artist like Whiteley heard it, put it in a very different context.<ref>I’ve not been able to find the documentary online — if anyone recognises it, let me know. Whiteley died of a heroin overdose in 1992, so it may well have been some retrospective documentary of his work published around that time.</ref>

I’ve seen the song, and the band, in a completely different way ever since. Their music is not perfect — Knopfler aspired to grandiosity when he might have avoided it, and most of his songs after ''Communique'' are too elaborate and too long, but if you can see through that there is real fibre and real muscle behind.