Songfacts®:

• There were a lot of roller skating songs in the disco era, but none like this one. "Skateaway" is the story of girl who skates her way around the city, listening to the rock station on her headphones. She's the bane of taxi drivers, but her many admirers love to watch her weave through traffic and crowds.
  
  The song was written by Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, who had a way with words and could really tell a story; you won't find another writer who can get the phrase "urban toreador" into a song and have it make sense.
• The album title, Making Movies, comes from a line in this song:
  
  She's making movies on location
  She don't know what it means
  
  As implied, the songs on the album are very visual, relying on rich imagery instead of hooky choruses. "Skateaway" was the first single, followed by "Romeo And Juliet" and "Tunnel Of Love."
• "Skateaway" runs 6:40 on the album but was cut down to 4:45 for the single. The song didn't get a lot of airplay but found a devoted following and earned airplay decades later on Classic Rock radio, where the full version was typically played.
• "Skateaway" preceded MTV by a year, but Dire Straits made a high-end video for it anyway as part of a compilation they sold on home video that also included the videos for "Romeo And Juliet" and "Tunnel Of Love." All of them were directed by Lester Bookbinder.
  
  The rollergirl in the "Skateaway" video is credited as "Jay Carly," but several sources claim it was really Jayzik Azikiwe, the daughter of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, president of Nigeria from 1963 to 1966. Azikiwe, a renown poet, died of cancer in 2008 at 49.
• Dire Straits was a trio for the Making Movies album, their third, as Mark Knopfler's brother, David, had left. They brought in keyboard player Roy Bittan of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band as a session player.
• The song builds slowly from silence, which sometimes caused a panic response from DJs with rabbit ears for dead air.