Skate Away With Romeo And Juliet Dire Straits

Skate Away with Romeo and Juliet Dire Straits

"Skateaway" is a 1980 rock song by Dire Straits, dealing with a female roller-skater breezing through busy city streets, while listening to a portable radio through her headphones. It appears on the band's 1980 album Making Movies. It was released as a single in 1980, and in January 1981 peaked at number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 37 on the UK Singles Chart. The song was accompanied by a video that was popular on MTV, featuring musician Jayzik Azikiwe (1958-2008) as Rollergirl. The daughter of Nigeria's first president Nnamdi Azikiwe, she was credited as Jay Carly in the video directed by Lester Bookbinder.

Record World said that the narrative is "as vivid as [Knopfler's] guitar is distinctive". Ultimate Classic Rock critic Michael Gallucci rated "Skateaway" as Dire Straits' 7th best song, saying that it "sticks closer to a traditional rock-radio format" than the other songs on Making Movies.

"Romeo and Juliet" is a rock song by the British rock band Dire Straits, written by frontman Mark Knopfler. It first appeared on the 1980 album Making Movies and was released as a single in 1981. The song subsequently appeared on the Dire Straits live albums Alchemy and On the Night, and later on Knopfler's live duet album with Emmylou Harris, Real Live Roadrunning (though Harris does not perform on the track). The track was also featured on the greatest hits albums Money for Nothing, Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits, and The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations.

The song was written by Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler and inspired by his broken romance with Holly Vincent, leader of the band Holly And The Italians. Some of the lyrics indicate that Knopfler felt she used him to boost her career:

How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals.

The line, "Now you just say, oh Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him," came from an interview where Holly Vincent was quoted as saying: "What happened was that I had a scene with Mark Knopfler and it got to the point where he couldn't handle it and we split up."

Mark Knopfler's younger brother David, who was rhythm guitarist in Dire Straits, left the band during the album sessions. Having two brothers in the same band caused tension and arguments. Said David: "I left because it was no longer possible for Mark and I to work in the same band. We'd be walking around in the studio with eyes averted to the floor. We no longer had a communicating relationship."

To help fill out the sound, Roy Bittan from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band played keyboards on the album.

Running an even six-minutes long, "Romeo And Juliet" was the second single (following "Skateaway") from the third Dire Straits album, Making Movies. The album was recorded at The Power Station in New York City with producer Jimmy Iovine, who had been engineer/mixer on Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run and producer on Patti Smith's Easter.

Dire Straits made a video for this song along with two others from the album: "Skateaway" and "Tunnel Of Love." All three were directed by Lester Bookbinder and sold on VHS as a compilation called Making Movies. MTV went on the air a year later, but didn't play them - they were too long, slow, and cerebral for their audience. Dire Straits got plenty of airtime on the network a few years later for their acclaimed CGI video for "Money For Nothing."

The line, "He's underneath the window she's singing, 'hey la my boyfriend's back'" references the Angels' 1963 hit "My Boyfriend's Back."

"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.

The song builds slowly from silence, which sometimes caused a panic response from FM Radio DJs with rabbit ears for dead air back in the day.