I’ve always had a soft spot for the British rock group Dire Straits. They formed in London in 1977, which was in the middle of my time as a student at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University).

They had a unique sound. Just saying the names of some of their songs makes the tunes pop into my head: Sultans of Swing, Romeo and Juliet, Brothers in Arms, Money for Nothing, etc. (Did you know that Sting sings the signature falsetto introduction, background vocals, and a backing chorus of "I want my MTV” in Money for Nothing?)

The reason I mention all this here is that I just received an email from my friend David Ashton who hails from Down Under (David is an Englishman who grew up in Rhodesia, Africa, and who now burns his barbequed bangers (sausages) in Australia.

In his email, David included a link to a video he’d just posted on YouTube. This offering is called Dire Straits—Telegraph Road.

I must admit that I’m less familiar with this piece than many of their other hits, but I just had a quick Google while no one was looking. From the Wikipedia we discover:

Telegraph Road is a major north-south 70-mile (110 km) thoroughfare in Michigan, and Mark Knopfler was inspired to write the song while riding in the front of the tour bus, which made the journey down Telegraph Road.

At the same time, Knopfler was reading the novel "Growth of the Soil" by the Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and he was inspired to put the two together and write a song about the beginning of the development along Telegraph Road and the changes over the ensuing decades.

As David explains in the notes associated with this video:

I've always loved Dire Straits (I'm in good company; they were Princess Diana's favorite group!). And I've always wanted to do something like this, but getting the right pics was almost impossible.

AI has now made it possible to get almost any image you can think of (almost... it's sometimes difficult to get it to do what you want...). So, I've imagined these pictures to cover the couple of hundred years or so of the story that Telegraph Road tells.

Please watch and enjoy, and please click “Like” like if you do. I assert no copyright over the Dire Straits music in this video. Thanks, Dire Straits, for the fantastic music you've given us.

Personally, I think this is awesome. It’s obviously a labor of love on David’s part, so it would be great if you could visit his video, click “Like,” and post a comment to make him feel loved.