"Telegraph Road" is a song by British rock band Dire Straits, written by Mark Knopfler.
[2] The song was first played live at the opening concert of the band's "Making Movies" Australian tour (Perth Entertainment Centre, 22 March 1981) as the final encore.
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.
[8] "Telegraph Road" is the last song recorded with Pick Withers on drums, as he was replaced by Terry Williams.
[9] In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone magazine, David Fricke praised "Telegraph Road", and he characterized as a "challenge to the average pop fan's attention span" with its "historic sweep and intimate tension".