Not exactly breaking news, to put it mildly, it's just one of those things I was pretty sure I'd sussed out from the song ("Tunnel of Love" by Dire Straits, of course, and there's a Douglas Adams quote on the Wikipedia page) but never got around to actually googling to see if there was more to it. Sure enough, the Spanish City was a fairground/tourist attraction in the Northeast of England that Mark Knopfler visited as a kid. The first place he heard rock-n-roll played loud so, as a formative experience of his, it's made the rest of us that much richer. Although you'd barely know it if you just read the Rolling Stone Top 500 list.
