The Riddle (Nik Kershaw song)

"The Riddle" is the title of a song recorded by English pop rock artist Nik Kershaw. It was released in 1984 as the lead single from the album of the same name. It reached number three on the UK Singles Chart.

Lyrics

The "riddling" lyrics caused much puzzlement and speculation among listeners as to their meaning, which was further fuelled by record company MCA's decision to run a competition to work out the meaning - without either telling Nik or even bothering to ask him what the meaning was. Had they done so, they would have discovered that there is in fact no meaning at all - the lyrics were nothing but gibberish, a "guide vocal" thrown together to fit the music, or in Nik's own words: "nonsense, rubbish, bollocks, the confused ramblings of an 80s popstar".^[1] However, at the 2011 '80s Rewind Festival Henley Kershaw announced the song as being about "love...loss...and bollocks" like that.

Music video

The music video to "The Riddle" depicts Kershaw walking through a house shaped like a question mark, making his way through certain obstacles and looking through drawers while singing. The video depicts many references to Lewis Caroll's book Alice in Wonderland with an appearance of young girl exiting the room through a small door, two portly gentlemen who resemble Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and an observation made by Kershaw to Through the Looking Glass. At the beginning of the music video Nik is seen trying to get through a door with a screwdriver, it ends with the camera moving up away from Nik to reveal that the question mark is lying in the street, at which point a man in a green costume seen earlier in the video comes and picks it up. The green man is the Riddler, a villain from the Batman comics. Kershaw claimed the video was inspired by his love for post-modern artistic expressionism.

Chart performance

Association

The martial music used in the song, has been used as an Irish Republican motivational tune.

Gigi D'Agostino version

"The Riddle" was covered as a dance song by Gigi D'Agostino, which was released in D'Agostino's album, L'Amour Toujours. The same lyrics are used as in Kershaw's song, but the order is changed and the tempo is faster.

Music video

For this song, Gigi D'Agostino created a new music video, but kept it in a surrealist style, similar in spirit to Nik Kershaw's music video. The music video, which was made by Andreas Hykade, features La Linea styled animation, taking place entirely with white lines on a light green background. Also, he shortened and rearranged his cover for the song, so the music video is 3:42 while the audio track on the CD is 4:45.

Other cover versions

Ukrainian band Скрябін released a cover under the name "Любити платити" (to love to pay) in 2002 with Nik Kershaw accompanying on keyboard. Other covers have been performed by Thunderstone, Prezioso and De Heideroosjes.

References