Nik Kershaw - The Riddle

The Riddle dropped in the fall of 1984, several months after his debut Human Racing was released. 1984 was a good year for Mister Kershaw. Although The Riddle wasn't as successful in North America as his debut, it was the album I preferred. I likely picked this up a couple of years after it came out, as I still think of this as being an album that I was listening to in 1986 or 1987. Which means I found it on sale and took a chance on it.

Sounds about right.

Listening to this now, with the benefit of hindsight and perspective that I didn't have at the time, I'm struck by the change in tack between his debut and what he was writing and recording for his follow up. Right out of the gate "Don Quixote" was an odd blend of techno with elements of funk. A little bit like what Level 42 was doing as well - oddly enough, Mark King would guest on the closing track on side one, "Easy." At the time I wasn't a big fan of Level 42, although Mark's talent as a player cannot be denied.

On the subject of talent. I'd actually forgotten how talented a musician Nik was (is), as he played guitar, bass, and keyboards on the album, in addition to providing the vocals. His bass work in particular is really good.

This was an album I always liked, a sort of guilty pleasure, as this wasn't really the style of music I sought out, but there was something about Nik Kershaw I appreciated. The first side was pretty decent, and the song I tended to gravitate to was the odd mid tempo "Wild Horses" that was really catchy, but not quite a single. However, the songs were cohesive, and I always enjoyed them together. Heck, listening to it again, "You Might" is a decent rock song ... after forty years the album is still full of surprises.

The second side, though, was my favourite. Leading off with "The Riddle" there's just something infectious about this tune, and if you get a chance to see footage of him at Live Aid it's pretty bloody amazing.

The only song on the entire album that always felt a bit stilted was "Wide Boy," the only song I saw a video for at the time. It was getting decent play, and to me was a perplexing follow up to "Wouldn't It Be Good," at least here in Canada. I will admit that over four decades my opinion has softened a bit ... still a goofy song.

However, the biggest surprise on the album to me was the closing track, "Save the Whale," a song that pushes six minutes and isn't quite techno prog, but it is an environmental lament for saving the whales. It's a haunting song, and was a surprise when I first heard it, and remains one of those strangely engaging songs that added to the album.

The Riddle is still a remarkable piece of pop wizardry and for me was as far as I went with Nik's music back in the '80s. It's not like I deliberately stopped listening to him, I just didn't keep up, and I wasn't alone apparently, as most of us seemed to jump off the bandwagon after this release. In my case it was more out of sight and out of mind than anything.

It didn't help that I thought this was the last album he'd done back then, so it wasn't like I got off the wagon, the wagon just seemed to stop.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog