Music Video of the Day: Wide Boy by Nik Kershaw (1985, dir. Storm Thorgerson)

I wanted to hold off spotlighting a Nik Kershaw video for a bit, but I might as well polish off this surreal thing I started months ago with some of his videos.

I swear I must have heard this song as a kid. I just can’t find any evidence to support that memory. My best guess is that since I did watch Doc Hollywood (1991) a lot as a kid, even though Chesney Hawkes was the one to sing Kershaw’s The One And Only, I still recognize the style. That song was also used in a movie called Buddy’s Song. I haven’t seen the film yet, but this song seems to fit the plot summary on IMDb as well as that one:

Buddy is an aspiring teenager who is a very good musician and has pressure to go further than his Dad’s teddy boy rocker days. However when his father is sent away for a year for covering up for criminal Des it puts further strain on the family relationship. When Terry is released things get steadily harder while Buddy’s career gets rosier.

Like other Kershaw videos, it’s ambitious. The song doesn’t start till 2:20. Up till then, we see Kershaw sitting in an apartment drinking when we hear what sounds like the TARDIS before revealing a guy who appears to be there to claim his soul. I guess Kershaw’s character sold his soul to have overnight success we see in the rest of the video. At least that’s my interpretation of this version of the video, considering the chorus.

There’s a slightly different version posted below.

There is some change with the color, but the big difference is that it cuts out the beginning of the video and has an alternate ending. We see the doctors walk away and the video ends. In the other one, they pull the Nik Kershaw headshot away from their faces, and we see the man from the start of the video carrying Kershaw’s body before Kershaw fades into the ever growing pixels. I’m not sure why they changed it other than that people might be confused as to who he is if they had already edited out the start of the video for runtime.

And no, I didn’t pick out this song because it technically ties together yesterday’s post of a Huey Lewis & The News horror-themed music video with this one. The connection is that Roger Daltrey was in Buddy’s Song, and he and Huey would go on to be in .com for Murder (2002) together.

Thorgerson of album art fame directed this, and several other Kershaw videos.

Prolific art director and production designer Nigel Talamo was an art director on the video along with Caroline Greville-Morris who has also done a fair amount of work as an art director. She also worked on feature films as a production designer.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism: