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

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

For those of you in an area that celebrates Daylight Savings Time, remember to make sure your clocks are set back an hour.

This is the last of the Thorgerson/Kershaw music videos that I can find. It also means that along with The Riddle, Wouldn’t It Be Good, and Wide Boy, we’ve done all the songs that Kershaw performed at Live Aid.

I have never read Don Quixote or even come close by seeing Man Of La Mancha, so I can’t really speak to what it has to do with it beyond a few things like the tilting at windmills bit. But that’s something that has become a saying independent of the book. He’s asking Don Quixote, among other things, if we are seeing imaginary enemies. This song is from 1985.

If you read the lyrics while watching the video, then you can see what they were going for with this. Especially tying television to delusional thinking about ourselves and our actions. After reading a couple sentences from the Wikipedia article on Don Quixote, I can see why that is the name of the song and the person the song is addressed to.

I would love to know who that is at the beginning of the video. My best guess is that it’s supposed to be Salvador Dali since he did at least one painting based on Don Quixote. That would explain the inclusion of the clock too.

I’m not sure what the dancers are there for, but I’m willing to bet that’s a Man Of La Mancha connection.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: The Riddle by Nik Kershaw (1984, dir. Storm Thorgerson)

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

It has come to an end. When I started this “30 Days Of Surrealism” thing, I really had one video in mind. This is that video. Nik Kershaw breaking into someplace, and getting pushed down into a giant question mark by The Riddler with nothing but surreal things around him as he tries to make his way to the end of it.

I could walk through the video pointing things out, but I don’t need to. Kershaw himself does that in the video below. It seems to be a truncated version of something where he did the whole video. It’s stil pretty good, and he talks about the song as well. The video should be there. It is just one of those that doesn’t want to show its thumbnail for some reason.

Most of the things in the video are easy to spot after a couple of watches. There is one that took me many viewings to spot. The teapot with multiple spouts. The first time you see it, it appears to only have one of them.

But when he passes by it, you can clearly see that there are two of them.

I wonder if it is covered up the first time or if they switched out the pots. I wouldn’t be surprised if they switched them. Maybe The Riddler did it.

Enjoy the video, and keep your eyes pealed because there’s something everywhere. Even the words on the head that Kershaw runs his hands over.

30 Days Of Surrealism:

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

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

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: