The Riddle - Nik Kershaw

What this video is

Released 5 November 1984 as the lead single from Kershaw's second album, The Riddle arrived at the absolute peak of the British new wave's global commercial reach. The song's deliberately nonsensical lyrics — written as a placeholder guide vocal and never replaced — became a cultural lightning rod, generating fan theories for decades. The music video, directed by surrealist design legend Storm Thorgerson, extended…

Why it matters

A flagship artefact of mid-1980s British synth-pop at its most visually ambitious. The video represents the convergence of fine-art surrealism (via Thorgerson's Hipgnosis lineage) with the emergent music video format, demonstrating how directors from album-art backgrounds reshaped early MTV…

The director

Storm Elvin Thorgerson (28 February 1944 – 18 April 2013) was an English art director and music video director. In 1968 he co-founded Hipgnosis with Aubrey Powell, producing iconic album art for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and others. Following Hipgnosis's…