Phones the size of bricks and terrible haircuts: singer Nik Kershaw’s recollections of the 1980s aren’t entirely complimentary, although, to be fair, the decade when his image could be found on posters in the bedrooms of teenager the length and breadth of the UK went by in a bit of a blur.
He was the baby-faced singer-songwriter whose hit songs made him a constant presence on the radio between 1984 and 1987, with his hit albums Human Racing and The Riddle both recording platinum (more than one million) sales.
All together he spent 62 weeks on the UK Singles Chart in 1984-5, beating all other solo artists at the time, and was among the first singers to perform during the global famine relief fundraiser Live Aid in 1985.
Subsequently Nik stepped back from the limelight and concentrated on writing songs, famously penning The One and Only, which was a big hit for Chesney Hawkes, and producing records, which involved working with the likes of Sir Elton John, Sia, Gary Barlow and Bonnie Tyler.
Now in his mid-sixties, albeit still looking remarkably youthful with his spikey bleached hair, Nik is about to hit the road with The 1984 Tour, celebrating the year when he was the UK’s biggest selling artist.
A popular fixture during eighties festivals, he says the audiences at his live shows are usually pretty mixed in age.
‘There’s the hard core who were there since the beginning who could have been only 12 or 13 years old when they came to their first shows; they’re a good 10 to 15 years younger than me,’ he says. ‘I might have minded about having a young audience in the day, but now it reaps its rewards – you’re going to drop dead before your audience does.
‘It’s the hard core lot who indoctrinate their kids, and there’s another lot as well; I think ‘how do you know about the music?’ and then I realise it’s You Tube, making this one of the good things about the Internet.’
Despite looking barely out of his teenage years himself when he was at the height of his fame, Bristol-born and Suffolk-raised Nik was a reasonably well-seasoned 26 year old who had spent three years playing guitar with his own rehearsal band while working for the Civil Service and almost another three with a function band that played jazz, fusion and prog rock.
‘I was actually quite old when it kicked in for me, but I looked young for my age,’ he says.
‘The eighties were a very mad time. It was all a bit of a blur to be perfectly honest.
‘It was very intense of at least years from 1984 to 1987. It’s weird because you’re in your own little bubble.
‘What I remember wasn’t specific to the 1980s; the people around me, concerts I was playing and TV studios I was hanging out in. The being a celebrity bit was quite bizarre and bonkers – that took quite a bit of getting used to.
‘I remember things about the eighties such as phones the size of bricks and terrible haircuts.
‘There was some great music in the eighties and some awful music, which is true of any decade I think, but in the eighties pretty much anything went. If you liked jazz, R&B, rock or pop you would find it. There were some pretty eclectic charts.’
Live Aid was a defining moment for the eighties and Nik describes taking part as both a privilege and ‘absolutely terrifying’.
‘When I was first asked to do the gig by Bob (Geldof) it was going to be a gig in London, at Hammersmith, and it just got bigger and bigger and we were part of it and couldn’t back out of it.
Nik’s songs were undoubtedly catchy, but reading the lyrics 40 years with the benefit of an historical perspective, it’s hard not to credit him with an ability to see into the future with lyrics such as ‘pinball man, power glutton, vacuum inside his head, forefinger on the button, is he blue or is he red’, but he laughs at the idea that he’s some kind of prophet.
‘A lot of people imagined that there was some kind of politics in songs like I Won’t Let the Sun go Down on Me, but I was just trying to reinforce that world around us,’ he explains.
‘Nothing much changes really. Pretty much the same things people were protesting about then, they’re protesting against now. The injustice and unfairness that were happening in the 1980s are happening now and will be happening after another 40 years, probably.’
Nik goes on to explain that he suffered from ‘imposter syndrome’, despite his undoubted popularity, and rarely wrote about himself in the early days.
‘I was afraid of getting found out and they would discover I was a bit of an oik that had gatecrashed the party.
‘With my songs I rarely wrote about myself or anything I had genuinely experienced.
‘In a couple of songs on both albums I was writing about random stuff I knew nothing about. City of Angels was about Los Angeles, where I had never been. I evaded writing about myself in case I got found out. Then it just occurred to me that it’s easier to write songs about things you have genuine experience of rather than read about it in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
As for The Riddle, with its references to the ‘old man of Aran’ and ‘seasons of gasoline and gold’, some people have spent hours poring over the lyrics to decipher its message, but Nik says there’s no clever hidden meaning.
‘It was the last song I wrote for the second album; there were two albums in nine months and very little time for the second album,’ he explains. ‘I did a demo to try the melody, chords and drum pattern, and for the lyrics I did what I sometimes do now and used a template containing the rhythms of words and sounds of words.
‘I was in such a hurry that we recorded the nonsense, and every attempt I made to rewrite it never seemed right.
For all his self-deprecation, Nik is hugely respected in the music industry, with no less than Sir Elton John describing him as ‘the greatest songwriter of a generation’.
‘This has been following me around for years and I began to doubt he’d said anything of the sort, then we were researching a box set and came across an Old Grey Whistle Test recording from 1984 at the Hammersmith Odeon and that’s how Richard Skinner introduced me. I don’t know where Elton said it, but Richard said he said it.
‘Elton John was lovely to me, such a generous man who has always been very good at championing new artists. I was very lucky to be a beneficiary of that back in the 80s.’
Nik says he’s looking forward to being back on the road with his band, with 12 dates in the UK and 16 across Europe.
‘‘I know Bath quite well as I have friends living there and have done all the tourist things: the Roman baths, Royal Crescent. It’s a fabulous place,’ he says.
‘Those who come along to the gig are going to hear both those albums from 1984: there were 10 songs on each, so 20 in total,’ he says. ‘It’s the first and probably the last time it’s happened. I cannot see me doing it in the next 10 years.’
