The Riddle was released as a single by UK singer-songwriter Nik Kershaw in 1984. While Nik described the lyrical content as being nondescript and really no more than a guide vocal for the production, that didn’t get in the way of the track being a big hit and didn’t stop people trying to read all sorts of ridiculous meanings into the song.
Refresh your memory …
My interest is not in the lyrics but the musical composition. People who were around in the 1980s will be very familiar with the melody and probably pay it no special attention, but this was no formulaic pop song – it is full of surprising melodic and harmonic shifts.
There’s a great example in the first verse. Here’s how that ends …
The song starts in A major and the chords progress more or less in line with that key until the downward run in the melody takes us to a very unexpected and really dissonant Db on the word ‘brave’ – alongside an Ebm chord; a weird chord to put there and a strange melody note to put with it. I can think of no conventional musical logic behind this, so there’s no way that Nik analysed his way to that point. Assuming he composed this with his guitar or piano, humming along with the melody, two things could have happened to spark the idea:
- He wanted to innovate at that point so he played around with all sorts of chords hoping for a lucky find. He found the Ebm, thought ‘that’s different – I like it’ and then adapted the melody to work with it.
- He hummed the melody, came to the Db note just through experimentation and then tried to find a chord change to make that melody work. He came up with the Ebm and threw it in.
Chances are, when you first heard that piece of the song, you felt slightly uncomfortable being taken to such an unpredictable place. The fact is pop music tends not to be unpredictable – at least not musically – and more’s the pity.
You won’t come up with songs like The Riddle if you compose by layering loops or by repeating riffs over and over again. You won’t get there by following the rules of conventional harmony. You have to want to innovate, to unsettle, to break the mould.
Nothing makes this point better than the bridge of The Riddle. It seems to change key so often that it becomes almost impossible to analyse using traditional rules of harmony. What’s more the whole song shifts up a semi-tone from A to Bb as a result of the bridge.
Take a look …
Interestingly, it’s not just melody and harmony which Nik plays with in the bridge – the rhythmic pattern of the melody changes with each phrase. Nik really did want you to work hard listening to this song. That’s why, even though superficially this might sound like a typical new wave pop record of the 1980s, it’s actually a classic, for me at least.
