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Nik Kershaw: My best songs were quick to write – that’s often the way!

Posted on 12 August 2025

It’s more than 40 years since Nik Kershaw first exploded onto the UK pop scene as a chart-topping solo artist and the pop music legend comes to the Playhouse on Wednesday 15th October 2025!

A string of global hits – including ‘Wouldn’t it Be Good’, ‘The Riddle’ and ‘I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ – saw him spend an astonishing 62 weeks on the UK singles chart through 1984 and 1985.

He also performed a memorable set at the iconic Live Aid concert at Wembley in front of an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion.

But it’s not just as a solo artist that Nik has enjoyed global success – he’s also written and produced best-selling songs for a string of top artists including Elton John, Sya, Gary Barlow, Ronan Keating, Lulu, Bonnie Tyler, and many more.

He wrote the Chesney Hawkes smash ‘The One And Only’, which spent five weeks at number one in 1991 and cracked the top 10 in the USA. “The royalties from that single put my kids through university and private school,” he jokes.

So, it’s fair to say that Nik Kershaw has got plenty to talk about… with his trademark dry wit and self-deprecating humour.

And that’s exactly what he will be doing when he takes to the road in autumn 2025 on an intimate theatre tour with a difference.

Musings & Lyrics runs from September 17 to November 23, and coincides with the launch of his new book which tells the stories behind every song from his nine studio albums.

The book – ‘Musings and Lyrics (The Inane Ramblings of a Grateful Idiot)’ - also includes a first-ever vinyl release of his celebrated Songs From The Shelf series, which has been gaining a growing fanbase online.

The vinyl is exclusively available on the Superluxe format, which also includes a photobook with never-before-seen pictures. A Luxe version of the book is also available with a limited-edition CD instead.

“I’m very much looking forward to these solo shows, which are in some brilliantly intimate venues – giving me a chance to share songs, stories and have a Q&A session with the audience too.

“I do get some funny questions from time to time. A few years ago I had one which said: ‘Nik, can you sing Fantastic Day for us please?’ I had to break the news to them that I wasn’t Nick Heyward, and that they’d booked tickets for the wrong show!

“I get asked a lot about Live Aid too, which was unlike anything else I’ve ever done. It was an incredible experience, and I feel very privileged to have been part of it. When you realise just how many people were involved behind the scenes in making that event happen, it’s amazing.”

Reflecting on the chart-topping days of the mid 1980s, he says: “My feet didn’t touch the ground for about two years. It was like my life was on rails and I couldn’t get off the train.”

By the end of the 1980s, Nik says he had become disillusioned with being a performer, and after four albums for MCA Records he took a step back from being a ‘popstar’ to focus on writing and production for other artists.

“Some were written on my own; some in collaboration others; some for established artists, some for hopeful idiots; some for major label projects, some just for the hell of it.

“A few made it out into the world, but most didn’t – and these are the ones included in Songs From The Shelf, parts one and two.

“They’ve been available digitally for a while now, but people kept asking me where they could get hold of physical copies of them – now they have the answer,” he says.

“Writing for other people is a very different process. You may have very strong views about something, either spiritually or politically, which would feel right for you to sing. You can’t do that for others – things have to be a bit more generic.

“Harmonically I used to go off all over the place, but you can’t really do that when you are writing for others either. You have to operate within certain parameters.

“Ultimately, after about eight or nine years of writing for others, that became the thing that frustrated me the most. I realised I couldn’t really go for it and write some the songs I wanted to write because no-one else was going to sing them! So I decided I was just going to have to sing them myself.”

The show, and the book, focuses very much on the lyrics and creative processes behind the many songs Nik has created during his career.

“All opinions, inane musings, unhinged rants and incoherent ramblings are mine and mine alone!” he says.

“There’s not always a long and complicated story behind the writing of a song. Sometimes I talk about the recording process, sometimes it’s about the song itself and how I created the lyric, and some are reflecting on what was going on in my life, and the world, at that time.

“I used to wake up in the middle of the night with great ideas for a song and have to write them down. Or they’d come to you when you were driving the car, or out on a walk. You’d start whistling a tune, and it would grow from there.

“The really successful songs came to me relatively quickly. They weren’t difficult to write, and just sort of happened – that’s often the way.”

There’s no such thing as a typical week in his working life these days.

Nik says: “I still do gigs, which I enjoy, but don’t have the same hunger and drive to be constantly creating new material that I had in my 20s.

“There will be another album at some point, though. At the moment I’m just not sure what it will be, and when. You always have to think that your best-ever album is still to come – there’s no point in doing this otherwise.”

So will Nik be giving the definitive answer to the meaning of his mind-bending 1984 hit The Riddle and reveal once and for all what it was all about?

“Yes, I will,” he says. “I’ve developed a new way of explaining it, and the process I went through when I was creating it. No spoilers, though…you’ll have to come to one of the shows or buy a book to find out.”

Tickets to Nik’s show are available at https://www.awaywithmedia.com/tours/nik-kershaw
Order his new book here https://www.awaywithmedia.com/buy-books/entertainment

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