Nik Kershaw: An Unlikely Guitar Hero Made "Good" in the U.K.

When you think of guitar heroes in the '80s, the usual suspects come to mind, from Prince and Eddie Van Halen to AC/DC's Angus Young, Slash of Guns N' Roses and plenty of hard rockers. You might not immediately think to put Nik Kershaw on that list - in fact, if you didn't grow up in England, you might be thinking, "Who?"

But for a shining moment in the U.K., Kershaw became known as an ace pop artist who indeed was also a steady hand on the axe. Having taught himself to play in school, he dropped out to seek performing full-time. But his debut single, 1983's "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," stiffed on the charts.

Undeterred, Kershaw picked for his next single an introspective rocker, one of the last songs he'd written for his debut album. He sought a more muscular guitar sound for the track, but it didn't come together the way that he expected. "I knew the chords that I wanted, and I mapped them out on a keyboard," he said in 2017. "I tried playing the chords with a kind of aggressive guitar sound, but because there was a clash in the way the harmonics went together, it just really sounded quite unpleasant. But I was not averse to listening to the odd Queen record, and I suggested to Peter [Collins, the producer] that we make a kind of guitar orchestra, like Brian May would do, just to separate those notes so you don’t have the harmonics clashing with each other."

Despite the unwieldy results on tape - Kershaw estimated in 1986 there were somewhere around 20 individual guitar tracks on the song - "Wouldn't It Be Good" established Kershaw as a bold new talent. Backed by a unique music video in which the pop star played an alien in a green-screen get-up, "Wouldn't It Be Good" would hit the Top 5 in England and just miss the Top 40 in America. Off the strength of that single, "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" was reissued back home, reaching No. 2 - his highest chart position ever. Three more U.K. Top 10s followed - and in 1985, Elton John hit the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic with the simmering ballad "Nikita" - anchored by Kershaw's emotive guitar playing.