Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel (1986)

Peter Gabriel has been open that Sledgehammer is a tribute to the soul records of his youth, Otis Redding's in particular, and that those records were full of innuendo he wanted to reproduce. So the song is a list of things he can be for you: a "sledgehammer", a "steam train", a "bumper car", a "big dipper", "fruit for your fruit cage". It reached number one in the United States in 1986, an entire nation humming along to a catalogue of fairground euphemisms.

The video is why almost nobody notices. Stephen R. Johnson's stop-motion, animated by Aardman and the Brothers Quay, with the dancing chickens, the fruit face and the train circling his head, is so inventive and so charming that it disarms the lyric completely. It won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987, still the record for a single video. Generations of children have sung the chorus at full volume with no idea what it means, and Gabriel, a famously thoughtful man, seems to have enjoyed that immensely.

Its afterlife is the penny dropping. About 260 people a month search for what Sledgehammer means, decades after singing it, and the answer is the list of objects. Play it for someone who only knows it from the radio, read them the list slowly, and watch their childhood reorganise itself.