Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer": Best rock video according to Classic Rock (UK)

What’s the most memorable image from the video that helped transform Peter Gabriel from art-rock linchpin into a genuine global superstar? Is it the toy train spinning around a winking, blinking Gabriel? Is it the singer being enveloped by a swirl of circling fruit? Is it the pair of mildly disturbing dancing chickens high-kicking along to the song.

“The director, Stephen Johnson, said: ‘I want some chickens,"’ says Dave Alex Riddett, camera operator on the shoot for Gabriel’s 1986 single Sledgehammer, the most dazzling and inventive promo of the past 50 years. “We said: ‘Okay, we’ll make some fake chickens.' And he went: ‘No, no, I want some real chickens.' I think Nick Park, who spent two or three days animating the chickens under hot lights, was quite fearful that he was going to get salmonella poisoning."

Riddett and future Wallace & Gromit creator Park were working for fledgling animation house Aardman when Gabriel presented the company with an idea he and director Johnson had for a stopmotion promo for the first single from his fifth solo album, So.

“It’s called ‘pixilation’, which is basically animating a human being," says Riddett. “Rather than setting up a puppet and filming it each time you move it, you do it with a person. You get them to break down their movements into fractions of a second. So we’d paint the sky on Peter’s face one frame at a time, and film it."

It wasn’t the first time the technique had been used in a music video. Gabriel had borrowed the idea from a segment in the clip for Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere, directed by Johnson the previous year. But Sledgehammer extended the idea across the whole video, presenting a stream of images that were striking, surreal and occasionally disturbing.

Aardman enlisted US experimental filmmakers The Brothers Quay to help create the models that would appear in the videos. The shoot itself took six intense days, a chunk of which involved Gabriel sitting in an old cinema chair that Riddett had converted with the addition of a neck brace (“to keep his head static") while the models were moved around him in real time. At another time, Gabriel lay under a pane of glass for 16 hours to shoot the part of the video where he’s slowly covered by wooden panels and doors.

“I don’t think he realized how much energy he needed to put into it,” says Riddett. “But he was great about it. It was his idea after all."

Being stuck behind the camera meant that Riddett missed out on a cameo in the video, unlike his colleagues who appeared as part of the jerkily hypnotic dance scene that concludes the it (Gabriel's daughters Anna-Marie and Melanie are in there too). “We built a whole big set," Riddett says of the latter. “If you look behind him, the actual scenery is dancing - the wallpaper is changing."

The final five-and-a-half minute video stands as a work of eccentric visual genius, and one of the defining promos of the video era. Riddett says it put Aardman on the map, while Gabriel acknowledged the part it played kicking his career on to the next level. “I'm not sure that it would have been as big a hit, and I certainly don’t think the album would have been opened up to as many people, without the video,” he told Rolling Stone.

For Riddett, it’s the combination of energy, invention and sheer maverick spirit that makes the Sledgehammer video so iconic. “It’s the slight lack of sophistication," he says. “You could almost see the joins - that was a very important thing. It had that energy to it. You could almost see how it was made, but then you’d also think: ‘Well, somebody’s gone to a lot of effort.’ Particularly poor old Peter.”