The band had been living in poverty-row flats in London, struggling to make it there since 1981, and this looked like the last gasp of their career. It was a hit back in their native Norway but flopped everywhere else.
(They called it, derisively, “The Juicy Fruit Song,” because they thought it sounded like an ad jingle.) We hear assorted other versions, including one that’s like jaunty soft-rock reggae, and then, amazingly, there’s the original single version, released in October 1984, which somehow lacked the ecstatic verve of the one that became famous.
We hear an early rock ‘n’ roll version of the riff, and it doesn’t sound particularly alluring. That was after he had met Pål (pronounced Paul), his once and future bandmate, who grew up 50 yards away from him on an apartment block of Oslo. The synth riff was actually written by Magne Furuholmen back in the ’70s, when he was 14 or 15. The magical beauty of “Take On Me” has something to do with the way that its rhythm is so active - the quick, loud, almost punky drums that open it, the high percussive synth riff that sounds like it could have been written by Bach, the dreamy airy jittery ear-worm propulsiveness of it all - yet the effect of the vocals, and the chords, is to counterpoint all that activity with a sensation of pure bittersweet timeless soaring. It occupied a special place, because in the age before the revival of the romantic comedy you could argue that the “Take On Me” video was one of the great romantic movies of the 1980s, like “Ghost” compressed into four minutes.Īnd the song itself was so gorgeous that, somehow, you never tired of it it was a love song that sounded like a percolating version of Christmas Day on Ecstasy. Yet that one song, in the second half of the ’80s, was inescapable, especially on MTV, where its half-animated black-and-white romantic shadow-world video, by director Steve Barron, was ubiquitous.
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Apart from that, they barely cracked the top 20 in the U.S. A-ha became, and remain, famous for one and only one song (quick, hum their 1987 James Bond theme song “The Living Daylights,” or any other song they ever put out). A-ha came out of the moment in the ’80s that gave us the lush majesties of Pet Shop Boys and Enya and “Major Tom (Coming Home)” and “Under the Milky Way,” and they have never left that moment behind.īut let’s get real. The band members - guitarist and workaholic group engine Pål Waaktaar-Savoy, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, and lead singer Morten Harken - have enjoyed a long-term musical marriage as close, fraught, and marked by feuds as that of the Bee Gees or the Stones, and they’ve recorded many songs with that succulent synth layer-cake vibe.
“Take On Me” appeared on their first album, “Hunting High and Low,” released in October 1985 (though an earlier version of the song had appeared the year before), and since then they’ve released an additional 10 albums. (I’m sure the fans would see it that way.) In a career that stretches back 35 years, A-ha have sold 50 million records and have played to crowds of 200,000. As the new documentary “ A-ha: The Movie” makes clear, A-ha have been around long enough, and have enjoyed enough sustained in-concert fan exuberance, to make the one-hit-wonder classification seem a bit of a slight.