The story of a-ha

Three boys from Oslo

The a-ha story starts in the suburbs of Oslo. Pål Gamst was born on the sixth of September 1961, the son of a pharmacist, and grew up in the Manglerud district. His parents loved classical music and started him on the flute, and he was soon seen as a child prodigy and steered towards studying composition. He later took his mother's family name, Waaktaar, as his own. He was a quiet loner at school who read, painted and worshipped Jimi Hendrix, and he dreamed of one day writing a rock opera like Hair. In the same neighbourhood lived a boy a year younger called Magne Furuholmen, born on the first of November 1962. The two would become the songwriting heart of the band.[1] [2]

Magne's childhood was marked by tragedy. His father, Kåre Furuholmen, was a jazz trumpeter who led a popular dance band called Bent Sølves Orkester. On the first of May 1969 the band was flying to a gig in Linköping in Sweden when bad weather forced the small plane to turn back. It was short of fuel, one engine failed, and it crashed at Drammen, south west of Oslo. Kåre Furuholmen, three of his bandmates, the singer Vigdis Mostad and the pilot were all killed. Magne was six years old. Years later he said that losing his father gave him the freedom not to live in his shadow, and that he invented the father he needed in his imagination.[1] [2] [3]

The strangest part of that day only came to light much later. On the road home from a holiday in the south, a young boy from Asker was sitting in the family car with his parents and his brother when the stricken plane came down. The boy was Morten Harket, born on the fourteenth of September 1959, the son of a hospital doctor. His father turned the car around and drove to the crash site to help, but the ambulances were already there. Thirteen years later that boy would form a band with the son of one of the men on board. Morten and Magne only worked out the connection once they had become friends.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morten grew up on a very different diet from his future bandmates. He loved Uriah Heep, Queen, Hendrix and James Brown, and as a teenager he consciously dreamed of becoming the lead singer of Uriah Heep. He grew orchids, took piano lessons without the discipline to practise, and later enrolled to study theology. He has said that was partly because he had been called up for military service just as he had finally grown the long hair he always wanted. In the end he did serve, because he decided it was the right thing to do. On the Oslo club scene he sang with a blues band called Souldier Blue.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pål and Magne, meanwhile, had been making music together since fifth grade, when Pål, then a drummer, recruited Magne as a guitarist and singer. The group briefly called itself Spider Empire, then became Bridges. Pål switched to guitar and talked Magne onto keyboards. In 1980 Bridges paid for and released their own album, Fakkeltog, a Norwegian title meaning torchlight procession, though the songs were in English. Morten saw them play and was stunned. He later said they had everything except him, and that he knew he had to join, not for his own sake, but for theirs. Bridges recorded a second album in 1981, then fell apart when Pål and Magne decided to try their luck in London.[1] [2] [3]

Starving in London

Pål and Magne first went to London on their own, but after six months with nothing to show for it they came home to Norway. This time they took Morten with them into a basement at Pål's parents' house, where Pål strummed chords on a battered nylon string guitar and Magne played a bright little keyboard riff. Morten said later that the moment he heard that riff, he knew it was the song that would break everything open. The trio officially formed in 1982, and in January 1983 they moved to London together, three Norwegian music nerds who, by their own account, hardly listened to pop at all.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

London was brutal. The band lived in a flat in Forest Hill in the south east of the city, with mice inside and rats outside. To keep warm they left the electric oven on, and when they painted one wall, a strange brown liquid bubbled out of it. Money ran out completely. Morten has said they were literally starving, and he remembers nearly fainting in the street. Yet in the evenings they drifted around the New Romantic clubs, where Morten was photographed so often that strangers assumed he was already famous. He found that very funny, because nobody could work out who he was.[1] [2]

They signed with a publisher called Lionheart, grew frustrated, and walked away. Then they picked a studio to record new demos, and the reason was simple. The studio belonged to the musician and producer John Ratcliff, and it had a Space Invaders machine. Ratcliff introduced them to his own manager, Terry Slater. The two men formed TJ Management to run the band, with Ratcliff on the musical side and Slater on the business side. In December 1983 Slater landed them a deal with Warner Bros. He told them to keep writing, because when success hit, they would not even know their own names.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They also needed a name. Morten was leafing through Pål's notebook of lyrics and spotted a song title, A-ha. He later said it was a terrible song but a great name. Another version says Pål had been torn between calling a song A-ha or A-hem. Either way, the name stuck, partly because it worked in English and in Norwegian alike. The band's early heroes were the Doors, Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen, along with the film director Ingmar Bergman. In London they fell for the melancholy side of synth pop, acts like Soft Cell, Yazoo and OMD, and heard in it the same yearning as in their own darker music.[1] [2] [3]

Their first real single was the old Bridges tune, now called Take On Me. Producer Tony Mansfield, an expert on the Fairlight sampler, worked on the recording, and it was released in 1984 with a cheap video of the band singing in front of a blue background. It reached number three in Norway, but in Britain it crept no higher than number one hundred and thirty seven. A second version produced by Alan Tarney flopped as well. Tarney had actually turned them down the first time they approached him, after a bad experience with another band. A year later they came back with the same song, and he said yes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The video that changed everything

The rescue came from Warner Bros. in America. Executive Andrew Wickham decided the song deserved one more serious push, and his colleague Jeff Ayeroff had an idea for a video in which a comic book hero comes to life and falls in love with a girl. Another Warner man, John Beug, had seen a student animated film called Commuter, made by Michael Patterson at the California Institute of the Arts, which used a loose pencil sketch style drawn over live footage. Patterson and his partner Candace Reckinger were hired, and the Irish British director Steve Barron, who had already made Billie Jean for Michael Jackson, was brought in to direct.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Barron met the band in a youth hostel in Bayswater, where they were sleeping on single beds with no money. The café scenes were filmed at Kim's café in Wandsworth in south west London, with a dancer from the troupe Hot Gossip, Bunty Bailey, playing the girl who is pulled into the comic book. Then came the slow part. Every frame that mixed the real and the drawn worlds had to be traced by hand, a technique called rotoscoping. Patterson and Reckinger worked for sixteen weeks, sleeping and drawing, one in the living room and one in the kitchen. Warner told Barron he could take as long as he liked.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The video was first shown on a local Boston music channel called V66, then MTV put it into heavy rotation. The single entered the Billboard chart in July 1985 and reached number one in the issue dated the nineteenth of October 1985, making a-ha the first Norwegian band to top the American chart. In Britain it finally charted on its third release and climbed to number two, where it sat for three weeks behind Jennifer Rush's The Power of Love. It topped the charts across much of Europe and at home in Norway. The band even appeared on Soul Train, one of the few white acts ever to appear on the show.[1] [2] [3]

The follow up, The Sun Always Shines on T.V., was recorded while the band were sick with flu, with Magne and Morten lying on camp beds in the studio with high fevers. It became their only British number one, spending two weeks at the top in January 1986, and it reached number twenty in America. Its video picks up where Take On Me ended, before the band perform in a Victorian church in Teddington filled with shop mannequins. The debut album, Hunting High and Low, went to number fifteen in America and number two in Britain, sold millions around the world, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, which went to Sade.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifth of September 1986 a-ha swept the MTV Video Music Awards. Take On Me won six awards, including Viewer's Choice, Best Concept Video and Best Direction, and The Sun Always Shines on T.V. won two more, for editing and cinematography. Eight awards in one night was a haul that only Peter Gabriel would match, the following year. Two more hits followed from the album in Europe, Train of Thought and the orchestral title track Hunting High and Low. For Morten, fame hit like a bullet train. He said later that the band stopped being a band the moment they made it, and it took years to recover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scoundrels and a Bond theme

From June 1986 to February 1987 a-ha toured the world, playing one hundred and thirteen cities in sixteen countries. In the middle of it, on the sixth of October 1986, they released their second album, Scoundrel Days. It was darker and more guitar driven, recorded at a studio in Wimbledon with Alan Tarney producing. All the songs came from Pål and Magne, with Morten no longer on the writing credits. The singles I've Been Losing You, Cry Wolf and Manhattan Skyline were big hits in Europe, and some of the lyrics for Cry Wolf were credited to Lauren Savoy, the American filmmaker Pål would later marry. Morten later said the band's early demos had always sounded more like Scoundrel Days than like their first album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

America was another matter. Cry Wolf peaked at number fifty on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the last time a-ha ever appeared on that chart. After the tour they would not play North America again until 2005. Magne has blamed the band's own stubbornness. He said they were three headstrong Norwegians who refused to make another Take On Me, and that anything they did to break the formula was treated by the record company like a disease. In the United States they are still often called a one hit wonder, even though they had two Top Forty hits there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1987 a-ha were chosen to sing the title song for the James Bond film The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton's first outing as Bond. The producers had been pleased with Duran Duran's Bond hit two years earlier and felt a-ha could deliver another. Pål wrote the song and the veteran Bond composer John Barry produced it and took a co writing credit. The partnership was a disaster. Barry reportedly called the band the Hitler Youth in a newspaper interview. Morten said Barry tried to befriend them by running down Duran Duran, then made demeaning comments about women, and that none of them could stand his view of other people.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Relations with the Bond producers broke down too. The band told them they could not attend the London premiere because they were booked on a tour of Japan. According to Morten, the film makers did not believe them, and when the band did not show up, they were furious. Even so, the song reached number five in Britain and number one in Norway, and it is one of a-ha's most played live songs, often stretched into a mass sing along. The band's preferred version appeared on their next album. Years later Pål admitted that he loved the strings Barry added, saying that was when it began to sound like a Bond song.[1] [2] [3]

Morten was also offered a small part in The Living Daylights as a henchman. He said no, partly because he had no time and partly because he felt they wanted his fame rather than his acting. He did act in Norway, playing a role in the children's film Kamilla og tyven in 1988 and its sequel. Pål, meanwhile, was falling for the American filmmaker Lauren Savoy, whom he had met in 1984. Their long distance romance fed straight into the songs. Pål said it inspired the band's next single, Stay on These Roads.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reluctant pop stars

Stay on These Roads came out as a single in March 1988 and reached number five in Britain. It was one of the few songs that all three members helped to write. Magne showed it to Morten first, in Pål's flat, and Morten suggested a change to the chorus that Magne called brilliant. Magne has said it is potentially the best song he ever wrote. The album of the same name followed on the third of May 1988, produced again by Alan Tarney. Like the first two, it peaked at number two in Britain, with hits including Touchy and You Are the One. It would be their last British Top Ten single for eighteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By now the band were tired of being teen idols. Magne and Pål tried to rein in Morten's pop star behaviour, begging him not to pose for the cameras, because they felt it distracted from the music. Morten, for his part, hated being treated as an object. He said later that fans did not really want him, they wanted an image, and compared it to how women feel when they are objectified. The band admitted they did far too many cheesy photo shoots in this era. Morten also said they were jealous of U2, who were allowed to be taken seriously from the start.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their fourth album, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, came out on the twenty second of October 1990, named after a Norwegian fairy tale. It was moodier still, co produced by Ian Stanley, formerly of Tears for Fears. Its biggest hit was a cover of Crying in the Rain, written by Carole King and Howard Greenfield and first recorded by the Everly Brothers. Morten said the band got to know the Everlys, who each gave them a guitar, and that his became his main songwriting tool. The album topped the chart in Norway and sold well in Europe, though reviews were mixed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came the biggest night of their career, and one of the most painful. In January 1991 a-ha headlined an evening of the Rock in Rio festival at the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Around one hundred and ninety eight thousand people paid to see them, a Guinness world record for a paying rock concert audience. The other headliners that year included George Michael, Prince and Guns N' Roses. Yet the band felt ignored. Pål said MTV interviewed everyone except them, and Magne said they had played to the biggest crowd in the world and nobody noticed. They called it crushing.[1] [2] [3]

The fifth album, Memorial Beach, was recorded mainly at Prince's Paisley Park studios outside Minneapolis. Magne later recalled standing at a urinal in Minnesota next to Prince in full stage make up and thinking that none of this was normal. Morten called the sessions a dark and heavy period. The first version of the video for Dark Is the Night was banned for disturbing images, including Morten's face tearing through the skin of his stomach. Released on the fourteenth of June 1993, the album sold poorly, though Q magazine named it one of the year's best. After two concerts at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and a last run of shows, a-ha quietly stopped.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Going solo and coming home

During the break the three went their separate ways. Morten released his first English language solo album, Wild Seed, in September 1995, and it went to number one in Norway. Its first single, A Kind of Christmas Card, won Norway's song of the year award. Its lyric, by the poet Håvard Rem, was inspired by a true story about a young Norwegian woman who went to Los Angeles to become a film star, was drawn into pornography and drugs, and was sent home by the Norwegian consulate. In 1996 Morten co hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo. He also recorded Can't Take My Eyes Off You for the film Coneheads.[1] [2] [3]

Pål married Lauren Savoy in a civil ceremony on the twenty first of December 1991, and they combined their surnames into Waaktaar-Savoy. He had written the Memorial Beach song Angel in the Snow for her as a wedding gift. In 1994, tired of the English speaking media misspelling his name, he began calling himself Paul. With Lauren and drummer Frode Unneland he formed the band Savoy, which sold over three hundred thousand records in Norway. Magne married his high school sweetheart Heidi Rydjord in 1992, made film music with the project Timbersound, and built a serious career as a painter and printmaker.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion came almost by accident. In December 1998 a-ha were invited to play the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo. Paul wrote a new song for the occasion, Summer Moved On, and they also played The Sun Always Shines on T.V. The performance was cut from the highlights shown in Britain, and the American network Fox left it out of its broadcast entirely. But the night convinced the band to go back into the studio. The result was Minor Earth Major Sky, released on the fourteenth of April 2000. It went to number one in Norway and became their first number one album in Germany.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Summer Moved On became a radio hit across Europe and a number one in Norway. It contains one of the most famous feats of Morten's career, a single note held for about twenty seconds, which was hailed as a record for a pop hit. The label insisted that almost the whole album be remixed to make it friendlier to German radio. The band also experimented online. Their video for I Wish I Cared was one of the first music videos made entirely in Flash animation for the internet. In March 2001 they opened Oslo's new Vallhall Arena with a pair of concerts streamed on the web.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The seventh album, Lifelines, followed on the twenty fourth of April 2002 and topped the charts in Norway and Germany. The video for Forever Not Yours was shot in Havana by the director Harald Zwart and reimagined Noah's Ark, with look alikes of Madonna, Desmond Tutu and Queen Elizabeth the Second queuing to board. A live album from the tour came out in 2003, and around the same time the journalist Jan Omdahl published the band biography The Swing of Things, later issued with a CD of early demos. In 2004 a singles collection took them back into the British Top Twenty for the first time in years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A second wind

On the second of July 2005 a-ha played Live 8 in Berlin in front of close to two hundred thousand people. During Take On Me, Morten's in ear monitor failed and he could not hear himself. He asked for a two minute break and used it to talk about the cause of Live 8, but the two minutes stretched to almost seven, and after one more song the organisers told them their time was up. Later that summer, on the twenty seventh of August, the band played to one hundred and twenty thousand people in Frogner Park in Oslo, the biggest concert ever held in Norway. In September they sold out Irving Plaza in New York.[1] [2]

The eighth album, Analogue, came out in November 2005, their first on Universal after two decades with Warner. The title track began life as a stranger song called Minor Key Sonata, until the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin was brought in to make it catchier. It became their first British Top Ten hit since 1988. Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash sang backing vocals on two tracks. In 2006 the British music magazine Q gave a-ha its Inspiration Award, a sign of how many younger musicians now cited them, among them Coldplay's Chris Martin, Keane and U2's Adam Clayton.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The ninth album, Foot of the Mountain, arrived on the nineteenth of June 2009 and was a deliberate return to synth pop. The title song grew out of a solo track by Magne called The Longest Night, and it became the most played song on Norwegian radio that year. The album went to number one in Germany and number five in Britain, their best British placing in over twenty years. Paul said one track was inspired by Arcade Fire. But the recording had taken four years to start, because the three were rarely in sync. Paul complained that whenever he was ready, the other two were busy with solo projects.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifteenth of October 2009 the band announced they would split after one last world tour. They said they had lived the ultimate boy's adventure, and wanted time for other meaningful parts of life, from humanitarian work to politics. Before leaving, they put five hundred thousand euros of their own money into a talent grant, handing a million kroner each to four young Norwegian acts. The final concert at Oslo Spektrum on the fourth of December 2010 sold out so fast that a second show was added the night before. Around this time Magne also revealed that he suffered from a heart rhythm disorder, atrial fibrillation.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The farewell turned out to be short lived, and it was followed by a national tragedy. On the twenty second of July 2011, the far right extremist Anders Behring Breivik set off a car bomb in Oslo's government quarter and then opened fire at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya. Seventy seven people were killed, in the deadliest attack in Norway since the Second World War. A month later, on the twenty first of August 2011, a-ha briefly came back together at Oslo Spektrum to perform Stay on These Roads at a national memorial service for the victims.[1] [2] [3]

Back together, apart

For a few years the three followed their own paths. Morten released the solo albums Out of My Hands in 2012 and Brother in 2014. Paul formed Weathervane with the American singer Jimmy Gnecco. Magne coached the winner of the Norwegian version of The Voice and kept up Apparatjik, the art pop collective he had formed in 2008 with Coldplay's Guy Berryman and Jonas Bjerre of Mew. On the sixth of November 2012 all three were made Knights of the First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav. Morten recalled King Harald admitting that it was an odd thing, but asking what else a poor king could do.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2013 Pitbull and Christina Aguilera performed Feel This Moment, built on the Take On Me riff, at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, and Morten walked out to sing part of the original. Then a poll ahead of Rock in Rio's thirtieth anniversary found that a-ha's record setting 1991 show was what people remembered most about the festival's history. The band were invited back, and on the twenty seventh of September 2015 they played Rio again. The reunion came with a new album, Cast in Steel, released on the fourth of September 2015, with Alan Tarney producing some tracks for the first time since 1988.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Magne was candid that the comeback was not his idea. He said the other two wanted to do it, and he had to choose between blocking it, letting them go ahead without him, or making a fool of himself after all his talk about the end. The album was made in pieces. Paul and Morten began in New York without Magne, and Paul said the three of them were never in the same studio at the same time. He admitted he missed working on a song together in real time. Still, Cast in Steel reached the British Top Ten, and the 2016 tour played to big crowds across Europe.[1]

In June 2017 a-ha recorded an MTV Unplugged special in secret on the remote island of Giske off Norway's west coast, with phones banned from the room. Guests included Alison Moyet, who sang on Summer Moved On, and the Norwegian singer Ingrid Helene Håvik. At Morten's request they even played an old Bridges song, The Vacant, renamed Sox of the Fox. The album, Summer Solstice, reached number six in Britain in October 2017. Its slowed down acoustic Take On Me found a new audience and turned up in the film Deadpool 2 the following year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

True North and a hard diagnosis

In October 2019 the band began touring Hunting High and Low in full, starting in Dublin, before the pandemic forced a long pause. In June 2021 a documentary, a-ha The Movie, directed by Thomas Robsahm, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It was frank about the rifts. Magne still resented being moved off guitar in the early days and felt undervalued as a writer, and Paul came across as the controlling force in the studio. Rolling Stone noted that the three no longer spent time together offstage. Morten called talk of feuds silly, asking why they would still be together after forty years if they could not stand each other.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their eleventh album, True North, was recorded in November 2021 in Bodø, north of the Arctic Circle, with the Arctic Philharmonic orchestra, and filmed for a companion movie. It was inspired by Bruce Springsteen's film Western Stars, and Magne described it as a musical letter from their home country about nature and the environment. Morten joked that the concept was Magne's way of tricking the band into making another record after they had decided not to. The album came out on the twenty first of October 2022. That year the band toured some seventy arenas, including a show at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[1] [2] [3]

Take On Me kept finding new generations. In February 2020 its video passed one billion views on YouTube, and in September 2024 it became the first video from the 1980s to reach two billion. In 2023 an episode of the HBO series The Last of Us used the song, sending it to number one on Billboard's chart of songs from television. In a later season the actor Bella Ramsey sang it on an acoustic guitar. The Weeknd's Blinding Lights was widely compared to it. Morten once said the song had left the band right away and had been much better at being a pop star than they ever were.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the fourth of June 2025, Morten Harket revealed that he has Parkinson's disease. He broke the news in an interview with the band's biographer Jan Omdahl on the a-ha website. In 2024 he had undergone deep brain stimulation surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, with electrodes implanted on one side of his brain in June and the other in December, and his physical symptoms improved dramatically. His voice, though, was affected. He said he did not feel like singing, and that for him that was a sign. Magne called it a day of sad news in the a-ha world, and said the band's future plans would be shaped around Morten.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Morten met the news with typical calm. He said he had no problem accepting the diagnosis, and borrowed his ninety four year old father's attitude to an ageing body, simply using whatever works. His message to fans was not to worry about him, to look after nature while there is still time, and to spend their energy on real problems. As of 2026, a-ha remain Norway's most successful pop export, with sales often put at more than one hundred million records. The three men who met through a plane crash, a teenage band and a schoolboy's keyboard riff are still, in their own complicated way, a band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around a-ha

Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and Magne Furuholmen. They grew up in the same Oslo district and started a band in fifth grade, which became Bridges. Together they wrote most of a-ha's songs, with Magne once saying Paul meant more to his musical development than anyone. The partnership was also a source of friction. Magne felt undervalued as a songwriter during the band's peak, and Morten has said Magne is a much bigger writer in a-ha than he gets credit for.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morten Harket and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy. Paul describes Morten as totally different from him. When they first reached London together, Morten burned Paul's clothes and dressed him from head to toe. Paul says Morten was the only person in Norway as ambitious as he was, that both have big egos, and that Magne often has to mediate between them. Morten calls Paul a workaholic and the driving force behind the band.[1] [2]

Morten Harket and Magne Furuholmen. Their lives first crossed in 1969, when Morten's family came upon the plane crash that killed Magne's father. Years later they bonded over their childhood love of Stoke City football club and could recite the 1975 team. Magne has joked about Morten's intensity and called his voice a fantastic weapon in cold synth landscapes. When Morten revealed his Parkinson's diagnosis in 2025, Magne said the band's future would be shaped around him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and Lauren Savoy. Paul met the American filmmaker and musician Lauren Savoy in 1984 and married her in December 1991, combining their names. She is credited on the lyrics of Cry Wolf, their long distance romance inspired Stay on These Roads, and Paul wrote Angel in the Snow as her wedding gift. They later formed the band Savoy together, and they have a son, True August.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morten Harket and Bunty Bailey. Bunty Bailey, a dancer with the troupe Hot Gossip, played the girl pulled into the comic book in the Take On Me video and returned for The Sun Always Shines on T.V. Director Steve Barron noticed the pair still holding hands between takes, and they became a couple, which the teen magazines covered eagerly. In 2019 they returned together to the Wandsworth café where the video was filmed.[1] [2] [3]

a-ha and John Barry. The veteran Bond composer produced The Living Daylights in 1987 and clashed with the band from the start. Barry found them exhausting and reportedly compared them to the Hitler Youth, while the band disliked his remarks about Duran Duran and about women, and disputed his co writing credit. Years later Paul still praised the strings Barry added, saying that was what made it sound like Bond.[1] [2] [3]

a-ha and Alan Tarney. The English producer, known for his hits with Cliff Richard, first turned a-ha down, then relented and recut Take On Me into the version the world knows. He went on to produce most of their first three albums, including The Sun Always Shines on T.V. and Stay on These Roads, and returned to produce three songs on Cast in Steel in 2015.[1] [2] [3]

a-ha and Steve Barron. The Dublin born director met a penniless a-ha in a Bayswater youth hostel and pitched the comic book idea for Take On Me, working with animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger. He went on to direct their videos for The Sun Always Shines on T.V., Hunting High and Low, Cry Wolf, Manhattan Skyline, The Living Daylights and Crying in the Rain, and much later Butterfly, Butterfly in 2010.[1] [2] [3]

a-ha and Terry Slater and John Ratcliff. The band chose John Ratcliff's studio because it had a Space Invaders machine. Ratcliff introduced them to his manager Terry Slater, and the two became a-ha's managers under the name TJ Management, with Ratcliff handling the music and Slater the business and the link to Warner Bros. Slater secured their record deal in 1983, though Morten later said things were not well managed in the early days.[1] [2] [3]

a-ha and Coldplay. Chris Martin has repeatedly named a-ha as a major inspiration and once introduced Magne on stage as the best keyboard player in the world. Magne's first solo album featured Guy Berryman and Will Champion, and Magne and Berryman later formed the art pop group Apparatjik with Jonas Bjerre of Mew and producer Martin Terefe, who also produced a-ha's Analogue.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morten Harket and Camilla Malmquist Harket. Morten was married to Camilla Malmquist Harket from 1989 to 1998, and they had three children. She appeared in the video for his first solo single, A Kind of Christmas Card, in 1995. Morten also has two daughters with later partners, one of them Inez Andersson, whom the band's official site described as his partner in 2025.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about a-ha

• a-ha picked John Ratcliff's London studio for their demos because it had a Space Invaders machine. Looking for somewhere to record new demos in London, the band chose Ratcliff's studio for its arcade game. Ratcliff went on to co manage them and introduced them to Terry Slater.[1] [2]
• The verse melody of Take On Me was partly inspired by a Juicy Fruit chewing gum advert. Morten said the tune reminded him of a gum jingle, which shaped the verse. Paul wanted the chorus to climb through Morten's range in octave leaps, like Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra.[1] [2]
• The first British release of Take On Me in 1984 peaked at number one hundred and thirty seven. The Tony Mansfield version came out with a cheap video of the band against a blue background. It reached number three in Norway but barely registered in Britain.[1] [2]
• The Take On Me video debuted on a local Boston music channel before MTV picked it up. The rotoscoped clip was first shown on the Boston station V66. MTV then gave it heavy rotation, and the single climbed to number one in America.[1]
• Take On Me was screened in cinemas before films like Back to the Future and Weird Science. The video was sent to more than two hundred theatres as a so called Music Zap, with a remixed surround sound track and extra animation.[1]
• The café scenes in the Take On Me video were shot at Kim's café in Wandsworth, south west London. The café sits on the corner of Wandsworth Road and Pensbury Place. Morten and Bunty Bailey returned there together in 2019, thirty four years later.[1]
• The Take On Me video's animation grew out of a student film called Commuter. Michael Patterson made Commuter at the California Institute of the Arts. Its footage was later reused in a-ha's Train of Thought video, completing a loose trilogy with Take On Me and The Sun Always Shines on T.V.[1] [2] [3]
• The Sun Always Shines on T.V. was recorded while the band were sick with flu. Paul recalled that Magne and Morten lay on camp beds in the studio with high fevers. The song still became a-ha's only British number one, in January 1986.[1]
• The hit sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia got its name from an a-ha song. Co creator Glenn Howerton was listening to Hunting High and Low at the gym and titled the original home movie It's Always Sunny on TV, after The Sun Always Shines on T.V.[1] [2] [3]
• The Scoundrel Days cover was shot on the Haleakala volcano on Maui, Hawaii. Norwegian photographer Knut Bry took the photograph in 1986. The album's Manhattan Skyline was, in Magne's words, a cut and paste job, with Magne writing the quiet part and Paul the rock part.[1]
• The single cover of Stay on These Roads includes a blurred photo of the Falcon Crest actress Susan Sullivan. Nobody knows why the publicity shot of Sullivan, from the American soap opera, ended up in the montage on the seven inch sleeve.[1]
• The Pretenders were first considered to sing the title song for The Living Daylights. The Bond producers chose a-ha instead because they thought they would make a bigger chart impact, after Duran Duran's success. The Pretenders ended up singing the closing credits song.[1]
• Morten says the Everly Brothers each gave a-ha a guitar after they covered Crying in the Rain. The band got to know the duo after the 1990 cover. Morten said the guitar he received became his main songwriting tool.[1]
• Hunting High and Low was briefly kept off BBC radio during the 1991 Gulf War. It was one of many songs by various artists pulled from BBC airplay during the conflict.[1]
• Magne once found himself at a urinal next to Prince in full stage make up. It happened in Minnesota, where a-ha recorded Memorial Beach at Prince's Paisley Park studios. Magne said it made him realise none of this was normal.[1] [2]
• Memorial Beach's cover photos were taken on Atalaia Beach in Aracaju, Brazil. The pictures came from a shoot during the band's 1991 tour of Brazil, the same trip that included their record breaking Rock in Rio show.[1]
• Morten Harket co hosted the 1996 Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo. He presented the show alongside the Norwegian television presenter Ingvild Bryn, during a-ha's hiatus.[1]
• Paul only starts a painting once the canvas is already framed. Paul has painted all his life, and his only exhibition, held in Lillehammer in 1998, was called Rammer, Norwegian for frames.[1]
• Paul spent years correcting the spelling of his first name before settling on Paul in 1994. Born Pål Gamst, he took his mother's family name Waaktaar, and after marrying Lauren Savoy in 1991 the couple merged their surnames.[1]
• Magne designed an official Norwegian postage stamp in 2001. Also a working visual artist, he decorated eleven floors of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship with glass artworks and created Scandinavia's largest ceramic sculpture park.[1]
• Magne thought about exhibiting his art under a false name so it would not be judged as art by the a-ha guy. When his work was first shown in 1989 he considered a pseudonym, then decided that hiding would be a kind of vanity. He now runs a studio with several employees.[1]
• Magne's father was a jazz trumpeter killed in a plane crash with most of his band in 1969. Kåre Furuholmen led Bent Sølves Orkester. The band's plane went down at Drammen on the first of May 1969, killing five musicians and the pilot.[1] [2]
• Morten and Magne are both lifelong fans of Stoke City football club. Morten caught the bug from his brother, who covered their shared bedroom with posters of Gordon Banks and other Stoke players, though neither had ever been to a match.[1] [2]
• Morten and Magne helped pioneer electric cars in Norway with a converted Fiat Panda. Working with the environmental group Bellona, they imported the car and got it registered. A climate researcher has argued Norway's love of electric cars can be traced back to that period.[1]
• A video for I Wish I Cared was among the first music videos made entirely in Flash for the internet. The 2000 clip was released online only. The first, according to Wikipedia, was Duran Duran's Someone Else Not Me.[1] [2]
• Graham Nash sang backing vocals on two songs on a-ha's 2005 album Analogue. The Crosby, Stills and Nash singer appears on Over the Treetops and Cosy Prisons. Max Martin reworked the album's title track into a hit.[1] [2]
• Foot of the Mountain was the most played song on Norwegian radio in 2009. It clocked up over one hundred and twenty two hours of airplay, the first time a Norwegian artist had topped that list. It also served as the official song of the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin.[1]
• Before splitting in 2010, a-ha gave away five hundred thousand euros of their own money to young Norwegian acts. Four winners chosen by public vote each received one million kroner, a prize the Guardian noted was worth twice the Booker Prize.[1]
• King Harald joked that the knighthood was an odd thing, but asked what else a poor king could do. All three members were made Knights of the First Class of the Order of Saint Olav in November 2012. Morten said nobody in Norway calls them sir.[1] [2]
• Morten was the first Masked Singer contestant in the franchise to perform his own song. Appearing on the British show in 2021 as the Viking, he sang Take On Me in episode five and finished seventh. He said the show felt like driving with a smeared windscreen.[1] [2]
• The Washington Nationals play Take On Me during the seventh inning stretch. The baseball tradition began because former Nationals outfielder Michael Morse used the song as his walk up music.[1]
• Take On Me was the first music video from the 1980s to pass two billion YouTube views. It reached the mark in September 2024, having become only the fifth twentieth century video to pass one billion in February 2020.[1] [2]
• In 2019 Magne replied to a Donald Trump campaign clip copying the Take On Me video by saying even blind pigs find truffles. The rotoscoped clip was shared by Trump on Twitter. Magne said a-ha wrote their music for everyone and would have preferred it not be used in a divisive campaign.[1] [2]
• A Kind of Christmas Card, Morten's first solo single, was inspired by a true story of a Norwegian woman lost in Los Angeles. The poet Håvard Rem heard of a young woman who went to Hollywood to act, fell into pornography and drugs, and was sent home by the Norwegian consulate. The song won Norway's song of the year.[1]
• The Unplugged album included a reworked Bridges song from 1980. At Morten's request, a-ha played The Vacant from the Bridges album Fakkeltog, renamed Sox of the Fox, at their 2017 Unplugged sessions on Giske.[1] [2]
• Before he was famous, Morten says the New Romantic star Steve Strange had a crush on him. Morten said Strange asked whether he was gay, and when he replied that he was straight, Strange answered how boring.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.