Shang Art How Long Did It Take to Make
Morten Harket, vocalist
I had always wanted to make music on a big calibration, but never knew how information technology was going happen – until I saw a band in Oslo called Bridges. I was stunned. They had everything. The only thing they didn't have was me. I knew I needed to join, not for my own sake, only for the band's. I knew I was a necessary ingredient.
We had to get out Norway and go where it was all happening, which was London. We loved information technology there, merely information technology was hard. We had no money – nosotros were literally starving. It started to get ugly. Paying for food wasn't an option. I think about fainting in the street. It was affecting my mental state. We sent a guy called Terry Slater a couple of demos, using the concluding of our money. And then things turned. He landed us a deal with Warners and said just go on coming upwardly with songs, because when success hits you, y'all won't even know your name.
We'd already written Take on Me only hadn't recorded it. Paul [Waaktaar-Savoy, guitarist] had start played information technology to me in his parents' house, downwards in the basement. He had a crappy old nylon-stringed guitar with hippy paintings on information technology and he strummed the chords with Magne [Furuholmen] playing the riff on piano. The moment I heard it, I knew information technology was the i that would break the whole affair open up.
It was only a riff, though. We wrote the rest together. Information technology reminded me of an advert for chewing gum that went: "Juicy Fruit is a bundle total of sunshine." That influenced the verse melody. Paul had the thought of really using my vocal range in the chorus, having notes ascent in octaves like Strauss's As well Sprach Zarathustra. Equally for striking that last high note, you either have wings or you don't – the vocalisation is non in the throat, it's in the blood. It'due south what you envisage, what yous believe. People recall the chorus is the hard part in Have on Me, merely they're wrong. The hard part was making the verses bounciness.
It was released three times and kept flopping. Things weren't well managed in the early days. Merely Jeff Ayeroff at Warners liked it and put up the team for the video, which was what got things really moving. Information technology was a steady climb, getting to No 2 in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and No 1 in America in 1985. It was what nosotros'd been waiting for and expecting to happen. It was meant to be. Since then, the song and video have been played to death around the world. It has its own career. It lives its own life.
Michael Patterson, animator of the music video
I'd fabricated a brusque motion-picture show chosen Commuter that pioneered the pencil-sketch blitheness fashion I after used in the Take on Me video. I was experimenting with how to create a fleeting impression. If you look at a Turner painting, you tin can run into into it: the style might be impressionist simply you can still see the reality. I wanted to do blitheness that had that quality.
Me and my partner Candace got a phone call from our benefactor. "This homo in Hollywood wants a gratuitous copy of Commuter," he said. "I told him to go to hell, but if you want to call him, here'due south his number." I wrote it down on a scrap of paper and put information technology in my wallet. Ten months later, we were in LA and running out of money, and so I called the number and the guy said: "Hey, are you interested in doing a music video?"
Next we met Jeff Ayeroff at Warners, the Diaghilev of music videos. He had a doormat outside his role saying: "Master of the Universe." He said: "I accept this idea – a comic-book grapheme comes to life and falls in love with a daughter." For 16 weeks, all we did was sleep and work on the video, me in the living room, Candace in the kitchen. We made effectually 2,000 drawings.
Nobody had e'er seen anything like it. Nosotros watched many people rip it off, yr after yr. We one time stopped to fill up the auto – and the attendant was sitting there drawing blitheness frames. I said: "What are you doing?" He said: "Oh, we're copying this guy's work – you lot know, the A-ha video?"
The 30th anniversary edition of the album Hunting High and Low is out on eighteen September.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/15/a-ha-how-we-made-take-on-me
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