It’s no secret that I love the music of Norwegian band a-ha…and of course I’m not alone in that as they have literally millions of fans worldwide. There are even a large number of them in the USA despite the fact that after their first two records America seemed to lose interest in them. It can’t have been easy for them to follow their careers over the years as most of their musical output since around 1990 hasn’t been widely available Stateside, but many have managed it…like this fan. Here he is reacting to the title track from a-ha’s most recent album, released in October 2022.

A-ha is a band who have been masters of pop/ rock & blues for 40 years, selling over 100 million albums & singles combined, and with 11 studio albums, 3 live albums and several compilations and hits albums. Their 1985 debut album Hunting High and Low sold 12 million copies worldwide and launched them into the stratosphere from nowhere…well actually not from nowhere but from Norway, but that was virtually the same as nowhere musically speaking at that time. However, it was Oslo in Norway where the three members of a-ha lived and where they wrote most of the music on that first album. More remarkable too for the fact that they wrote the lyrics in English when it wasn’t their native language, which of course is Norwegian. Magne Furuholmen and Pal Waaktaar were neighbours and attended the same school in Oslo, they gravitated towards each other through their creative music ability and formed a teenage band called The Bridges with three other schoolmates where they wrote and performed their own music strongly influenced by The Doors sound. Only Magne or Mags as he is universally known, and Pal, were really single minded enough to want to pursue a career in music, the others opting for university and careers in medicine and engineering. In the meantime Morten Harket, a guy a couple of years older was singing with a blues band in Oslo in his spare time whilst he was studying at college, and fortuitously their paths crossed and the three of them formed a band and called themselves a-ha because it is a word that is universally understood as an expression of surprise or delight and it means the same in every language. On 14th September 1982, which just happened to be Morten’s 23rd birthday, they moved to London where they thought they’d have a better chance of breaking into show biz…and after a few years of struggling on the breadline they got their big break with that first massive hit song Take On Me in 1985. The rest as they say is history!

Now, with the 40th anniversary of Take On Me and that debut album coming up next year in 2025 and the iconic video expected to have registered 2 billion views on YouTube by the autum of this year 2024. I’m hoping there will be a tour announced as I was disappointed when due to Morten Harket contracting Covid and coming down with laryngitis on the very day I was due to see them perform in concert in Oslo in 2022…sadly the concert was cancelled at very short notice and as I’d flown there from Dublin specially to attend the concert, I was devastated. Luckily all was not lost as my son Neil was with me and Oslo is a city well worth visiting even without the added bonus of seeing a-ha!
Here I’m posting a short intro to 2022 album True North…