A-ha's Relentless Drive: From Oslo's Basements to the Top of the World
Morten Harket doesn’t mince words when he describes A-ha’s early days. Imagine three young musicians in Oslo, scraping together coins just to make rent. They weren’t rolling in cash, but Harket says the fun and energy they shared more than made up for it. That scrappiness, he believes, set the stage for everything to follow.
When A-ha formed in 1982, Norway wasn’t exactly a global music hotbed. Still, Harket and his bandmates, Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, burned with something more than just hope — it was an almost stubborn sense of certainty. "It wasn’t even confidence," Harket recently explained. "It was knowledge. We just knew Canada, Japan, the U.S. — we’d get there. This is happening." Sure enough, within just three years, the world was singing along to Take On Me.
The climb wasn’t fast. Their first recordings didn’t get much traction and money was tight. They squeezed into tiny rehearsal spaces and lived cheaply. Yet, for all the struggle, Harket remembers those times as oddly joyful. "We had hardly any money but a lot of fun," he recalls, adding that their creative spark was never about becoming instant stars but about making music that felt true to them.
Take On Me: More Than Just a Hit Song
When "Take On Me" finally exploded in 1985, it didn’t just reach No. 1 in America and top the charts worldwide — it changed A-ha’s lives overnight. But instead of treating that moment like a high point, Harket insists they always saw it as a starting line. “We’d made it. But for us, it felt like we had just come to the starting point. Now it begins.”
Much of the song’s early success came from its groundbreaking music video. Think about it: a striking mix of live-action and animation, hand-drawn by artists in London, with Harket leaping off the page and into pop history. Decades later, it’s still racking up plays—over 1.6 billion on YouTube. But for A-ha, the video wasn’t just about flashy visuals. It symbolized the inventive spirit at the heart of everything they did.
Harket says that the band's biggest weapon was always teamwork. "Take On Me was just the beginning… Luckily, there were loads of other songs lying in wait, songs that would capture the same spirit as our debut hit." That kind of optimism helped fuel their journey beyond what many assumed would be one-hit-wonder status.
The magic wasn’t just in the song’s catchy hook or the famous high note—though Harket’s vocal range did plenty to set it apart. Instead, it was A-ha's willingness to experiment and push boundaries. Over time, their influence on the synth-pop sound of the 1980s became impossible to ignore.
These days, Harket looks back at those lean years in Oslo with a grin. The lack of money never got in the way of their dreams. In fact, it probably supercharged them. For fans, "Take On Me" will always be a classic, but for A-ha, it was only ever the opening chapter of a story that’s still unfolding.
