“We ceased to be a band the moment we made it. It left us with nothing. We felt like a failure although we had commercial success.”
Morten Harket
Introduction
Norway has a wealth of history with picturesque landscapes and culinary delights. Yet their biggest export over the years has to be the iconic band A-ha. Their iconic singles Touch Me and The Sun Always Shines On TV had massive success across the globe. In a band whose music remains popular today, lead singer Morten Harket remains one of the most recognised faces in Norwegian music. Yet this is a band with many facts you may not know. So, I thought compiling a few would be fun as I trawled through the music vaults to find them.
Hidden Gems
A-Ha were there for the birth of the highly successful music franchise MTV and produced a highly memorable video for Take On Me that was animated. Many think this was the first of its kind, but Elvis Costello and the Attractions was the first in 1979 with their song Accidents Will Happen. The Rolling Stones and Paula Abdul tried it, but A-Ha is the most iconic. It has been spoofed many times, including in the cult classic Family Guy. The video became only the fifth music video in history to reach one billion views on YouTube. In 1986, MTV nominated the band for 11 awards, and they won 8 of them. You may not know that this band that did the theme tune for the James Bond movie The Living Daylights are Knights of the 1st Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. All three band members were awarded the title in 2012 for contributing to Norwegian music. The band’s name comes originally from Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who wrote a song titled “A-ha.” When Morten Harket saw the word written in a notebook, he declared it a great name and suggested the band call themselves that. The pair consulted dictionaries in several languages and discovered that the word was in every single one. According to Morten Harket, the song of the same name was “terrible”.
Two band members, Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar, formed Spider Empire in 1977. A couple of years later, the band switched names to Bridges. Yet A-Ha was not always blessed with success. The band that left Norway to make it big in London released Take On Me three times before it became a success; previously released under the titles of Miss Eerie and Lesson One, it didn’t boom under the fourth attempt in 1985, the song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 (the first song by a Norwegian band to attain that position) and number two on the UK Singles Chart.
The title of The Sun Always Shines On TV comes from the band’s guitarist Paul Waaktaar, who created the title for the band’s single The Sun Always Shines On TV while watching television in a British hotel room. Paul was struck by a presenter announcing the following programme and said: “It’s a rainy day, but the sun always shines on TV.” The band also has two entries in the Guinness Book of Records. The first is for the “longest same-pitch note in a song that made the UK’s Official Singles Chart”. It was set at 20.2 seconds, performed by A-ha frontman Morten Harket in the “Summer Moved On” single from 2000. As part of Rock in Rio, the band also held the record for the highest-paid concert audience in history. Their performance at the Maracanã was watched by a crowd of 198,000 in January 1991.
I end with an interesting fact about a burger and Magne Furuholmen. Sesam is somewhat of an institution in Trondheim. Nestled at the bottom of the iconic red Studentersamfundet building, it’s been helping partygoers deal with their late-night hunger for decades. Magne Furuholmen tasted a Sesam burger in 2003 after an A-ha concert at Studentersamfundet. He liked it so much that when he organised a garden party at his place a year later, he had the owner travel to Oslo to do the catering. If you’d like to try it, Sesam has two Trondheim locations. One is in the Solsiden nightlife area and the original Studentersamfundet.
