JB: Judd Apatow is so open-minded, adventurous, and youthful in his attitude to comedy yet so dull and conservative when it comes to music. In one of the many Apatow family arguments restaged by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in This Is 40, he harangues her for what he deemed her simple-minded taste in music. The offending tune playing in her car that signaled his tantrum? “Take On Me.” Rudd’s archive-label exec deems it a brainless jingle and vastly inferior to the Pixies, which he castigated her for not being well-rounded enough to appreciate. I think Apatow was pretty evenhanded parceling out the blame and the flaws to that movie couple, but where “Take On Me” is concerned, he was totally taking sides. Clearly, the guy hates pop. But in terms of its vocals, its lyrics, and its arrangement, “Take On Me” is far from a dumb-ass formulaic pop record.
MAGNE “MAGS” FURUHOLMEN: “Take On Me” was a song I lived with for almost 10 years before it became a hit. I wrote the hook in ’77, when I was 15 years old. [A-ha cofounder Päl Waaktaar and I] started when we were 12 or 13. We were called Bridges at the time. We were heavily immersed in the Doors. We didn’t really go for the poppy side of the sixties. We sort of liked the Beatles, but it was The White Album and the more experimental stuff that was the focus. When the riff for “Take On Me” came about, it was like a guilty pleasure—there was a little bit of shame attached to it. Päl thought it was way too commercial for us. I remember arguing that it was really catchy. We used to call it “The Juicy Fruit Song” because it reminded us of the Juicy Fruit commercials in the seventies.
It was left by the wayside for a long time. Then, when we recruited Morten around ’82, he said, “This is a really big hit song!” We had the verse and the riff but a very flat chorus. After we started working with Morten, his incredible range really influenced the chorus—we wanted to see just how [high] he could go. His voice was very elastic and very powerful in all registers, and that influenced our writing greatly.
“Take On Me” stands out from the rest of our catalog. It stood out through all of its history, even as it changed from being sixties psychedelic retro-pop to eighties synth-pop with a vengeance. One of the allures is it brings people in who wouldn’t normally go for the upbeat, happy, pop stuff because it has that melancholy streak. The verse and the riff are in a minor key. It’s not a happy song—it’s quite sad if you listen to it. I never considered it to be a dance track, even though, ironically, the riff is used in “Feel This Moment” with Pitbull and Christina Aguilera. We used to joke about A-ha being ideal for wooden-legged dancers because there was never any groovy approach.
If you grow up in Norway, melancholy is nothing to do with being sad; melancholy is a sense of yearning, a longing, and, probably historically, a transport away from hardship. It has manifested itself in folk music and in art. Think about Edvard Munch and his very expressionist, intense dark landscapes. Think about the musical works of Edvard Grieg: very declarational, very big emotions, very melancholy in essence. The same goes for literature. Knut Hamsun’s Victoria and Hunger were as influential to us as pop music was. Our way into music came about through that blend of Beatles energy with Doors melancholy, and the way we sounded came from the time we spent in England, but the core, the foundation of the writing, comes from the Norwegian culture. Päl’s parents would take him to the opera. My grandfather was a musician.
When I was about 14, we [were featured] in a little article in my local newspaper, and when they asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” we said, “We’re gonna go to England, become huge pop stars, and be bigger than the Beatles.” There is [something] very beautiful about kids from this suburb in Norway thinking they’re gonna be the first out of the country that hadn’t produced any international pop stars. But my father was a musician, so I got a sense that it was possible. Sadly, he died young. When I was six, he passed away on his way to his first gig abroad through a plane accident, which, incidentally, Morten saw as a child. First time I met Morten, we ended up walking three hours through the forest because we’d missed the night bus. Once we’d exhausted our music knowledge, we started talking about our families. I told him my father died in 1969, that he fell down outside of Oslo. He said his family was on a bridge and saw that plane go down. It was weird to realize he had been witnessing my father’s death 10 years before we met. I remember walking away from that meeting thinking either he’s a pathological liar or it was just the strangest coincidence that we had this kind of connection straight off the bat.
When we came to England as A-ha in ’82, there were multiple radio stations playing all this new music: Depeche Mode, Yazoo, ABC, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Blancmange, Thompson Twins. Our synth sound happened partly by necessity. Before we left Norway, we used to have bass and drums and someone else playing a second guitar, but when we came to the U.K., it was just me, Päl, and Morten, so we had to find a new way of making music. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was the first song that made us realize, “We can make music with a lot of emotional impact by using synths.”
“Take On Me” has been recorded twice. The first version, we were in with a big producer, Tony Mansfield [Aztec Camera, Naked Eyes, the Damned], and we would listen to everything he said. Gradually we became disenchanted. One of the songs that suffered the most was “Take On Me.” It didn’t sound like the hit we thought it should sound like. The chorus didn’t sound soaring. There was very little emotion; it was too mechanical-sounding. But the record company had the belief that it was a strong contender, so it was released as a first single. We made a video for this version. [One of our managers] was afraid that three Norwegian guys with very dubious fashion sense would come off as gay. His cure was to rent strippers for the video.
We don’t like this video, we don’t like that version of the song, but we went with it. It was played on BBC Radio a couple of times, but nothing really happened. We convinced our manager to give us a chance to rerecord “Take On Me” with another producer. Alan Tarney had been suggested earlier in the game, but we had not been too keen. But we saved the day with that second recording. I took this new version up to Baker Street where the American Warner Bros. office was and said, “This is how we should sound,” and [they] loved it. Then we were allowed to rerecord “The Sun Always Shines on TV” and the single for “Hunting High and Low” with real strings. We recorded the next couple of albums with Alan Tarney.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by English-as-a-Second-Language New Wavers 1. “Rock Me Amadeus,” Falco 2. “The Great Commandment,” Camouflage 3. “Big in Japan,” Alphaville 4. “Firecracker,” Yellow Magic Orchestra 5. “Da Da Da,” Trio
Of course, if you say “Take On Me” to anyone, they probably immediately think of the other video. The thing that makes it so special is the hand-drawn aspect. Steve Barron made 20,000 drawings—it was, like, 5 drawings per second. It took three months of postproduction just making the animated sequences. Steve came up with this love-affair story line, the idea of [Morten] coming in and out of an animated world and the real world. At the end, when he’s looking about in the hallway and meeting [the video’s leading lady] in the real world—that was stolen from Altered States, the film by Ken Russell. It was a perfect setup, especially with someone as good looking as Morten. This is what triggered the whole idolization thing, which threw us a bit at the time. But in hindsight, it’s easy to see why this real world–versus–cartoon world love affair between an idealized superhero-type figure and the innocent English girl would trigger what it did.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
“Take On Me” scooped up six 1986 MTV Video Music Awards and helped earn A-ha a Grammy nod for Best New Artist. However, its follow-up, “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” was only a modest hit stateside, and the band’s U.S. career pretty much ended there. But that was only the beginning of A-ha’s success around the world. They released a total of 39 singles—including the James Bond theme “The Living Daylights”—and nine studio albums, the last being 2009’s U.K. top-five Foot of
the Mountain. The band split after their final live performance, which was at a 2011 national memorial service in Oslo dedicated to the 77 people massacred that year by an antigovernment terrorist. Harket has released five solo albums and continues to tour on his own. He and Furuholmen still live in Norway, where all three members were honored with knighthoods in 2012. Waaktaar, a painter, moved to Manhattan and changed his first name to Paul and hyphenated his last to Waaktaar-Savoy to include his wife’s, as is Norwegian custom. Once a tight-knit trio, the former bandmates now barely speak, but “Take On Me” lives on: There have been ska, punk, and boy-band versions, as well as Italian progressive power metal, Latvian instrumental cello-rock, and Trinidadian soca renditions.
FURUHOLMEN: I’m totally at peace with “Take On Me,” but I know there are other people in our group who would rather not talk about that song. At one point we all had a kind of strained relationship to it, but that happens to anyone who has massive success with one song. As much as we don’t like to hear it, in America that is our one big hit. You feel for all the songs that you bled for, and the ones that didn’t get attention. It’s like you have two kids, and someone always talks about how great that one kid is. Although we’ve had our times of feeling confined by this idea that it was so defining for us, we just have to accept it and embrace it.
We’ve had our breaks before. In the nineties we disbanded, although it wasn’t formally done. This time it was, and it would take a hell of a lot for me to go back. We exhausted a few lifetimes together. We don’t really stay in touch, although I did spend two hours with Morten a week ago—we hadn’t sat down for two hours since 2010. We happened to be in the same hotel in Oslo. He keeps it alive. He’s been out there touring—he’s been playing “Take On Me” without me and Paul. He can do that. He’s the only one [of us whom] people would come and see perform those songs.
There are some bands who continue on just to keep making money. Every year they’ll do the summer tour. They don’t talk to each other backstage, they sneak in separate sides of the room. I’m not against people doing that. But the three of us have, subsequent to ending the band, given ourselves the opportunity to look at A-ha from the outside, and I’m quite proud of that. It’s like a marriage: When you’re in it, you tend to take things for granted. It feels like we could have made it work better if we had been a little less careless. But I’d rather look at all the great things that did happen. I’m totally satisfied with what A-ha achieved. I celebrate the idea of what we made together, resting secure in the knowledge that it couldn’t have happened without all three of us.
“LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”
anchester’s music scene has long been dominated by oddballs, eccentrics, misanthropes, depressives, villains, and grotesques. The Buzzcocks, Magazine, the Fall, John Cooper Clarke, the Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Oasis. What a parade of impenetrable accents, incompetent dental work, unruly eyebrows, surly attitudes, and black, black hearts. But no Manchester band better embodied their rain-spattered, concrete environment than Joy Division. The year 1979 was a banner one for bleak, nightmarish post-punk classics, like Gang of Four’s Entertainment, Public Image Ltd.’s Metal Box, and the Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys. These records were made to be moped to in the confines of a predominantly (but not exclusively) adolescent male suburban bedroom. That same year, Joy Division’s debut, Unknown Pleasures, dealt with similar themes—the ever-popular alienation and despair—but it did so in a transcendent fashion. The combination of Ian Curtis’s disembodied growl, Peter Hook’s brutally melodic bass, the band’s machinelike precision, and producer Martin Hannett’s desire to make a record that sounded both spacious and terrifying turned Unknown Pleasures into a ghost train ride to hell. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” offered a glimpse of a group capable of forging an emotional connection with a larger audience. But by then, Joy Division were already frozen in time.
JB: You know why I liked Joy Division? Because other people did. No point in lying about it: I was a sheep. If I read about a band in the NME, and John Peel was playing them, and their records were stocked in one of Glasgow’s indie-friendly stores, I would buy them and take them home and play them continuously until either I genuinely liked them or a post-punk version of Stockholm syndrome set in. The 1979 version of me was devoid of a mind of my own—to the degree that I purchased an olive-green thrift-store raincoat that flapped down around my ankles because that was the requisite uniform to properly appreciate the existential anguish of Joy Division. (Having said that, the skies of Glasgow are gray and overcast approximately 11 months out of the year, so that raincoat turned out to be a smart and practical investment.) You know why I eventually came around to liking Joy Division? Because they sounded like disco. They sounded like the Teutonic disco records I bought along with the post-punk indies: Silver Convention, Donna Summer, Munich Machine—stuff I didn’t need to make an effort to enjoy. Joy Division’s music was gruesome, claustrophobic, unpleasant disco, but it had a pulse that I recognized, and that caused me to respond.
LM: As embarrassing as it is to admit, the first time I heard “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Paul Young’s 1984 cover. I liked his version then, as I still do now. But I can understand the horror with which it was received by Joy Division’s army of gloomy fans, not to mention the surviving members. The band, their legend, and that song are precious and seem to remain unexploited, no matter how many T-shirts they sell at Hot Topic. It wasn’t until I heard the original that I understood how desperately sad a song it is. This isn’t my favorite Joy Division song—that would be the even more haunting “Atmosphere”—but I get why “Love Will Tear Us Apart” universally tops so many best-songs-of-all-time lists. It’s a living document that details the hopelessness Curtis felt in his dead-end marriage before he took his own life. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” marked a real turning point for Joy Division…and we’ll never know what could have come next.
BERNARD SUMNER: Ian almost died making that song. It was the story of his demise. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was kind of Romeo and Juliet for real, put down in lyrics. I think the reason for that being a hit [in the U.K.]—apart from the melody, which is brilliant—is that it was such a romantic story. You can’t get more real; you can’t get more surreal.
PETER HOOK: I would not want someone to write a song about me like that. The lyrics are so poignant and so hurt, it really is shocking. And I never realized for years. When Ian used to sing it, it looked to me like he was having a great time; when Bernard was singing it [years later, with New Order], same. Then, when I came to sing it [with Peter Hook and the Light], I thought, Oh my god, these lyrics are really dark. It’s a very sad love song—it’s an anti-love song—but it sounds like a joyous love song. And I suppose that’s its secret. If your heart’s broken, you need to fight your way through it.
Ian always had a bag of lyrics with him, scraps of papers with ideas written on them. As we were playing, he’d just delve into this bag and pull something out, mumble it—at least, that’s what it sounded like to us—and then he’d elaborate, and it built up from there. The next minute, you had a song. The great thing about Ian was that you didn’t really need to hear what he was saying; you could just look at what he was doing and know that he meant it. That fire, that passion in his body language and his delivery, let you know that everything was okay.
On more than one occasion, Tony Wilson asked Ian to refer to Frank Sinatra. [Before recording “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Tony] gave [Ian] a double LP [of Sinatra’s] and said, “Listen to this.” It’s plainly ridiculous at first sight, but now that I’m a fan of Frank Sinatra—as these things happen as you get older—I can see what Tony meant. He was referring to Sinatra’s soul and passion and the delivery. But I think Ian had that anyway, unless maybe he did get it from Frank.
The lyrics always came afterwards. The music always came first, and Ian was very, very involved in orchestrating the music and telling us what sounded good. He didn’t tell us what to
play; he just told us that what we were playing was great. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is very simply written. It took us something like three hours from start to finish. Ian went away, thought about the vocal, came back the next day, and we had the song. It came very, very naturally, very easy.
You didn’t write songs with a view to recording them in those days. You only wrote songs with a view to playing them [live at a gig]. The first chance you got to play it, you would play it, and judging the audience’s reaction was quite a delight, really, because it was the best way to tell if you’re going in the right direction. And they loved [“Love Will Tear Us Apart”]. It’s very up-tempo. It’s very, very in-your-face—you could say it has like a punk ethic to it. It went down great every time we played it. “Atmosphere” is also a favorite with many Joy Division fans. The reason it’s not my favorite song is it’s always associated with funerals. Every funeral I go to, they play bloody “Atmosphere.” The most popular song at weddings is “Angels” by Robbie Williams, and the most popular song at funerals is “Atmosphere.” When I went to [Factory Records boss] Tony Wilson’s funeral and they put “Atmosphere” on at the end, I wished we had written fuckin’ “Angels.”
The thing with Joy Division’s music is that each member was playing like a separate line. We hardly ever played together; we all played separately. But when you put it together, it was like the ingredients in a cake. When you eat the ingredients separately, they don’t taste very nice, but when you mix them together, they taste wonderful—if you do it right, of course. And in Joy Division, you got that right very easily. Once we got to New Order, we had three of the ingredients, but there was always an ingredient missing.
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