A pencil sketch that learned the chorus
A drum machine and a keyboard riff arrive already running, bright as a cartoon chase, and Morten Harket’s voice climbs until the note is higher than the room expected.
a-ha did not get Take On Me right the first time. Pål Waaktaar had the bones of it, with Magne Furuholmen, and a 1984 version produced by Tony Mansfield barely travelled. Warner let them try again. Alan Tarney produced the recording that the world knows, for Hunting High and Low, released in 1985. The single, in its new clothes, reached No. 2 in Britain and No. 1 in America. Harket sings the chorus at a height that sounds like a special effect and is only a voice. The video, directed by Steve Barron, rotoscoped by Michael Patterson, pulls a pencil girl out of a comic and into a cafe, partly shot at Kim’s Cafe in London, and it did as much as the mix. You cannot separate the sketch from the falsetto now. They arrived together, the third time the song was asked to exist.
Harket has brushed off the idea that the high note was a calculation. The melody went there, and he went with it. That plainness is easy to miss under the video’s magic. Tarney’s production is glossy and tight, the bass synth bouncing, the guitars polite, the vocal enormous. Furuholmen’s keyboard figure is the part amateurs still try to play and miss by a finger. Waaktaar’s song, underneath the famous bit, is a plea to be taken seriously by someone who is leaving, which is an ordinary subject wearing an extraordinary coat. The coat is why it is still on the radio. The plea is why it still works when the cartoon is turned off.
The high note was not a stunt. The melody went there, and so did I.
(Morten Harket, interview)
Live, the test is whether he will still climb. He does, night after night, and the room waits for it the way a fair waits for a firework, which is unfair to a band that wrote other songs and fair to this one. The pencil video has been copied until the copies are tired. The record is not. It is a piece of 1985 craft, three young Norwegians in London studios, a producer who understood radio, a singer whose range was not a rumour. Mansfield’s version is a footnote. Tarney’s is the door.
What remains is the joy of a difficulty made to look like play. The riff is simple until you try it. The chorus is a smile until the last bar, when the voice has to mean it. a-ha spent years being the video, and the video is wonderful, a cafe, a comic, a hand through a wall of graphite. Under it, a song about being taken on, taken seriously, taken anywhere but left. The synths sparkle. The plea does not. That double life is why a sketch from 1985 still stops a kitchen.
