A-ha – Take On Me

Hunting High and Low 1985: third try, drum machine, locked riff

Take On Me is the breakthrough single from a-ha’s Warner Bros. debut Hunting High and Low (1985). Pål Waaktaar-Savoy and Magne Furuholmen wrote the song; Morten Harket sings the high chorus he has insisted was melody, not a stunt. A first 1984 version produced by Tony Mansfield barely charted. Warner let them record it again with Alan Tarney; that take reached No. 2 in Britain and No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. A drum machine and Furuholmen’s keyboard riff lock from the first bar; Harket’s voice climbs into falsetto recorded with little echo, clear enough to stay on daytime radio.

Steve Barron’s video, rotoscoped by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, moves a pencil-drawn girl from a comic into a cafe partly shot at Kim’s Cafe in London. MTV ran it hard; you cannot separate the hit from that hybrid of live action and drawing. Length sits around three minutes forty-five. The arrangement stays bright and clipped: verse as invitation, chorus as the leap Harket simply sings rather than effects into place. Norwegian synth-pop arriving late into mid-1980s British and American charts needed a visual to travel; the rotoscope supplied it without drowning the song.

Live, Harket still takes the high note as a measured climb. Later remixes and acoustic turns show the melody’s strength without the drum machine, but stations return to the Tarney version. In career terms the single opened arenas for a trio that might otherwise have stayed a European cult act. Hunting High and Low also carried The Sun Always Shines on T.V.; Take On Me remains the track most listeners hear first.

Decades of karaoke, commercials and meme edits have not emptied the riff. Covers often chase the falsetto and miss the locked keyboard figure that makes the chorus land. In the a-ha catalogue this track documents persistence: three studio attempts, an American No. 1, and a video that taught MTV how to sell a Norwegian band to living rooms that had never heard Oslo synth-pop. Radio rarely changed the lyric. The bright arrangement was already what daytime radio played. Later interviews still give the 1984 Mansfield try, the Alan Tarney remake, and the Billboard No. 1. Compilations still file the track under 1985, which is how most new listeners meet it.