A-ha - Take On Me

"Take On Me" by A-ha is an iconic hit of the 1980s. It came out in October 1985 with an equally iconic music video that helped define the age of MTV. It hit #1 in the US and in countries all over the world. And it's still massively popular today. It currently has over two and a half billion streams on Spotify. So, with all of that, it's easy to imagine that this was all inevitable. But actually, the song took so many steps and missteps before it became the hit that everybody knows. I talked to Paul Waaktaar-Savoy from A-ha, who wrote the original bones of the song back when he was a teenager in Norway, years before it came out. The song actually came out and flopped TWICE in the UK, before it found a foothold in the US. So for this episode, Paul took me through the whole history of the song, and all the different versions that existed. And he told me how he and his bandmates, Magne Furuholmen and Morten Harket, pushed and pushed and persevered. "Take On Me" was their first single as a band, and it made them the most successful Norwegian pop group of all time. For more info, visit songexploder.net/a-ha. https://songexploder.net/a-ha

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit tidal.com/songexploder to create an account and start uploading your music for free. That's tidal.com/songexploder for zero platform fees on every sale. Your music, your earnings.

• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know, or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be, wherever you get podcasts.

• 2:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  When I was a kid, the first song where I ever thought, this is my favorite song, was Take On Me by Aha. Looking at it now, it's like, of course that was your favorite song. It is an undeniable iconic hit of the 1980s. It came out in October 1985 with an equally iconic music video that helped define the age of MTV. It hit number one in the US and in countries all over the world, and it's still massively popular today. It currently has over two and a half billion streams on Spotify. So with all of that, it's easy to imagine that this was all inevitable. But actually, the song took so many steps and missteps before it became the hit that everybody knows. I talked to Paul Wachtersavoy from Aha, who wrote

• 3:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  the original bones of the song back when he was a teenager in Norway, years before it came out. The song actually came out and flopped twice in the UK before it found a foothold in the US. So for this episode, Paul took me through the whole history of the song and all the different versions that existed. And he told me how he and his bandmates, Magna Führerholmen and Morten Harkin, pushed and pushed and persevered. Take On Me was their first single as a band, and it made them the most successful Norwegian pop group of all time.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I am Paul Wachter-Savoy, which is a mouthful. Aha has three members, Magna Schurholman, who plays keyboards, Morton Harkett on lead voice, and myself, Paul Wachter-Savoy, on guitar.

• 4:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You and Magna started playing music together years before Aha actually began, is that right?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he lived down the street from me when we were like 12 or something, so we've been in the band for a long time. We had made a pact at 15 or 14 that we were gonna go to England and try to get a record deal. I mean Norway back then was really, I think they played one hour of pop music a week on the radio, it was very limited exposure to anything, so we just knew that if we were gonna try to get a career out of this, we had to leave Norway, even though no one had done that before. And it was sort of like a laughable thing to say. But we, you know, at the same time, we thought that would be an amazing adventure.

• 5:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And the two of you were in a band together in high school called Bridges?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did two albums with Bridges. But Bridges was sort of very introverted. Lots of songs that everybody said, "Well, I have to hear it 20 times before I get it." And Bridges sort of disintegrated, which was me and Magna left. But I think as we got closer to going to England, we started to get the urge like, "Well, we gotta have some songs that really sort of you can get with the first couple of listens." So we were definitely feeling that, you know, we had to sort of make it a little bit easier on people on the porters.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  We had a rehearsal space in a kindergarten up the road. It was done on a four-track. The verse came to me on acoustic guitar, as I always wrote on. And then, taking that to Magna, we played it around, just the two of us. He came up with a keyboard riff.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I played guitar, Magna played keyboards, I played bass. And there's Magna's neighbour there singing loud backing vocals. The Breach of Summer. And I had a throwaway chorus. I almost hated it. It went around itself in a four-bar loop and you couldn't get out of it. And it's just annoying.

• 7:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  That song was called Miss Eerie, is that right?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Where did that name come from?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  That was, I mean, it's embarrassing. But I probably were inspired by Aladdin Say and by Bowie, which is Aladdin Say. I wanted to do my misery, Miss Eerie. It's like one of those teenage overreach.

• 8:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so how did Morton end up joining the band?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Well, Morton first heard us when we played a show in his school. And he was a fan, one of my, maybe the only fan he had. So he was always interested in doing something with us. He just thought we needed a better vocalist, so not me. You know, Morton had an amazing voice. Funny, the first time I heard him, when we auditioned him, he was playing in a blues band and he just had a show the day before. So his voice was so raspy, like a...

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Joe Cocker type of thing was like completely busted. So I thought like, well, that's cool. Let's go for this guy.

• 8:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  The next time I heard him, I was like, you know, sang like an angel. But he could do so much with his voice. And that really changed my writing because before that I would be writing to my own voice. So I had to be sort of limiting the octaves. But with Morton, it's like writing for a totally different instrument. So it was very inspiring. And just from the get go, he was such a fan of that song, especially the riff. He was just like, that was it. And then my parents had a little cabin outside of Oslo in the forest. So we borrowed that four track recorder and tried to come up with a demo tape that we can present when we go to England.

• 9:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Besides Morton joining the band, were there other ways that you were changing things up?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Instead of guitars, we replaced it with the synth because that was really what was happening. And we wanted to be part of the new sort of sound. So the first version we did with Aha with Morton, that was called Lesson One.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  It was a totally new lyric and new approach.

• 10:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You can still sort of hear the DNA of the original chorus that you said you didn't like in this chorus. Did you still also not like this one?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  It was like a sugar rush. It was too kind of bubbly and it didn't really give you goosebumps. It was catchy, but it didn't really grab you in the way that I like a song to do. It has to have a more like a, you got to feel that sort of spine tingling.

• 10:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So this is October, November, 1982?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, yeah.

• 11:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What happened next after you finished recording in the cabin?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Then we decided, okay, that's it. Now we have eight songs. We got a cassette. So now we can go to England and we can start doing the rounds, you know, record companies and stuff like that.

• 11:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's one thing to say, we're going to move to England and start a music career there. But I'm just curious, how do you actually figure out how to move to England and even get started?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  We thought it would be a lot easier than it turned out to be. Let's put it that way. We booked this sort of package tour. Is that what you do? Like, we didn't do the return flight. We just went to England because that was the cheapest we could get. And then it was like, okay, what do we do now? You know, so we knew nothing. We knew no one. We bought like a Melody Maker or Music Express.

• 11:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  These are music magazines.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, back in the day, they're probably gone now. But, you know, there'd be some ads there and stuff like that. But it was very hard to, to actually figure out, how do we do this? How do we get through the reception at any record company? You know, you just can't, you know? It was very inspiring, too, the coming to England. You could, for the first time in our life, suddenly you have pop music coming out of every shop, every cab, every, you know, it was just everywhere. Going to places like Adam Palace, which was like a really cool club. So you did sort of want to compete at that level. And it took us about two weeks to realize that demo sounded pretty thin and not really hip enough.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  So after about a few months, we did the last money we have and booked two or three days in this studio. I think we recorded like four songs, not Take On Me, but four other songs. And as luck had it, the owner of that studio loved the demo, John Radcliffe. And he was signed to EMI and his A and R guy, Terry Slater, had quit EMI and he looked for a band to manage. So they became our managers.

• 13:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Now, how did that change things for you guys?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  You know, for the next couple of years, we were able to use the downtime of that studio from four in the morning till the new session came in at 10:00 next day. So we'd be sitting around there like tired and ready to keel over, waiting for that band to get finished and then hop in and use those hours to do a new song. They had a drum machine and I'm terrible with every machine and every sort of software I ever made, but the Lindrum, I just took to it. So we would just sort of lay down the drums first, imagining what the rest of the track would be.

• 13:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Is this something that you made in John's studio then?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is Round the Boo Studios, 8-track.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  And Magna had a, you know, I hear that

• 14:11Speaker 01

  from there on in, that became really part of the groove.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  But you can see we're trying to figuring out what the bass is doing. And my bass drum pattern is sort of trying to find the right thing.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  The song is pretty much sketched out at that point, but the chorus was not happening. And then Terry said, he had worked a lot with Queen and all these different artists. And we'd say like, well, whatever you got in falsetto, you had a hit. Falsetto, you had a hit. That was one of his sayings. And I thought like, well, hell, we got the best freaking falsetto singer right here. He can sing super low, he can sing super high. And where most people have like a sort of whispery, sort of weakish falsetto, he can't really do that. The way he does falsetto is like full on. It's like a trumpet. But I don't really love when that sort of money note's coming straight here comes the chorus

• 15:19Speaker 01

  and everybody goes up and, you know, so I never really liked that kind of songwriting. So I thought, you know, Morton has a really nice registers. I thought like, okay, maybe we should start it with the lowest notes and then bring it up to the falsetto where you can guarantee to get a hit.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And take on me, of course, that's the We're Norwegian and like people would tell me, you can't say take on me. That's not real English. You can't. But it just felt like that song couldn't be called anything else. It just had to be, you know, take me on. No, I don't like that. In a way, we were trying to take on the world and we were just saying like, well, take on us for, you know, to get a lot of this. But this is the first time we have a new chorus.

• 16:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Paul Wachter Savoy of Aha continues after this.

• 16:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 17:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This year, my wife and I are hosting Thanksgiving at our house. And in anticipation of that, I've already started some of the planning. And one of the things that I realized I wanted to have was some kind of small but elegant serving tray that I could put snacks and stuff on while we're just hanging out before the meal starts. So I turned to Wayfair and I found the perfect thing. These small wooden plates made from acacia. They match the rest of the vibe of my house and I'm To be using them even when it's not Thanksgiving. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high-quality, customer-trusted products for your home, so you can host and celebrate without the stress. If you're hosting for any of the many holidays coming up, take a look at the website to browse for ideas or look for something very specific.

• 18:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 18:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Just go to LinkedIn.com slash Song Exploder. That's LinkedIn.com slash Song Exploder. Terms and conditions apply.

• 19:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Okay, so you had written the song, you had recorded this eight-track demo. What was your next step?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Next for the song was to try to find a producer. We were signed to Warner in the US. Andrew Wickham was our A and R guy, and it was really his job to find suitable producers. And the producers was very, very hard to find. This was the 80s where the producers was like gods, but we didn't know one from the next, really. In the end, they managed to get Tony Mansfield. It was exciting, but it was also a little bit tricky because we were used to working very fast. But he had gotten a Fairlight, which he loved, and everything had to go through a Fairlight.

• 19:53Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Could you explain what a Fairlight is and why, when you work with it, everything had to take longer?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  It's really a sampler mixed with an eight-track recorder. And he would take the parts that we sort of insisted on taking, but he would love to also kind of make his own parts. That's when we actually found the bassline for the verse.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  That was his thing. And then the replies on the chorus. That was during that supposed second.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  But on this middle eight, on this version, you would have all these kind of orchestra bangs.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  I feel like the first time people got samples, that's what they did.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And it ate up a lot of time.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Five guys staring at a computer screen. I mean, everything takes a long time. We would never use a computer before. So when we had seven songs instead of 10, the money was spent.

• 21:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  For the whole album?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we were there on a tourist visa. So it was a lot of pressure on the whole thing, you know, recording the album and stuff like that. It is sort of like, you felt like you were on this borrowed time and the budget was spent. You know, it was a very tense time. You know, we tried to get it going before they really threw us out. When we signed the deal with Warner Brothers, we ended up signing with the Warner in America. But Warner in England, they were also interested. And I think they were always a little bit pissed off with that, that we didn't go with the English company. So for years, we were sort of struggling with a little bit of them not feeling like they needed to do so much for us

• 22:07Speaker 01

  since we didn't sign with them. So when that first single came out, they threw out a few of the ugliest posters you've ever seen, just around where we lived. And that was it. There was nothing. And the English charge back then, maybe it is still like that, but it was like you had one or two weeks to get it onto the charge. You needed to have something, a TV show, something. And we didn't have any of that. So you couldn't expect it to just take off like that. So that is the first version that came out and bombed.

• 22:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Okay, so you have spent the whole budget and then this version of the song comes out in 1984 and it flops. How were you able to convince anybody to give you another chance? Or maybe even more so, I'm curious, for your own sake, how were you able to feel like that wasn't the end of the road for the song? Like it had its chance, it didn't happen and that was that?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the good thing about being young. You don't feel, you know, it's just sort of brush it off your shoulders. You know, we were 100% confident. We were like, there was not a doubt in our minds. So it must have been the A and R guy, Andrew Wickham, he must have felt the same thing. And the producer, Alan Tarni, who actually did the final version, he was almost saying yes before we went for Tony Mansfield. And I think Andy Wickham got back to him and say, this is what they ended up with, but I know it could be better. So he finally agreed to have another go.

• 23:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Alan Tarni, so this is how you end up with him as the producer?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yes. But it took some time, you know, it was very touch and go. Because, you know, they've spent this much money on the half-finished album. Are they going to pour more money into it and risk losing more money? From Norway, no one comes from Norway and makes it. So it was a risk for people. But Alan Tarni had a little spot in between making this other album. So we could do five days. I remember the first day, he had some sort of meeting or a doctor's appointment. So Magna and I just put down a couple of parts to sort of sketch out the song.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  And already then, it just sounded like, wow, this is so much cooler.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  So then it was my time to do the drum programming. At first, we just had a basic pattern, just like a straight pattern. He had a lin drum, but what he didn't have is he didn't have a clap sound on that thing. He had two snares. So we ended up doing a halftime feel on the second snare.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  So you would have a

• 25:06Speaker 01

  For me, it gave the whole song what I've been missing. That's sort of a little bit of a different swagger.

• 25:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Morton has all these little moves that he does in his vocals that are so awesome.

• 25:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One of my favorites is this like little ramp up that he does going into the chorus.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  This is just him just in the groove and he's just sort of like egging yourself on, you know?

• 25:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  It did feel like, it was a good song to start with because we did feel everything was very unsettled around us. Are we gonna be sent back to Norway? Are we gonna lose this deal because we didn't finish the album? I'd met my later wife. She was American. I don't have a penny. How am I gonna keep her without any? Everything was up for grabs. And you just sort of, yeah, you're just sort of dreaming big and hope that it's gonna come through.

• 26:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And that was what informed the lyrics to the song?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of like, it's no better to be safe than sorry.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Already then, it was sort of like it's such a good vibe in the track. There must have been a song that I'd heard which used a PPG Wave, which is that synthesizer. So I asked if we could possibly rent that in for the day.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  So that was a very cool scent, you know. Didn't make him too well, so they always break down. But back then it was brand new and the newest thing.

• 26:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One thing I didn't know was in the song until I got these stems is the acoustic guitar.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  When we signed the deal, we wanted, he took me to a guitar shop just to pick out a guitar. You know, being Norwegian, we sort of picked the cheapest one there, you know. It was like a no bottom in it. You know, I read later that the guy from Smiths, he just got him to buy like the most awesome vintage guitar. I should have gone that route. But yeah, I ended up with this kind of horrible thing. But, you know, there's a reason for everything. It had a very sort of high trebly sound. So whenever you kind of mixed that in with all the drum feels, it became this sort of exciting thing. So it worked out pretty well.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  So Tony, Morton and myself, sort of three-part harmony.

• 28:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Wow, so the producer's also singing.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So it would be all three of you singing on one mic?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, one mic, you know.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I love the, particularly the last chorus, because the two first choruses, he goes to the falsetto at a sort of a later stage. But on the last one, he does the chest voice and that's always like the big payoff for me.

• 28:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  After you finished recording this version, did the three of you feel differently than you had up until this point?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  At this time, when we mixed it with the house engineer there, Jerry Kitchingham, I just remember walking around there while he was mixing, hearing it through like a half-open door or down the hall or whatever. And I just feel like, God, if this isn't a hit, I don't know what is. You know, it was like, no matter in what sort of terrible situation you were in, it still sounded great.

• 29:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How much time passed between you finishing the song and then it finally coming out again?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Well, that was the thing. I mean, we finished it very quickly in five days. And then the English WEA, which is sort of Warner in England, released it very quickly again and did the same kind of job as last time. And there's no plan, there's no promotional thing. So it did the same business as the first time, you know, it just didn't do anything. And that's really when the people who signed us sort of stepped in and say, okay, don't do anything more with this band. We want to launch it. So they kind of put the foot down and said like, you don't do anything more on a whole.

• 30:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The American counterparts.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And there was a new guy on the company, Jeff Aroff. He fell in love with the album and the song. And he had been keeping this one particular idea sort of in the back of his head. There was this art film called Commuter with animation. So he was the one who put together that with Steve Byrne, who was the director.

• 30:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And made the music video.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Do you remember the day it became clear to you that this version of the song, released in America, had become a hit?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  It was very strange because it climbed so slow. It was like they started at the bottom. But of course, nobody's heard about the two first attempts.

• 30:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Right, because that was only in the UK?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, you know, as we get closer to the top, we would get our really our hopes up. And when it went into top 100, we were ecstatic. When it went into top 40, we couldn't believe it. When it topped 20, it was like, this is just amazing. I mean, we were on our high, you know? But of course, you didn't really expect it to go to number one. But then suddenly we got the call. I think we celebrated with a hamburger.

• 31:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You know, this song for me has been an enormous hit my entire life. But to know that it had all these different iterations, I don't know how much that exists anymore, of giving something that much of a chance.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you have something that you think it's uniquely itself, you never lose faith in it, that it could be something, you know. So you chase it up and you give it its best shot, you know. But of course, when it comes to hits, you have to be a little bit lucky. If you're in the right time, in the right spot, there's so many things against you and it's very difficult.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  But it does help to be a little bit stubborn.

• 32:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now, here's "Take On Me" by AHA in its entirety.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Talking away. I don't know what to say, I say it anyway. Today is another day to find you shyin' away. I've been coming for your love, okay? Take on me. Take on me. Take me on. Take on me. I'll be gone.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  So needless to say I'm all sent in But I'll be stumbling away Still learning that life is okay Say up to me It's for better to be safe and sound Take on me Take on me Take me on Take on me I'll be gone In a day or two

• 34:51Speaker 02

  All the things that you say Is it a lie or Just to play my worries away? You're all the things I've got to remember Be shy and awake I'll be coming for you anyway Take on me Take on me Take me on Take on me I'll be gone In a day or two Take on me Take me on

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Take on me I'll be gone Take on me Take me on Take on me

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Take on me

• 36:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You can see some of the original pages from Paul's notebook in 1981, where they were working out the lyrics to the song as it evolved. You'll also find links to buy or stream Take On Me, and you can watch that iconic music video. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm watching and listening to and thinking about, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you

• 36:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 37:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Radiotopia. From PRX.