A-ha - Take On Me

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 Rishikesh Hirwe. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians, these are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save.

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Get it all this fall from Macy's Fashion Guide. Shop at macy's.com or in-store. 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 U.S. 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 Wachter-Savoy from AHA, 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, Magna Furholman and Morten Harkett, 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.

I am Paul Lochte Savoy, which is a mouthful. AHA has three members. Magne Furholman, who plays keyboards. Morten Harkett on lead voice. And... myself, Paul Wachter-Savoy on guitar. You and Magnus started playing music together years before AHA actually began, is that right? 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 going to 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. 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 at the same time, we thought that would be an amazing adventure. And the two of you were in a band together in high school called Bridges? 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 Magnet 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 um make it a little bit easier on people on the poor listener

We had a rehearsal space in a kindergarten up the road and it was done on the four track. The verse came to me on acoustic guitar, as I always wrote on. And then taking that to Mang, we sort of played it around, just the two of us. He came up with a keyboard riff. I played guitar, Magne played keyboards, I played bass, and there's Magne's neighbor there singing loud backing vocals and the Bridges drummer. And I had this sort of a throwaway chorus.

I always hated it. It sort of went around itself in a four-bar loop and you couldn't get out of it. And it's just like annoying. That song was called Miss Eerie, is that right? Yeah. Where did that name come from? That was, I mean, it's embarrassing, but I probably were inspired by like Aladdin Sane by Bowie, which is Aladdin Sane. So I wanted to do my...

Misery, Miss Eerie. It's like one of those teenage overreach. And so how did Morten end up joining the band? Well, Morten first heard us when we played a show in his school. And he was a fan, maybe the only fan we had. So he was always interested in doing something with us. He just thought we needed a better vocalist, so not me, in other words.

You know, Morton had an amazing voice. Funny, the first time I heard him, when we sort of auditioned him, he was playing in the blues band and he just had a show the day before. So his voice was like... so raspy, like a Joe Cocker type of thing. It was like completely busted. So I thought like, well, that's cool. Let's go for this guy. The next time I heard him, he 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. besides morton joining the band were there other ways that you were changing things up uh 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 Morten, that was called Lesson 1.

It was a totally new lyric and new approach. 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? 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 so this is october november 1982 yeah i think so yeah

What happened next after you finished recording in the cabin? 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 of record companies and stuff like that. 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?

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? 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 these are music magazines yeah back in the day they're probably gone now but you know there'll 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, that coming to England, you could, for the first time in our life, suddenly have pop music coming out of every...

shop every cab every you know it was just everywhere going to places like cannon 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. 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, the owner of that studio loved the demo, John Radcliffe. And he was signed to EMI and his A&R guy.

Terry Slater had quit EMI and he looked for a band to manage. So they became our managers. How did that change things for you guys? 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 next day so we'd be sitting around there like tired and not 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 ever made but the lindrum i just took to it So we would just lay down the drums first, imagining what the rest of the track would be. Is this something that you made in John's studio then? Yeah, this is Rendezvous Studios, an 8-track. And Magna had a, you know, I hear that...

From there on in that became really part of the groove. But you can see we're trying to figure out what the bass is doing. and my bass drum pattern just sort of trying to find the right thing.

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 he would 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 is coming straight. Here comes the chorus and everybody goes up. So I never really liked that kind of songwriting. So I thought, you know, Morten 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 and take on me of course that's

We're Norwegian, and people tell me, you can't say Take On Me, that's not real English. But it just felt like that song couldn't be called or anything else. It just had to be 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 not to get a lot of this. So this is the first time we have a new chorus.

My conversation with Paul Walker-Savoy of AHA continues after this. Thanks to Function for supporting Song Exploder. I chose to use Function because it's the only health platform that gives me data about what's happening inside my body. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is burnout, and how it's not just a mental state, but a physical one too.

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Okay, so you had written the song, you had recorded this 8-track demo. What was your next step? Next for the song was to try to find a producer. We were signed to Warner in the US. Andrew Wickham was our A&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 were 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 fair light, which he loved, and everything had to go through the fair light. Could you explain what a Fairlight is and why, when you work with it, everything had to take longer? It's really a sampler mixed with an 8-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 baseline for the verse. That was his thing. And then the replies on the chorus. That was the one I suppose I can. But on this middle 8, on this version, you would have all these kind of orchestra and bangs. I feel like the first time people got samples, that's what they did.

and it ate up a lot of time. 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. For the whole album. Yeah. And we were there on a tourist visa. So it was a lot of... pressure on the whole thing, recording the album and stuff like that. You felt like you were on this borrowed time and the budget was spent. It was a very tense time. We tried to get it...

going before they really threw us out. When we signed a 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 little bits. of them not feeling like they needed to do so much for us 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 charts 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.

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.

Yeah, that's the good thing about being young. You don't feel, you know, you just sort of brush it off your shoulders. You know, we were 100% confident. We were like, there's not a doubt in our... Mine. So it must have been the A&R guy, Andrew Wickham. He must have felt the same thing. And the producer, Alan Tarnio, 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 said, this is what they ended up with, but I know it could be better. So he finally agreed to have another go. Alan Tarney. So this is how you end up with him as the producer. yes but it took some time you know it was very touching goal 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 Tarny 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.

And already then it just sounded like, wow, this is so much cooler. 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 lindrum, but what he did have is that 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. So you would have a...

For me, gave the whole song what I've been missing. That's sort of a little bit of a different swagger. Morton has all these little moves that he does in his vocals that are so awesome. One of my favorites is this little ramp up that he does going into the chorus. This is just him just in the groove and he's just sort of... Like egging yourself on, you know? Yeah. 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 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 and big and hope that it will come through And that was what informed the lyrics to this song? Yeah, it's sort of like, it's not better to be safe than sorry.

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. 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. the newest thing one thing i didn't know was in the song until i got these stems is the acoustic guitar yeah

When we signed the deal with Warner, it took me to a guitar shop just to pick out a guitar. And being Norwegian, it was literally...

Picked the cheapest one there, you know, it was like no bottom in it. You know, I read later that the guy from Smith's, 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 treble-y sound so whenever you kind of mix that in with all the drum fills it became this sort of exciting thing. So it worked out pretty well.

it's uh tawny morton and myself it's got a three-part harmony wow so the producer is also singing yeah so it'll be all three of you singing on one mic oh yeah one mic I love 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.

After you finished recording this version, did the three of you feel differently than you had up until this point yeah this time when we mixed it with the um 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 how much time passed between you finishing the song and then it finally coming out again 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. There's no plan, there's no promotional thing. So it did the same business as the first time. It just didn't do anything.

That's really when the people who signed us sort of stepped in and said, 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 AHA. The American counterparts. And there was a new guy on the company, Jeff Eeroff. 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 Barron, who is the director. And made the music video. Yeah. Do you remember the day it became clear to you that this version of the song released in America? had become a hit it was very strange because he climbed so slow it was like they started at the bottom but of course nobody's heard about the two first attempts right because that was only in the uk yeah

But, you know, as we get closer to the top, we would get our hopes up. And when it went into the top 100, we were ecstatic. When it went into the top 40, we couldn't believe it. In the top 20, I was like, this is just amazing. I mean, we were on a 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.

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. 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. But it does help to be a little bit stubborn. And now, here's Take On Me by AHA in its entirety.

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