Take On Me

Thank you for the get well soon messages. Much appreciated. Covid wiped me out harder and for longer than I expected but I'm back on my feet now.

I've only been out of the house once in ten days but am hoping to be strong enough to accompany my sister to a longstanding and much rearranged gig at Wembley Arena this evening. She's a massive A-ha fan and in a moment of weakness I agreed to go with her.

I'm being facetious of course - A-ha are great and I'm looking forward to the gig. I'm glad it's seats though.

So in honour of my sister and Norway's finest, this week our Top Tip is inspired by the evolution of, and the never say die approach to, A-ha's biggest chart topper, Take On Me.

All Around The World

For a brief flurry in the mid 80s A-ha were everywhere. Everywhere!

They even came to my home town of Harrogate as part of the Saturday Superstore Roadshow. They took Harrogate and the world by storm, quickly producing a handful of instant classic hits.

The haunting Hunting High And Low and The Sun Always Shines On TV already sounded like film themes so it wasn't a mad leap when the trio were put on Bond theme duty. They produced The Living Daylights which, like the film, is pretty good but underappreciated.

But their most enduring chart hit was of course their very first single, the synth driven, insanely catchy Take On Me. It sat atop the charts in the US, Australia, Japan, everywhere.

A-ha made their debut success look effortless.

But it wasn't. Far from it. Take On Me was for a long time an abject and repeated failure.

When Will I Be Famous?

My mate Hally heard of A-ha before they were famous. He bought the very first version of Take On Me.

Not the 1985 version that ended up as a worldwide smash but the single's first release in 1984.

It reached number 137 in the UK and Hally was one of an estimated 300 buyers to help to put it there. I haven't seen Hally for about a decade but I bet he still mentions this fact to anyone within the first ten minutes of meeting him.

But even that version wasn't anywhere near the initial attempt. The song's origins actually began way back in 1981 when the formative band . . . 

Hang on! Okay, I'm going to self edit here because in my head resides an insane amount of trivia about pop and rock - often about bands I care very little about. Like A-ha for instance.

Don't know why but it's there. If my brain was able to store and retrieve the same amount of information about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the EU's Common Agricultural Policy I'd have done a lot better in my English and Geography A Levels that's for sure.

In Bloom

No one needs the full Take On Me history so here's a summary of the song's evolution with links to awesome YouTube clips:

1 - Future A-ha members Pal and Mags were in a band called Bridges and sketched a nascent version of Take On Me called The Juicy Fruit Song.

2 - Bridges re-recorded The Juicy Fruit Song but now called it Miss Eerie.

3 - Morten Harket joined and they called themselves A-ha and Miss Eerie evolved into Lesson One - complete with morning rooster impression!

4 - October 1984 and A-ha release Take On Me as a single (recorded at Pete Townshend's studio). It has a boring video and it bombs (but Hally liked it!).

5 - In April 85 A-ha they re-re-re-recorded and released the definitive version of Take On Me.

So finally, now you've got the perfect pop tune with an infectious melody sung by a Norwegian hunk with matinee idol looks and a Roy Orbison style two and a half octave range . . . and it bombed. Again.

I'm A Believer

Fortunately there were so many people who still believed in the song. Not just the band but people from the record company who really believed that with just the right approach this song could be a worldwide smash.

It's at this point, or probably way earlier in fact, that most people give up on an idea. The single had already been given multiple chances and the record company had gone over budget more than once.

Would your management team keep on flogging a horse like this that is so obviously dead?

It's doubtful. The obstacles are too great.

Think of how it often goes at work. At so many organisations management will introduce an idea and there will be automatic pushback. Especially if it's been tried before.

People, often those who have been there a long time and who have 'seen it all before', will put up resistance. They'll say "We've tried that before, it doesn't work."

Often they'll be right. It didn't work. But that's not necessarily because it was the wrong idea. Perhaps it was just implemented in the wrong way or it wasn't quite the right time. 

There's a great quote from everybody's favourite Greek philospher Heraclitis: 

“No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

I Want My MTV

The team around A-ha thought Take On Me was the right idea. They just needed a way to package it.

The creative director tasked with this was determined to make the song into an earworm and resolved to making a video that would be ubiquitous. It was the age of MTV so visuals were key.

A live story for the song was recorded in a London cafe and an animation team then took months to trace over 10,000 illustrations to create a comic book style video. The resulting video was a cutting edge, mini masterpiece depicting a doomed romance through different dimensions.

It was the universal fairytale about escaping the humdrum and diving into a fantasy world. Buoyant melancholy, perfect for the MTV age and all in under three minutes.

Sometimes you have to have belief in yourself, belief in an idea that you truly feel will work. Belief to stick with it and a belief that you will find a way to get people to notice. Sometimes it takes a while for the rest of the world to catch up with you. That's what happened with Take On Me.

With the innovative new video paving the way the single soared to number one in twenty seven countries and is acknowledged as an enduring classic.

Turns out it wasn't just for the MTV age either as it has been viewed nearly 1.5 billion times on YouTube. That's an insane shelf life for any song, never mind one that was clearly a repeat failure.

One More Try

So this week's Top Tip is a belief recipe. A mixture of 'if at first you don't succeed then try, try, try again' with a heavy dollop of 'don't listen to the critics, believe in yourself' all wrapped up in the very important element of 'surrounding yourself with talented people who believe in you'.

It won't always work. But failure is one of the best teachers there is. Always be learning. Always be adapting.

If you have an idea that you believe in, then go for it. Take it on!

Here's the finished video for Take On Me. Go on, you know you want to.