Forty years ago, three Norwegian boys burst onto the pop landscape with the interminably ubiquitous hit single Take On Me. Keen to please, these exotic pop creatures with healthy translucent skin and chiselled good looks were only too happy to model for Jackie and Look-In magazines in an array of fetching Scandi knitwear and white muscle vests. They were Blu-Tacked fixtures on teenagers’ walls, to the consternation of their parents.
While the trio largely remained in the domain of teenyboppers, at the core of A-ha was something darker and more musically profound, as evidenced on their debut album Hunting High and Low from 1985.
Heavy rock was the first love of guitarist and songwriter Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and keyboard player Magne Furuholmen, while perma-quiffed singer Morten Harket received a copy of Uriah Heep’s Wonderworld when he was a teen, and it proved to be a gamechanger.
“Through listening to Uriah Heep, I had this massive revelation that I wanted to do what they did, and I believed I would go all the way,” Harket told Prog in 2012. “I was 15 years old and so excited – it was a calling! I knew what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life.”
The Sun Always Shines On TV contains lyrics that would have made Scott Walker proud
Harket’s long-lasting obsession with the Heep proved a gateway to other rock groups such as Deep Purple, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Queen – Indeed, he used to sing along to Freddie Mercury’s parts with consummate ease (though his air guitar skills remain undocumented to this day).
While A-ha’s debut album turned out to be a long way from Heep, the prog signs are within its grooves should anyone go looking for them. One needs look no further than The Sun Always Shines On TV, which hit the UK top spot in January 1986.
The five-minute, moody synthpop masterpiece with neoclassical overtones is
a long way from the summery feel of Take On Me, with lyrics that would have made Scott Walker proud: ’I fear the crazed and lonely looks the mirror’s sending me these days,’ sings Harket dolefully, belying the shiny, happy image the group created for themselves with their previous single (their own nickname for Take On Me was ‘The Juicy Fruit Song’).
There are signs of their progressive rock past elsewhere, too: And You Tell Me has a baroque pop structure that might have sounded very different were it not the mid-1980s, while Living A Boy’s Adventure Tale sneaks in oboes and clarinets.
But perhaps most proggy of all is the title track itself, a song as ambitious as it is dynamic, with surely the most dramatic middle eight of the decade. Seekers didn’t have to hunt high and low for progressive signs here.
