The Song That Failed Twice Before MTV Changed Everything
Released for the third time in September 1985, “Take On Me” finally reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 19, spending a single week at the top. The song had already flopped twice, first in late 1984 when it peaked at number 137 in the UK, then again in early 1985 with minimal support from Warner Bros’ London office. Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love” blocked it from the UK top spot for three consecutive weeks, leaving A-ha stranded at number two. But in America, MTV made them superstars overnight.
The single eventually reached number one in 36 territories worldwide, including Norway, Germany, Sweden, and Australia. It spent 27 weeks on the Billboard chart and ranked tenth on the 1985 year-end chart. As of 2023, Billboard ranked it the 26th greatest pop song in Hot 100 history. The album Hunting High and Low sold 11 million copies worldwide and earned triple platinum certification in the UK. For three young Norwegians who had been sleeping on floors in London flats, this was vindication on a global scale.
The song began life as “Miss Eerie” in Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen’s previous band Bridges, when both musicians were just 15 and 16 years old. Furuholmen created that iconic keyboard riff, though the band felt it was too poppy for their intended darker sound. After Bridges disbanded, they recruited singer Morten Harket, who heard the riff and declared it had the character of a universal hit. The song evolved into “Lesson One” before becoming “Take On Me,” with the vocals designed specifically to showcase Harket’s extraordinary range. Rolling Stone later called it one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history, with Harket climbing from A2 at the bottom to a falsetto E5 at the climax.
Producer Alan Tarney re-recorded the track for the third release, giving it a cleaner, more soaring sound with a proper coda instead of the earlier quick fade-out. The instrumentation mixed a LinnDrum machine with acoustic guitars, a Yamaha DX7, and PPG Wave synthesizers. When Warner Bros executive Andrew Wickham first heard Harket sing at an audition, he was stunned, later recalling he couldn’t believe someone who looked like a film star could sound like Roy Orbison. Wickham signed them immediately and placed the band on high priority, approving major investments that would transform their fortunes entirely.
Executive Jeff Ayeroff suggested basing a new video on a student film called “Commuter” by animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger. Director Steve Barron, who had already helmed videos for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Toto’s “Africa,” shot the live-action footage in just two days at Kim’s Café in Wandsworth, London. Patterson and Reckinger then spent 16 weeks rotoscoping approximately 3,000 frames by hand, tracing over the footage frame by frame. The actress playing the love interest, Bunty Bailey, became Harket’s real-life girlfriend after meeting on set. Ayeroff deliberately withheld the video from MTV until it was complete, building anticipation while the network desperately tried to see what they were creating.
The video won six awards at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, more than Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” had won and more than any artist in the three previous years combined. A-ha skipped the ceremony entirely to play a gig in Houston instead. Boyband A1 took a note-for-note cover to number one in the UK in 2000, outdoing the original’s chart peak. Weezer’s 2019 cover featured actor Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things in a video paying homage to the rotoscoping technique. On February 17, 2020, the original video reached one billion views on YouTube, becoming only the fifth song from the 20th century to achieve that milestone.
Three teenagers wrote that keyboard riff in Norway before they could legally drink. They failed spectacularly, twice, before an animator couple spent four months drawing over their faces frame by frame. The lead singer’s girlfriend came from the video shoot. The band no-showed their own award ceremony to play a random gig in Texas. None of it makes sense, and all of it is perfect. Sometimes the biggest pop songs aren’t born, they’re dragged into existence through sheer stubbornness and 3,000 hand-drawn frames.
