A-ha interview: A new take on them. Published Date: 18 July 2009 By PAUL LESTER
THERE IS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE between 1980s teen-pop sensations A-ha and the boy bands who emerged in their wake, even though they had an audience of excitable young females in common. For a start, the Norwegian trio wrote their own songs and played their own instruments. And those songs had about them an air of disquiet and existential doubt that was very Scandinavian, making them seem like a Joy Division for anxious, adolescent girls.
It was easy, because of their poster-boy appeal – especially singer Morten Harket, whose chiselled features could have earned him a fortune as a model – to dismiss them as purveyors of pap, but from their global debut hit single from 1985, Take On Me, onwards, it was clear that A-ha were doyens of exquisitely dolorous synthpop, sung with soaring yearning by Harket: imagine Take That produced by Ingmar Bergman. What's most surprising is that their "pocket symphonies", as main songwriter (and guitarist) Paul Waaktaar-Savoy calls them, songs as achingly sorrowful as Here I Stand And Face The Rain, Summer Moved On and There's Never A Forever Thing, have proved so popular – A-ha have sold almost 40 million albums.
"All music that's meaningful is pain-condensed and made into something you can relate to," decides keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, as we settle into the band's smart West London hotel suite. "Happy music makes me sad," he laughs. "It's like watching a Hollywood movie where you know the ending and (are) told what to feel." The most garrulous member, he fails to see why so-called "dark music" should make you feel depressed. Quite the opposite, in fact. "People find consolation in the way that someone can articulate conflicting feelings and turn them into some sort of beauty," he says. "That's the attraction of Joy Division to me – their music's beautiful."
Waaktaar-Savoy is literally a pale imitation of his former self – wan and exhausted from his journey (he's just flown in from New York), he sinks back into the hotel sofa, from where he issues occasional comments as though from a faraway place. Harket is more voluble but is the one most troubled by the perception of A-ha as pop pin-ups. Furuholmen is the easiest to talk to, and the one most likely to discuss the groupies "lined up like a pussy rack" outside the dressing-rooms over the years that he had to turn away (he has been faithful to his wife since he was 18), the conflicts that led to the trio's break-up in the 1990s, and the way being misconstrued as manufactured muppets "screwed with our heads".
Has making A-ha's music, I wonder, been therapeutic for them, an opportunity to exorcise all their negative feelings? "Well, you say 'negative', but I strongly oppose that," says Furuholmen. "Because to a Scandinavian melancholia is not negative; it's more like an itch you must scratch. It's a big part of our make-up."
A-ha were, like one of their idols Jimi Hendrix, prophets without honour in their own land, who had to come to Britain in the early 1980s to find success, which they used as the launch-pad for international stardom. Fans of The Beatles and The Doors, they had their heads turned by the synthesised pop music then reaping huge commercial rewards for the likes of Soft Cell and The Human League. "That was the big change for us," recalls Furuholmen, "coming from Norway, with our stylistic orientation towards 1960s music, and then being in England and opening up to a whole new set of influences after years of thinking music ended with John Lennon's Imagine album."
Sensing a link between The Doors and "the darker synth stuff like Soft Cell", they set about recording their first album, Hunting High And Low. Suddenly, thanks to the success of Take On Me and its video, with its revolutionary pencil-sketch animation/live-action combination called rotoscoping, A-ha found themselves caught "in a hailstorm of pop stardom", when really what they wanted was the acclaim of the serious music press.
"We didn't control it, we were controlled by it," says Waaktaar-Savoy of their new-found teen fame. "When my wife saw the first album and the poster it came with, she went, 'Uh-oh'."
According to Harket, the problem lay not in the music but the marketing of the band. "They (the record company] didn't know what to do with us. They failed to recognise the different aspects of A-ha." They were, admits Furuholmen, regarded by their label as "awkward". "People would say, 'There's no Take On Me' on this record, and we'd say, 'Yeah, great!' We knew that the expectation was to regurgitate our own success and that wasn't what we were about."
"We wanted the freedom to be playful," explains Harket, "to experiment and do what we felt like doing, but we were heavily affected by the success that the first record gave us."
It was hard to know what direction to pursue after the 10-million-selling debut album, so they opted for a harder sound on their second album Scoundrel Days (1986), then returned to pop for 1988's Stay On These Roads, which featured their James Bond theme, The Living Daylights, a sure sign of their ubiquity and commercial enormity. Collaborating with John Barry was a mixed blessing, and remains a source of some tension. Waaktaar-Savoy admits to enjoying working with the legendary Bond composer, which baffles Furuholmen, who has different memories of their sessions. "I can't remember you loving that at the time, correct me if I'm wrong," he says, one of several quietly barbed exchanges during the interview.
They toughened up again for 1990's East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon, part of what Furuholmen calls their "crystallisation process, away from the ornate and structurally complicated", towards a more organic, live-band sound.
But after 1993's sombre Memorial Beach the writing was on the wall, and despite A-ha discovering a huge audience in South America, they chose that moment to split. They worked on a variety of solo projects, and Furuholmen, "tired to the bones", began exhibiting art work and even worked for a year in a sound recording library where he digitally archived the experimental music of John Cage and Stockhausen.
"That album (Memorial Beach] felt like a requiem," he says. "It was clear we wanted to get out of the pop business."
It brings back particular unhappy memories for Harket. "I didn't feel like I fitted in," he reveals. "I felt like I was a hindrance to A-ha." Confusion reigned during this period. "We were at the peak of denouncing ourselves and what we had been," says the singer. "When you're at war with yourself you will go under. I don't think we were focused. We were fighting too many demons, and trying to avoid things."
They were mainly trying to avoid the truth: that they were exponents of deliciously downbeat synthpop. When they reformed in 2000 for Minor Earth Major Sky, they appeared finally to have come to terms with that, as had the rock press whose attention they had for so long craved.
"Every grudge was gone," says Waaktaar-Savoy. "There were open arms everywhere, and people seemed genuinely happy to have us back."
Furuholmen remembers their opening show in Hamburg being "a real shocker – like, 'woah!'" There were, adds Harket, not just screaming girls this time, but "hordes of grown people going apeshit". It was, says the guitarist, "the same in every country. We thought we'd have to start from scratch and build it up, but we didn't. We had a totally new audience, with a big spread in demographic, from people our age and older to the really young."
And the really credible: since A-ha's comeback, it has become acceptable to proclaim their greatness: U2, Coldplay, Oasis, Keane, Morrissey and Bloc Party have all come out of the closet in recent times – indeed, Coldplay's Guy Berryman and Will Champion have collaborated with Furuholmen on various solo projects.
"Only now, with the reappraisal of the band and new acts citing us as a musical influence, is our idea of the band finally coming out," says Furuholmen. "We were the most important band in the world in our minds! We were The Beatles! We wanted to make great album statements! We didn't just want Top 10 singles."
They did have another Top 10 single, Analogue (All I Want), in 2006, their first for nearly 20 years. And now they've made their first purely synth-based album for almost as long: Foot Of The Mountain, a return to the electro-melancholia that made their name, recorded with Steve Osborne, producer for New Order.
"It has," says Furuholmen, "some of the vitality of our early stuff without plundering our own mausoleums," while the icily pretty synthscapes, he feels, provide the perfect accompaniment for "Morten's eerie, otherworldly, fourth-dimensional vocals".
A-ha are finally happy with their sound, and with their new position in the pantheon of electro-pop alongside the likes of New Order and Depeche Mode.
"Is that the company we'd like to keep?" the keyboardist repeats the question, slightly tartly. "What, you mean intelligent individuals making interesting pop music? Yes, absolutely."
As for what it is that U2, Coldplay et al like about A-ha, that is even more obvious, according to Furuholmen. "They just like the way we look."
• Foot of the Mountain is released on 27 July.
