Forty-one years ago today, on the Billboard Hot 100 dated October 19, 1985, a song by three young Norwegians climbed to No. 1 in America. You almost certainly know it from the first few notes: that bright, bouncing keyboard riff, then a voice that keeps rising until it seems to touch the ceiling. The song was “Take On Me,” the band was a-ha, and the reason most Americans heard it at all was a music video unlike anything MTV had shown before.
In this On This Day feature, we look back at how a song that flopped twice in Britain became a worldwide hit, how a pencil-sketch fantasy turned three unknowns into stars, and why the video still draws millions of new viewers four decades later. The official video is waiting for you at the end of the article.
▶️ Want to step into the comic book first? Scroll down. The official video is at the end of the article.
A Song That Refused to Give Up
The story starts long before 1985. Guitarist Pål Waaktaar (later Paul Waaktaar-Savoy) and keyboardist Magne Furuholmen first came up with the riff in their teenage band, Bridges, when they were just 15 and 16. Back then the tune was called “Miss Eerie,” and the two friends worried that it sounded far too poppy for the darker music they wanted to make. When singer Morten Harket heard it, he joked that it sounded like a “Juicy Fruit” chewing gum jingle, but he also said the keyboard riff had the character of a universal hit.
The three formed a-ha in Oslo in 1982 and headed to London to break into the music business. The song went through another name, “Lesson One,” before it became “Take On Me.” The band even picked the studio of producer John Ratcliff partly because it had a Space Invaders machine. Ratcliff introduced them to manager Terry Slater, and before long they had a deal with Warner Bros.
Two Flops Before the Hit
Here is the part that surprises many fans. The first version of “Take On Me,” produced by Tony Mansfield and released in 1984, reached No. 3 in Norway but stalled at No. 137 in the United Kingdom. Its video was a simple performance clip of the band in front of a blue background. Warner then had producer Alan Tarney re-record the song with a cleaner, more soaring sound and a proper ending instead of a quick fade-out. That version was released in Britain in 1985, and it flopped too.
By now many labels would have moved on. Instead, Warner’s American side decided to make a-ha a priority and spend real money on one more try. The plan centered on a brand-new video.
The Pencil-Sketch Video
The idea came from inside Warner Bros. Executive Jeff Ayeroff pushed for a bold concept, and his colleague John Beug suggested basing it on “Commuter,” a student animated short by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger. Director Steve Barron, who had already made videos for Michael Jackson, Madonna and Culture Club, shot the live action. Patterson then drew over the footage frame by frame, while Reckinger handled the mattes. The technique is called rotoscoping, and about 3,000 frames were drawn by hand over 16 weeks.
The plot is pure romance. A young woman in a London café, played by English actress Bunty Bailey, is reading a comic book about a motorcycle race. The hero, played by Morten, winks at her from the page and reaches out a pencil-drawn hand to pull her into his black-and-white world. When the waitress crumples the comic and throws it away, the woman is pushed back into reality, and the hero has to fight his way out of the paper to reach her. The café scenes were filmed at Kim’s Café in Wandsworth, in southwest London.
In 1985 that kind of storytelling was exactly what MTV loved. If you remember how Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” turned a music video into an event a few years earlier, you can understand why programmers jumped on this one.
From Boston TV to the Top of the Chart
The new video was first broadcast on V66, a local music video station in Boston, and soon went into heavy rotation on MTV. Warner released it to dance clubs and television about a month before the single reached stores. The single entered Billboard the week of July 13, 1985, and kept climbing all summer.
In its fifteenth week on the chart, it reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 dated October 19, 1985. It replaced “Oh Sheila” by Ready for the World and was followed a week later by Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You.” a-ha became the first Norwegian band to top the American chart. The song spent 27 weeks on the Hot 100 and ranked No. 10 for the whole year.
The success spread around the world. In Britain, where it had failed twice, the third release finally charted and spent three weeks at No. 2, kept from the top by Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love.” It also went to No. 1 in Norway, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.
That Chorus
Part of the magic is Morten Harket’s voice. In the chorus he starts low and keeps climbing, finishing in a falsetto on the song’s highest note. His range on the record spans more than two and a half octaves, and Rolling Stone has called it one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history. Anyone who has tried it at karaoke will agree.
Awards and a Grammy Nod
At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, “Take On Me” won six awards: Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects and the Viewer’s Choice award. a-ha also earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, which went to Sade. The band appeared on Soul Train in 1985, and the story of the video continued in the opening of their next clip, “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.”
It was quite a time for the music video. The same MTV era gave us Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”, and a-ha’s clip held its own against all of them.
Why It Still Feels Fresh
In America, a-ha is often remembered almost entirely for this one song, although “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” also reached the Top 20. Around the world, the band kept making hit albums for decades and has sold more than 100 million records.
The video itself keeps finding new fans. In 2019 it was remastered in 4K from the original 35mm film. On February 17, 2020, it passed one billion views on YouTube, and by September 2024 it had passed two billion, the first music video from the 1980s to do so. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 14 on its 2021 list of the greatest music videos, and baseball fans at Nationals Park in Washington sing along to the song during the seventh-inning stretch. In 2019, Morten Harket and Bunty Bailey even reunited at the Wandsworth café, 34 years after the shoot.
Maybe that is the real secret. “Take On Me” is a love story told with a pencil, and it still feels like being young in 1985.
Listening Tips
- Start with the album. Hunting High and Low (1985), recorded at Eel Pie Studios in Twickenham, has “Take On Me,” “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” and the lovely title track.
- Compare the versions. Look for the original 1984 Tony Mansfield mix of “Take On Me.” It is fun to hear how much the Alan Tarney version changed.
- Watch the sequel. The opening of “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” picks up right where the story ends.
- Hear it unplugged. a-ha recorded a gentle acoustic version for MTV Unplugged – Summer Solstice in 2017.
- Explore the decade. Browse more 80s Hits and Behind the Video stories.
“Take On Me” Quick Facts
| Artist | a-ha (Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen, Paul Waaktaar-Savoy) |
| Album | Hunting High and Low (1985) |
| Written by | Pål Waaktaar, Magne Furuholmen and Morten Harket |
| Hit version produced by | Alan Tarney |
| Hot 100 No. 1 | Chart dated October 19, 1985 (one week) |
| Weeks on the Hot 100 | 27 |
| UK peak | No. 2 |
| Video director | Steve Barron |
| Animation | Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger (rotoscoping) |
| MTV VMAs | Six wins (1986) |
Sources
- “Take On Me” on Wikipedia (with its cited sources, including Billboard and Rolling Stone)
- a-ha on Wikipedia
- Hunting High and Low on Wikipedia
- List of Billboard Hot 100 number ones of 1985 on Wikipedia
- Billboard Hot 100, October 19, 1985
- Official a-ha website
Photo Credits
- Featured image: a-ha in 1984 by Sheila Rock, restored by Adam Cuerden, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Featured image: Morten Harket and Magne Furuholmen live in Nottingham, 2010 by Helen Dearnley, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Featured image: a-ha in concert in Kyiv, 2010 by sergey-astral, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Featured image: Morten Harket in 1984 by Sheila Rock, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- In-article image: Morten Harket at Kongsberg Jazzfestival, 2018 by Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- In-article image: Magne Furuholmen at Kongsberg Jazzfestival, 2018 by Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- In-article image: Morten Harket on the green carpet, 2012 by Andreas Meyer for Clean Tech Media, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
