October 1985, London and Oslo: Norwegian trio a-ha releases the third edit of “Take On Me”. The first two versions, out in 1984 and early 1985, had flopped in the UK chart. The third attempt - after radical reproduction by Alan Tarney and a video shot by Steve Barron for £100,000 - climbed so fast that by December it was #1 in the US, #2 in the UK and #1 in 17 countries simultaneously. Total sales by end of 1986 - over 7 million copies. For a Norwegian band on the English-language market, this was a historic breakthrough.
Three attempts
The first version of “Take On Me” was recorded by Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Pål Waaktaar-Savoy in London in 1984 under producer Tony Mansfield (who had worked with Naked Eyes and New Musik). Released in Norway in October 1984, in the UK in December. UK Singles Chart: #137. No reaction.
The second version was rewritten by a-ha themselves with Mansfield by March 1985. Result: UK #127. Another flop. At that point Warner Bros. was preparing to drop the band.
The project was saved by Warner's executive producer Terry Slater, who brought in Alan Tarney, previously known for his work with Cliff Richard. Tarney threw out everything Mansfield had done and rebuilt the track in six weeks at RG Jones Studios in Wimbledon. All three members of the band later acknowledged: Tarney's version was a different song.
“Alan Tarney turned our song into a hit. Before him it sounded like a student experiment. After him - like an actual pop track. We weren't offended. We learned”, Magne Furuholmen wrote in his autobiography a-ha: The Swing of Things (2018).
What Tarney changed
Tarney rebuilt the arrangement from scratch. Key changes:
- BPM raised from 169 to 172 - seemingly trivial, but on the dance floor the difference registers as “urgency”
- The main synth hook moved from a bass note to an octave higher - “C” became “C5”, giving it piercing brightness
- Drum track - completely replaced: live kit out, LinnDrum in, with sharp snare on 2 and 4
- Lead - Yamaha DX7, CALLIOPE preset, layered over a Roland Juno-60
- Morten Harket's vocal was re-tracked once - 28 bars of sustained leitmotif, three notes in the upper register (F♯5, G5, A5), held without a breath
The famous vocal leap to A5 is not a studio trick. Harket physically hit that note on every take. Out of 24 takes, Tarney kept the third from last: “it was the liveliest, with slightly rolling breath”.
The video that changed everything
The “Take On Me” video was directed by British filmmaker Steve Barron, whose credits included clips for David Bowie, Tears for Fears and Human League. Budget - £100,000 (around $140,000 at the 1985 exchange rate). Normal clips at the time cost £20,000-40,000. Barron spent four times the usual budget on a single technique - rotoscoping.
Rotoscoping is an animation process where live footage is traced frame by frame. The “Take On Me” video contained 3,020 individual frames, drawn by three animators over 16 weeks. Each frame was four layers: background, character, texture, outline. The mix of live action and animation, where the hero “steps out of the comic”, was technologically unprecedented for 1985.
- Grammy 1986: “Best Video” (won); “Best Short-Form Video” (won)
- MTV Video Music Awards 1986: six awards, including “Video of the Year”
- Billboard Music Awards 1985: “Video of the Year” by aggregate views
The video was the key factor in US success - in October 1985, MTV was rotating “Take On Me” 12-15 times per day in top-tier programming. Without that rotation the track would probably not have reached #1 on Billboard. No earlier, cheaply-shot version of the clip from 1984 had delivered anything close.
The numbers speak
- US: #1 Billboard Hot 100 (19 October 1985); 3× platinum
- UK: #2 (held off #1 only by Jennifer Rush's “The Power of Love”)
- Germany: #1, 4 weeks
- France: #1, 5 weeks
- Norway: #3 - paradoxically low for the band's home market
- Australia: #1, 3× platinum
- Japan: #4 Oricon International
- South Africa: #1, 12 weeks - the all-time record for any synth-pop single
By 2024 Spotify shows over 2.4 billion streams of the original - placing “Take On Me” in the top ten most-streamed 80s tracks across all platforms.
What a-ha opened up for the genre
“Take On Me” did three things others couldn't. First - it proved a pop song could have an operatic vocal range and not lose its audience. Harket's one-and-a-half-octave chorus is a technical marker of an operatic tenor, not a pop vocalist. Second - it showed that Scandinavian synth-pop could compete with British. Before a-ha, the English-language market belonged to UK and US acts; Norwegians opened a new geographical front. Third - it lifted the music video to the level of co-producer of the track. Without Barron's video, “Take On Me” would have remained a good synth-pop song; with it, the track became a cultural event.
For italo-disco this model mattered indirectly. Italians in 1985 weren't yet making expensive videos - they relied on records and club rotation. After “Take On Me” it became clear that without MTV video rotation, international success was impossible. More on how other European synth-pop anthems were built - in dedicated pieces.
What remains
a-ha are still active - their last album True North came out in 2022. In 2020 Morten Harket performed “Take On Me” at the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup, hitting the same A5 he sang 35 years earlier. For a singer born in 1959, physically extraordinary.
But the track's main legacy is cultural. “Take On Me” is the song by which millions associate the sound of 1985. Its video is used as a teaching example of rotoscoping in dozens of art academies. No other synth-pop record of the era left a comparable multimedia imprint. Related breakdowns - “I Feel Love” and “Forever Young”.