There are evergreen 1980s pop songs, and then there’s a-ha’s“Take On Me”. It’s an initially tentative tale of a boy who doesn’t “know what to say”, always “stumbling away”, before he begs us to take him on, the song’s melody soaring higher and higher. Frontman Morten Harket’s technical gifts as a singer (and his model-issue cheekbones) helped his listeners agree, as did the tenderness of the lyric created by the Norwegian band’s guitarist and joint-songwriter Paul Waaktaar, who wrote it about his budding relationship with his new girlfriend, Lauren Savoy.

“Take On Me”’s combination of youthful sweetness and boldness means it has been covered often, and twice already in 2019. Veteran pop producerTrevor Horn teases out its melancholy and envelops it with strings on hisTrevor Horn Reimagines the Eighties LP with The Sarm Orchestra. American alternative bandWeezer preserve its perkiness on their recentTeal Album. They also include its irresistibly bouncy opening synthesiser riff, some of which was written by keyboard player Magne Furuholmen in 1981, when he and Waaktaar were in another band, Bridges. It was inspired by The Doors’ Ray Manzarek’s playing on“Light My Fire”. “[He was] a huge influence in how I approached my instrument,” Furuholmen told Rolling Stone in 2010. “A lot of the strength of a-ha comes from absorbing things like that and adding our own Scandinavian flavour to it.”

“Take On Me” was the first songa-ha attempted to record early in 1983 after they had arrived in London from Norway to seek a deal. Back then, it was called “Lesson One”; before that, it was “The Juicy Fruit Song”. They picked a tiny studio, Rendezvous, in Sydenham, south London, to record in because it was cheap, and allegedly because it had a Space Invaders machine. It was a fortuitous choice: Rendezvous’ engineer, John Ratcliff, became their first manager. He introduced them to EMI Records A&R Terry Slater, who later quit his job to work with them. The story of that time is documented beautifully in writer John O’Connell’s song blog,What We Talk About When We Talk About Talk Talk. He describes the band jumping across the roofs of neighbouring houses to reach Rendezvous from their nearby flat, like a cartoon boy-band come to life.

But success took a while. Warner Music brought in a producer, Tony Mansfield, who smothered the first release of “Take On Me” with overblown synthesiser effects. The results were disastrous: in October 1984, it got to number 137. Thankfully, Warners wouldn’t let the song go. Another producer, Alan Tarney, who had been too busy to help before, was brought in, and he ended up sorting the song out in a day, adding only a few minor-key atmospheres and the pulses of a drum machine to the intro. “All I did was recreate the original demo,” he said in Sound On Sound Magazine in 2011. “That was the one that had all the charm.” Add a groundbreaking animated video to the mix, in which Harket breaks out of a comic, and boom: “Take On Me” was a US number one and huge-selling UK number two. It’s been their signature song ever since.

Nostalgic covers started appearing in the late 1990s. American bandReel Big Fish gave it a ska-punk treatment, while British boy bandA1’s faithful 2000 cover topped the charts in both the UK and Norway. It got an unfair deal in the 2016 Oscar-winning musical,La La Land: Ryan Gosling’s character plays it in his ’80s covers band, revealing how his dreams of being a successful jazz artist have gone sour. A deep fondness for it in pop culture is better revealed in two funny internet videos: a 2016 version byShittyfluted, featuring school recorders playing it out of tune with hilarious results (8m views), and a 2008“literal lyric” version, where “Morten” tells you what’s going on in the video (15m views). Even Furuholmen loved that. “I thought it was fantastic. The lyrics make so much more sense than the ones we have.”

Recent years have revealed how fond of the song a-ha really are. A gentler, tropical house remix byDJ Kygo played a part in their reunion: both band and DJ played together at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize concert. They have also re-recorded it twice — in 2017, stripped-back, forMTV Unplugged, and last yearin an orchestral version for the various artists80s Symphonic compilation. Waaktaar probably still holds it close to his heart for other reasons, too. Lauren Savoy is still his partner after nearly four decades.

What are your memories of ‘Take On Me’? Let us know in the comments section below.

‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.

Music credits: Warner Music Group— X5 Music Group; BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd; Crush Music/Atlantic; Rock Ridge Music; Sony BMG Music UK; We Love Music; Rhino   

Picture credit: Erica Echenberg/Redferns