On this day 33 years ago, a Norwegian trio by the name of a-ha found themselves atop the U.S. singles charts with their first single "Take On Me". Like many other acts whose first single went #1 in the U.S., the members of a-ha must have said to themselves "Well, that was easy."
And when their second single, "The Sun Always Shines On TV", became a sizable U.S. hit as well, the band must have thought it was always going to be this easy. While "Cry Wolf" from their second album, Scoundrel Days, reached #50 on the U.S. charts in 1986, the band has spent the remaining 32 years complete locked out of the U.S. charts while racking up eighteen Top 40 UK singles and a nine #1 hits in Norway.
Funny thing is, the a-ha story could have been so much different if it had been the original version of "Take On Me" that had been released in the States. Produced by Tony Mansfield (Naked Eyes, the B-52's, After The Fire), the original recording became a Top 5 hit in Norway but failed to chart in the UK. Frustrated by the lack of UK success, they sought to re-record the song for Hunting High And Low.
With producer Alan Tarney (Cliff Richard, Leo Sayer, David Cassidy), the band recorded the version we now know so well, but even that version flopped upon release in the UK while the U.S. office of Warner Brothers took a liking to the song and green-lit the filming of a big budget video for the song.
Making use of a revolutionary animation technique called rotoscoping, which took four months to complete, the new video for "Take On Me" arrived at the doorstep of MTV in September 1985 and was immediately added to the network's playlist.
Viewer response to the video was so overwhelming that MTV added the video to their heavy rotation playlist, by which time Top 40 radio picked up the song as well and, on this day 33 years ago, the song landed atop the Billboard charts.
Perhaps more than any other song at the time, the success of "Take On Me' forced the hand of just about every other band making records at the time into embracing synths and drum machines. Before you knew it, everyone was using Yamaha DX7's and LinnDrum drum machines on their records.
This is all somewhat ironic when you consider the fact that "Take On Me", itself, started out as a rock song called "The Juicy Fruit Song" that Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savo had written while still members of a band called Bridges.
After teaming up with singer Morten Harket to form a-ha, the trio transformed "The Juicy Fruit Song" into a new composition called "Lesson One". Thankfully, they didn't stop there and the rest, as they say, is history.