A-ha - Take On Me

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This episode is sponsored by the new video game Mixtape. It's sort of like if the movie Dazed and Confused were a video game. It's about high school and adventure and nostalgia. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the power of an amazing mixtape, then this game is probably for you. The soundtrack features Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, and a lot more. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC.

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1:23Potential savings will vary. When I was a kid, the first song where I ever thought, this is my favorite song, was Take On Me by AHA. Looking at it now, it's like, of course that was your favorite song. It is an undeniable, iconic hit of the 1980s. It came out in October 1985 with an equally iconic music video that helped define the age of MTV. It hit number one in the US and in countries all over the world, and it's still massively popular today. It currently has over two and a half billion streams on Spotify. So with all of that, it's easy to imagine that this was all inevitable. But actually, the song took so many steps and missteps before it became the hit that everybody knows.

2:07I talked to Paul Wachter-Savoy from AHA, who wrote the original bones of the song back when he was a teenager in Norway, years before it came out. The song actually came out and flopped twice in the UK, before it found a foothold in the US. So for this episode, Paul took me through the whole history of the song and all the different versions that existed. And he told me how he and his bandmates, Magna Furholman and Morten Harkett, pushed and pushed and persevered. Take On Me was their first single as a band, and it made them the most successful Norwegian pop group of all time. Take on me Take on me Take me

3:04I am Paul Wachtesavoy, which is a mouthful. AHA has three members, Magne Furholman, who plays keyboards, Morten Harted on lead voice, and myself, Paul Wachter-Savoy on guitar. You and Magnus started playing music together years before AHA actually began. Is that right? Yeah, he lived down the street from me when we were like 12 or something. So we've been in the band for a long time. We had made a pact at 15 or 14 that we were going to go to England and try to get a record deal. I mean, Norway back then was really... I think they played one hour of pop music a week on the radio. It was very limited exposure to anything.

3:49So we just knew that if we were going to try to get a career out of this, we had to leave Norway, even though no one had done that before. And it was sort of like a laughable thing to say. But we, you know, at the same time, we thought that would be an amazing adventure. And the two of you were in a band together in high school called Bridges? Yeah, we did two albums with Bridges. But Bridges was sort of very introverted. lots of songs that everybody said well I have to hear it 20 times before I get it and Bridges sort of disintegrated which was me and Magnet left but I think as we got closer to going to England we started to get the urge like well we gotta have some songs that really sort of you can get with the first couple of listens so we were definitely feeling that we had to sort of make it a little bit easier on people, on the poor listening

4:48We had a rehearsal space in a kindergarten up the road and it was done on a four track. The verse came to me on acoustic guitar as I always wrote on. And then taking that to Magna and we sort of played it around just the two of us. He came up with a keyboard riff.

5:36I play guitar, Magna play keyboards, I play bass, and there's Magna's neighbor there singing loud backing vocals and the Bridges drummer. And I had this sort of a throwaway chorus. I almost hated it. It sort of went around itself in a four-bar loop and you couldn't get out of it. And it's just sort of like annoying.

6:20That song was called Miss Eerie, is that right? Yeah. Where did that name come from? That was, I mean, it's embarrassing, but I probably were inspired by like Aladdin Sane by Bowie, which is Aladdin Sane. So I wanted to do my misery Miss Eerie. It's like one of those teenage overreach. And so how did Morten end up joining the band? Well, Morten first heard us when we played a show in his school. And he was a fan, one of my, maybe the only fan we had. So he was always interested in doing something with us. He just thought we needed a better vocalist, so not me. In other words, you know, Morten had an amazing voice.

7:03Funny, first time I heard him, when we sort of auditioned him, And he was playing in a blues band and he just had a show the day before. So his voice was like so raspy, like a Joe Cocker type of thing. He was like completely busted. So I thought like, well, that's cool. Let's go for this guy. The next time I heard him, I sang like an angel. But he could do so much with his voice. And that really changed my writing because before that, I would be writing to my own voice. So I had to be sort of limiting the octaves. But with Morton, it's like writing for a totally different instrument. So it was very inspiring.

7:45And just from the get-go, he was such a fan of that song, especially the riff. He was just like, that was it. And then my parents had a little cabin outside of Oslo in the forest. So we borrowed that four-track recorder and tried to come up with a demo tape that we can present when we go to England. Besides Morton joining the band, were there other ways that you were changing things up? Instead of guitars, we replaced it with the synth, because that was really what was happening, and we wanted to be part of the new sort of sound. So the first version we did with A-Ha with Morton, that was called Lesson One.

8:42It was a totally new lyric and new approach.

9:00You can still sort of hear the DNA of the original chorus that you said you didn't like in this chorus. Did you still also not like this one? It was like a sugar rush. It was too kind of bubbly and it didn't really give you goosebumps. It was catchy, but it didn't really grab you in the way that I like a song to do. It has to have a more like a, you got to feel that sort of spine tingling. So this is October, November 1982? Yeah, I think so, yeah. What happened next after you finished recording in the cabin? Then we decided, okay, that's it. Now we have eight songs. We got a cassette. So now we can go to England and we can start doing the rounds.

9:46record companies and stuff like that. It's one thing to say, we're going to move to England and start a music career there. But I'm just curious, how do you actually figure out how to move to England and even get started? We thought it would be a lot easier than it turned out to be, let's put it that way. We booked this sort of package tour, is that what you do? We didn't do the return flight, we just went to England because that was the cheapest we could get. And then it was like, okay, what do we do now? So we knew nothing. We knew no one. We bought like a Melody Maker or Music Express. These are music magazines.

10:22Yeah, back in the day. They're probably gone now. But, you know, there'll be some ads there and stuff like that. But it was very hard to actually figure out how do we do this? How do we get through the reception at any record company? You know, you just can't, you know. It was very inspiring, too. Coming to England, you could, for the first time in our life, suddenly you have pop music coming out of every shop, every cab, you know, it was just everywhere. Going to places like Cannon Palace, which was like a really cool club. So you did sort of want to compete at that level. And it took us about two weeks to realize that demo sounded pretty thin and not really hip enough.

11:03So after about a few months, we did the last money we have and booked two or three days in this studio. I think we recorded like four songs, not Take On Me, but four other songs. And as luck, the owner of that studio loved the demo, John Ratcliffe. And he was signed to EMI and his A &R guy, Terry Slater, had quit EMI and he looked for a band to manage. So they became our managers. How did that change things for you guys? You know, for the next couple of years, we were able to use the downtime of that studio from 4 in the morning till the new session came in at 10 next day. So we'd be sitting around there like tired and ready to keel over waiting for that band to get finished and then hop in and use those hours to do a new song.

11:58they had a drum machine and I'm terrible with every machine and every sort of software ever made but the Lin drum I just took to it so we would just sort of lay down the drums first imagining what the rest of the track would be

12:26Is this something that you made in John's studio then? Yeah, this is Rendezvous Studios, an 8-track.

12:35And Magne had a, you know, I hear that...

12:42From there on in that became really part of the groove. But you can see we're trying to figure out what the bass is doing. And my bass drum pattern is sort of trying to find the right thing.

13:07the song is pretty much sketched out at that point but the chorus was not happening and then terry said he had worked a lot with queen and all these different artists and he would say like well Whatever you got at falsetto, you had a hit. Falsetto, you had a hit. That was one of his sayings. I thought, well, hell, we got the best freaking falsetto singer right here. He can sing super low, he can sing super high. And where most people have a sort of whispery, sort of weakish falsetto, he can't really do that. The way he does falsetto is like full on. It's like a trumpet. But I don't really love when that sort of money note coming straight, here comes the chorus and everybody goes up and you know so i never really liked that kind of songwriting so i thought you know morton has a really nice registers i thought like okay maybe we should start it with the lowest notes and then bring it up to the falsetto where you can guarantee to get a hit and take on me of course that's the we're norwegian and like people tell me you can't say take on me that's not real english you can't but it just felt like that song couldn't be called anything else it just had to be you know take me on no i don't like that in a way we were trying to take on the world and we were just saying like well take on us for you know to get a lot of this so this is the first time where you have a new chorus Take on me, take me out, I'll be gone, literal too.

15:00My conversation with Paul Walker Savoy of AHA continues after this.

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17:50Okay, so you had written the song. You had recorded this eight-track demo. what was your next step next for the song was to try to find a producer we were signed to warner in the u.s andrew wickham was our a and our guy and it was really his job to find suitable producers and the producers was very very hard to find this was the 80s where the producers was like gods but we didn't know one from the next really. In the end, they managed to get Tony Mansfield. It was exciting, but it was also a little bit tricky because we were used to working very fast. But he had gotten a Fairlight, which he loved, and everything had to go through the Fairlight.

18:37Could you explain what a Fairlight is and why, when you work with it, everything had to take longer? It's really a sampler mixed with an 8-track recorder. and he would take the parts that we sort of insisted on taking, but he would love to also kind of make his own parts. That's when we actually found the bass line for the verse.

19:04That was his thing. And then the replies on the chorus. That was Dorian Man's full side down.

19:18Take me on, I'll be gone, bring to your tears.

19:34But on this middle eight, on this version, you would have all these kind of orchestra and bangs. I feel like the first time people got samples, that's what they did.

19:49And it ate up a lot of time.

19:55Five guys staring at a computer screen. I mean, everything takes a long time. We would never use a computer before. So when we had seven songs instead of ten, the money was spent. For the whole album. Yeah. And we were there on a tourist visa. So there was a lot of pressure on the whole thing, you know, recording the album and stuff like that. You felt like you were on this borrowed time and the budget was spent. It was a very tense time. We tried to get it going before they really threw us out. When we signed the deal with Warner Brothers, we ended up signing with the Warner in America. But Warner in England, they were also interested.

20:37And I think they were always a little bit pissed off with that, that we didn't go with the English company. so for years we were sort of struggling with little bits of them not feeling like they needed to do so much for us since we didn't sign with them so when that first single came out they threw out a few of the ugliest posters you've ever seen just around where we lived and that was it there was nothing and the english charge back then maybe it is still like that but it was like You had one or two weeks to get it onto the charts. You needed to have something, a TV show, something. And we didn't have any of that.

21:17So you couldn't expect it to just take off like that. So that is the first version that came out and bombed. Okay, so you have spent the whole budget and then this version of the song comes out in 1984 and it flops. how were you able to convince anybody to give you another chance or maybe even more so i'm curious for your own sake how were you able to feel like that wasn't the end of the road for the song like it had its chance it didn't happen and that was that yeah that's a good thing about being young you don't feel you know you just sort of brush it off your shoulders you know we were 100 % confident.

21:59We were like, there's not a doubt in our minds. So it must have been the A &R guy, Andrew Wickham. He must have felt the same thing. And the producer, Alan Tarnio, actually did the final version. He was almost saying yes before we went for Tony Mansfield. And I think Andy Wickham got back to him and say, this is what they ended up with, but I know it could be better. So he finally agreed to have another go. Alan Tarney. So this is how you end up with him as the producer. Yes. But it took some time, you know, it was a very touching goal. Because, you know, they've spent this much money on the half-finished album.

22:37Are they going to pour more money into it and risk losing more money from Norway? No one comes from Norway and makes it. So it was a risk for people. But Alan Tarney had a little spot in between making this other album. so we could do five days. I remember the first day, he had some sort of meeting or a doctor's appointment. So Magnin and I just put down a couple of parts just to sketch out the song.

23:11And already then, it just sounded like, wow, this is so much cooler.

23:19So then it was my time to do the drum programming. At first, we just had a basic pattern, just like a straight pattern. He had a lindrum, but what he did have is that he didn't have a clap sound on that thing. He had two snares. So we ended up doing a halftime feel on the second snare. So you would have a...

23:50For me, it gave the whole song what I've been missing. That's a little bit of a different swagger.