Take On Me

The riff is older than a-ha. Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen first came up with it as teenagers in their earlier band Bridges, in a tune called Miss Eerie that they felt sounded too much like a bubblegum advert. Waaktaar thought it too poppy for the dark style they were after; Furuholmen just thought it was catchy. When their school friend Morten Harket joined, he heard the keyboard line and said it had the character of a universal hit. The song became Lesson One, then Take On Me, built to show off Harket's range in a chorus Rolling Stone later counted among the hardest to sing in pop. Then it flopped, more than once. The first version, released in 1984, reached only number 137 in the UK. Warner executive Andrew Wickham kept investing, had producer Alan Tarney re-record it with a cleaner, soaring sound, and it flopped again in 1985. What finally worked was a video. Inspired by a student animated short called Commuter, director Steve Barron filmed Harket and actress Bunty Bailey in a café in Wandsworth and on a sound stage, and animators traced around 3,000 frames by hand, a process that took 16 weeks. In October 1985 Take On Me topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the video won six MTV Video Music Awards. Decades later it became the first 1980s music video to reach two billion views on YouTube. A riff its writers once thought too sweet for their band turned out to be the one everybody remembers.