Notorious Norwegian homosexuals

We're off to Wembley tonight to see A-Ha. We'd heard a rumour that Brother Beyond had reformed to support A-Ha on this stadium-nostalgia-fest so we snapped up some tickets pretty sharpish. We've since learned that this was a cruel hoax played on us by Martin who merely wanted a ride in our car to Wembley. A-Ha were the Nordic pretty boys sporting bleached and slashed denims and rippling muscles who very nearly became the biggest thing of the whole decade and were certainly untouchable in terms of squeal factor and hitmaking during one six-month period, finally knocking Duran Duran off the pedestal they had clung on to for years. Anecdotes of how this unassuming trio had to live in a dingy Oslo bedsit eating nothing but mousetrap cheese are legendary, as 'hunky' God-squad crooner Morten Harket, alleyway-faced guitarist and chief scribe Pal (pronounced 'Paul' and with a circle over the 'a', but I can't do that with my keyboard) Waaktaar and curlytop keyboardist Mags Furuholmen had to wait, pennyless and pissed off, for their flagship song "Take On Me" to be released for the FIFTH time before MTV showed the video and it rocketed up to No.2. That video, although almost too 80s for the 80s, was way ahead of its time and remains technically one of the greatest made, with the tearful story of how a girl enjoying a coffee in a caff while reading a comic finds herself being drawn into the story by the Morten as he battles against a bunch of gay motorbike boys. Happy ending ahoy (except for the cafe owner, as the girl disappeared without paying for her frothy coffee) as the dismal girl watches Morten batter himself against the walls of her unfeasibly large bedroom (ripped off from Ken Russells 'Altered States'), sweating and screaming (and yet not waking her parents at all) in order to shake off his inky cartoon existence and join the human race. The song told far less of a story than the flick, but it was more than enough to make A-Ha the biggest band in the UK for the next 18 months. Hit after hit followed, including their solitary No.1 "The Sun Always Shines On TV", the oddball “Train Of Thought” and the genuinely poignant "Hunting High And Low", which also monikered their first album. The domination continued through redoubtable pop catchies, namely the ultra-drummed “I’ve Been Losing You” and the awesome “Cry Wolf” until they went weird and pretentious with “Manhattan Skyline” which was notably their first single not to reach the Top 10 and suffered from Waaktaar’s over-confidence with the English language. There followed the worst-ever Bond theme for the worst-ever Bond film "The Living Daylights" in the death throes of 1987 and the rest of the decade was spent just missing the Top 10 before the 90s kicked in and Waaktaar made them all ludicrously aloof with songs like "Seemingly Nonstop July" which the public duly ignored. Their 1990 cover of "Crying In The Rain" was awesome, but from '89 onwards they had become a single-every-two-years band of what-might-have-been proportions, which continues to this day. Their place in pop folklore is eternal, however, thanks to that first video which is still more than watchable and admirable with age.