80s Actual: A-ha

26 August 2012

A-ha

A-ha's Take On Me was a great song which was accompanied by a very innovative video, linking animation with live action. In retrospect, an unexpected bonus is the "Nice Cold Ice Cold Milk" advertisement on the cafe wall in the video. Remember the full slogan?

"Milk Has Gotta Lotta Bottle - Nice Cold Ice Cold Milk!"

The Gotta Lotta Bottle ads began in 1982. More here.

Ah, nostalgia!

Help - I'm getting sidetracked!

In the Take On Me video plot, a young girl was swept off her feet by a dashing young man straight out of the comic strip she had been reading. In the final scenes, the man, played of course by A-ha lead singer Morten Harket, struggled to manifest himself in the real world to be with his love. And succeeded.

But it was only temporary. The video to follow-up hit The Sun Always Shines On TV briefly returned to the girl/comic strip hero scenario to reveal that the guy could not maintain his existence outside the pages of the comic. He fled from the girl, and appeared to explode into nothingness in the distance (perhaps returning to his fictional state?), leaving the girl heartbroken.

The A-ha lads, Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Pal Waaktaar, revealed a few facts about themselves in a 1986 interview...

"We got together in the summer of 1982 but the object was to come to Britain from day one," remembered Morten."We got some songs together, did some recording in a cabin in the woods and left for England on 2 January 1983."

The three of them expected to be snapped up by a record company and they hoped to have a summer hit single that year. But nothing happened.

Eventually they ran out of money so Mags and Morten went back to Norway to work and raise more money before heading back to England.

The three of them eventually became so poor that they could only afford a single light bulb in their tiny flat. But they stuck it out and in the end got a recording deal.

Their debut single "Take On Me" flopped the first two times it was released here. However, after making it to Number One in the American charts it became a hit all around the world.

Even though they have been so successful, Mags says they haven't changed. "We have no great ambition. We just live day to day."

No comments:

Post a Comment

INTRODUCTION

The '80s Actual blog is designed to be an antidote to all those television shows and on-line articles of recent years which examine pop culture - and frequently get it hopelessly wrong!

If you sat watching the BBC's "I Love The 1970s" and exclaimed over items being shown "I could swear that was 1968!" or "Wasn't that 1981?" chances are you were right.

If you look at certain '70s fan sites and think a lot of the material written about is actually from the '80s, you are almost certainly correct.

If on-line encyclopedia articles which state that pop culture of 1983 is really 1977, or similar, have you wishing for reality, then '80s Actual is for you.

There is a huge drive in the media and on-line to negate the 1980s, to attribute that decade's innovations and fond memories to other decades, and basically to present it as a completely vapid ten years, not worthy of examination.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's just comforting to have a decade people can scapegoat and declare "HORRIBLE"?

This blog is based on actual memories, media footage (thank you, YouTube!) and snippets of newspaper and magazine articles from the 1980s. If you read it here, I think you can rest assured it's accurate, though I can take no responsibility for the newspaper reports from the decade!

The '80s Actual blog examines the decade's news stories - from the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer into the public eye in 1980, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Was it simply "The Greed Decade" as many like to claim? I think not - the '80s saw the emergence of yuppies, but also Red Wedge, the Greenham Common Peace Women, and increasing concern for the environment. It may be convenient to scapegoat the '80s as the cause of all known ills, but the reality of the decade was far different - absolute bedlam, as Right fought Left, idealism fought corporate ambition. The election of Ronald Reagan as American President in 1980, and his second victory in 1984, had a far more decisive effect on the international political landscape than the three successive general election victories of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

Fashion came fast and furious - deelyboppers, ra ra skirts with lycra leggings, Swatch watches, pixie boots, jelly shoes, shoulder pads, blonde highlights, hair gel, hair mousse, men in pink, goths, shell suits, New Romantics, donkey jackets, leg warmers...

Musically, the 1980s saw the beginnings of House Music, the exciting and still evolving world of synths taking centre stage, the evolvement of Rap music into the fully-fledged Hip Hop scene, Band Aid and Live Aid, great Indie, startling Acid House, and Raves...

At the amusement arcades, Space Invaders ran rampant and we first met Pac-Man...

And there was so much more! The decade truly had something for everyone - and provided a welcome escape for a while from the long-running and boring saga of flared trousers as fashion, begun back in the 1960s!

It was a brilliant decade for telly - bringing us such wonders as A Very Peculiar Practice, Inspector Morse, Spitting Image, Hot Metal, The BeiderbeckeTrilogy and Edge of Darkness.

The 1980s also saw the creation of The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and other wonderful (often groundbreaking) American TV shows like Kate & Allie, Cheers, The Golden Girls, Married... With Children, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and Hill Street Blues.

The '80s gave us some wonderful UK TV ads. Remember Ted Moult advertising double glazing at the Tan Hall Inn with "Fit The Best - Everest"? Remember the Weetabix gang? Remember the Scotch video tape skeleton ("Re-record, not fade away"?). Remember the romantic yuppie couple in the coffee ads? And what about "Lotta Bottle"?

In fact, the '80s totally transformed our telly viewing, bringing us Channel 4 and Sky TV.

The '80s were a fascinating time for science and technology! Video recorders became widespread, the Sony Walkman arrived, the first hand-held mobile phones hit the streets (expensive analogue bricks!), the ZX Spectrum, Game Boy and the World Wide Web (Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!) were invented, the first computer mouse eeked its way into our homes and Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally discovered DNA fingerprinting. It's all here!

There are also also '80s Actual sister blogs taking us back to the '70s and '60s - The Real 1970s and Spacehopper.

The view of the 1980s presented here is from an English perspective - much of the original '80s material used is from England, but I hope this blog will prove useful and enjoyable to people in the other nations of the UK and much further afield.