SEEMINGLY ON THE VERGE OF SPLITTING FOR THE THIRD TIME WHEN LAST YEAR’S DOCUMENTARY A-HA: THE MOVIE BROUGHT THEIR SIMMERING TENSIONS TO THE BOIL, WITH TYPICAL CONTRARINESS THE BAND ARE INSTEAD RELEASING THEIR FIRST ALBUM FOR SEVEN YEARS. TRUE NORTH IS TRULY BEAUTIFUL – BUT, AS THE TRIO TELL CLASSIC POP, THIS TIME IT REALLY COULD BE A-HA’S FINAL STATEMENT.
JOHN EARLS
“This is the way a-ha works, isn’t it? We do a big goodbye tour, we vow never to play again, and two years later we’re back doing shows. In our movie, there was a lot of, ‘We’ll never record again.’ And here we are: new album. I’ve stopped giving thought to all the drama. This is an opportunity to give the fans more songs. That’s as much as I look at it.”
Paul Waaktaar-Savoy laughs knowingly. The guitarist is aware that the feuds in a-ha are the stuff of legend now, referred to almost as much as the animation in the Take On Me video. All three of the band know full well that the claim, “They hate each other, really”, follows a-ha around like a sketch show catchphrase. They’re all equally adept at explaining why there are tensions but they also seem just as powerless to work out how to change, nearly 40 years after leaving Norway to try their luck in England.
With Paul and Magne Furuholmen as a-ha’s main songwriters, you might think it’s Morten Harket’s role to be the diplomat in the band, using his voice as persuasively as he does in a-ha’s music. Not quite. “I’m not a diplomat,” insists Harket. “I’m the executioner. Diplomacy doesn’t really work in a-ha. It’s not a language that’s needed and it isn’t effective. People as intelligent as me, Paul and Magne, we see everything that’s on the table – and under it.
“Awareness is very high within the band, and it’s not as if anyone needs soothing. That means it’s tougher when we need to put a spade in the ground, because the soil in a-ha is harder. So I can’t be the judge, only the executioner. If necessary, I let things have consequences.”
Furuholmen tries playing down a-ha’s tensions, stating: “There are a lot of assumptions about how we feel about each other. There’s a lot of love and respect for the talent of each person in the band.” But the keyboardist accepts: “It’s an entrenched situation where things flare up unnecessarily. There’s a suspicion of people having their own agenda, which makes each of us act accordingly.”
Those agendas were addressed in the startling documentary a-ha: The Movie in 2021. Director Thomas Robsahm’s film is on the level of Metallica’s Some Kind O
