THE DARK SOPHOMORE LONG-PLAYER THAT’S MORE SMASHING PUMPKINS THAN SMASH HITS
FELIX ROWE
CLASSIC ALBUM
Just how on earth do you follow up that song? With the difficult second album. Norway’s finest returned with a much darker record – a melodramatic synth-operetta that revealed a more complex and intriguing group than their poster boys image would suggest.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, Take On Me is a seriously good pop song. In fact, it’s too good; so apparently effortless, immediately accessible and easy on the ear that we tend to overlook quite how sophisticated, intricate and well-crafted it is. It’s even simpler to dismiss its instantly hummable hook as mere bubblegum fodder, when delivered by three easy-on-the-eye Nordic cherubs, barely out of their teens. It’s so inherently marketable, the cynical might suspect foul play. Only when you stop to analyse its constituent parts (and attempt to hit that note) does the penny finally drop that you’re dealing with three heavyweight musos who’ve really got their shit together. Seriously good pop indeed.
Needless to say, it conquered the world through heavy MTV and radio rotation. The album from which it came, 1985’s Hunting High And Low was equally ubiquitous, selling by the bucketload and producing another hit single, The Sun Always Shines On TV. When you’ve set the bar so high, where do you go from there? That was the very real problem that a-ha had created for themselves. Of course, it’s a good problem to have. They were riding a wave of adulation; where they took it next was up to them.
In 1986, singer Morten Harket was interviewed for Australian TV during the band’s first world tour (playing comparatively modest 2,000- to 4,000-capacity venues) off the back of that first record. Despite a packed schedule, the band were somehow managing to squeeze in some studio time Down Under, attempting to finish off the next record. During the interview, Morten was asked the inevitable awkward question of how he felt about being ‘packaged’ – he responded in good spirits, gently emphasising it was the music that ultimately mattered to them, the connection with the audience, and the chemistry of the band.
That first record forged their pop poster boys image, which (for the casual observer, at least) still defines them to this day. In reality, as second album Scoundrel Days sets out to prove, it was an ill-fitting tag that never really
