A few winters ago, Magne Furuholmen was walking down a street in New York when he spotted a Christmas tree decorated with Rolex watches. “I thought, holy fucking hell – how far away from the original Christmas message can we get?” he sighs, still aghast at the memory, and what it says about the “hyperbolic, shopping-obsessed, ersatz, empty ritual” he feels the season of peace and goodwill to all men has become.
His response, naturally, came in the form of a song – or at least the bones of an idea that he hoped might be worked up into a track by A-ha, Norway’s premier purveyors of windswept pop desolation, of which he has been a member, on and off, since 1982.