CLASSIC ALBUM

THE DARK SOPHOMORE LONG-PLAYER THAT’S MORE SMASHING PUMPKINS THAN SMASH HITS

FELIX ROWE

Norse pop giants a-ha: Scoundrel Days made it to No.2 in the UK and went on to sell more than six million copies worldwide

© Getty

Just how on earth do you follow up that song? With the difficult second album. Norway’s finest returned with a much darker record – amelodramatic 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 STILL DEFINES THEM TO THIS DAY. IN REALITY, SCOUNDREL DAYS SETS OUT TO PROVE IT WAS AN ILL-FITTING TAG THAT NEVER REALLY SUITED THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

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 suited them in the first place. They didn’t try to escape the shadow of Take On Me by writing even bigger pop songs. Instead, they ventured into darker terrain. A first listen of Scoundrel Days suggests it was designed to be a correction – arealignment that wiped clean all you thought you knew about a-ha and reintroduced them as sophisti-pop connoisseurs.