About This Time 40 Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of October-ish 1985!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet…

It’s a heart-warming tale of a battle against the odds.

And no, I’m not talking about the video: the love story between a pretty shy girl and a comic book character, who can only be together if the cartoon character turns himself in a real, living, breathing, boy… and the only way he can do that, is by repeatedly slamming himself against the wall, smashing through the barrier between fantasy and reality, between two dimensions and three, finally breaking through into our world, all shiny and wet.

No, I mean the even more unrealistic fantasy of a group of Norwegian boys dreaming of becoming world famous pop stars.

Two of the three members of a-ha – Pal and Mags, the two who were not lead singer Morten Harket – had been dreaming the pop star dream for a long time.

They had formed a band in a summer cabin outside of Oslo in 1973 – a year before there were even any world-famous Swedish pop stars – playing a recorder and tin plates. They called themselves Spider Empire. They were not a hit.

A few years later Pal and Mags were interviewed in the local paper, and that’s when they first made the claim that they would one day be famous pop stars… not just in Norway, but in the whole world! They had it all planned out! They’d simply follow The Beatles model:

Outside of America, the plan more or less worked. Although they never really “got weird.” They just got melancholy.

When said by 14-year-old boys from a country most people knew nothing about, all of this sounded ridiculous. When they turned up at high school the next day everyone made fun of them, and rightfully so.

When they arrived in London a few years later, people made fun of them even more.

Not only did they have unrealistic ambitions, but they had unrealistic ambitions in a funny accent. They had unrealistic ambitions whilst eating funny food. They couldn’t find anyone who would give them a recording contract. They couldn’t find anyone who would even take them seriously.

For if there was one thing that British people knew about Europe, it was that they made terrible music there. After all, this was the continent that gave the world Eurovision. Also, “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora.

Quite what a-ha were up against can be seen in a Melody Maker review:

“A-ha then represent everything that is rotten to the core in pop music today, the sort of unadulterated crap that thankfully used to get no further than an indecent third in the Eurovision Song Contest, but which is now laid before us as some sort of pathetic evidence of the international nature of dross and how easily it can be exported to anywhere in the European Economic Community.”

Harsh words.

Whenever they were asked the worst thing about Britain, a-ha would usually say the racism. Although there was that one time, when asked “what do you think of the English?”, Morten remarked “I dunno. My ancestors used to rape and pillage them but er… I haven’t really tried that yet.”

The first time Pal and Mags went to London to try – and fail – to become pop stars they didn’t have Morten yet.

When they arrived back in Norway without first becoming world famous pop stars, they knew they needed someone to help them.

Pal and Mags asked Morten to join them before they even heard him sing. Presumedly they’d seen him though.

Morten was a dreamy manchild: fans could read interviews in which he spoke of his love of climbing trees. And his love of cows, which led to people “moo”-ing at him wherever he went. Also that he’d previously worked in a mental hospital. And had studied theology. So he possessed hidden depths.

And Morten could sing. He could hold notes for a freakishly long time. And if that wasn’t enough, he could sing the chorus to “Take On Me” !! HE COULD HIT THAT FINAL NOTE!!!

And so this new, Morten-enhanced version of a-ha headed back to London. One would have thought that things were looking up.

They spent the next couple of years in a state of borderline destitution. Nonetheless, this second attempt at breaking into the London music scene was, in some ways, an improvement. Morten, at least, was getting noticed.

So spunky was Morten that paparazzi were constantly snapping photos of him because they assumed he simply must be famous. He was, admittedly, hanging out in the same nightclubs as Boy George, so it was a fair assumption.

So dishy was Morten, that, when Warner Bros. were trying to decide how much to invest in a-ha, they flew the band out to Los Angeles simply to walk through the corridors to see how the office girls reacted. Despite these girls presumedly seeing rock stars – with their rock star good looks – all the time, as a perk of their job, they still went a little ga-ga. Warner Bros decided that it was safe to throw a whole lot of money in their direction and gave music-video-director-genius Steve Barron a call.

Steve Barron was all over MTV at the time.

Which made him the perfect guy to direct a video of a song parodying the channel, a diss-track against all the MTV bands, specifically those that looked like a-ha. I am, of course, referring to Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing.”

And I’m going to put it out there: “Money For Nothing” is a really shit video. It is! Admit it! It hurts my eyes. How was THIS EVER considered cutting-edge?

So, “Money For Nothing”… shit video… good song though, probably the only Dire Straits song I don’t have to force myself to like (it’s a 9.)

The interface between the real world and the computer world was clearly on Steve’s mind at the time. He had, after all, recently directed Electric Dreams, the story of a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a computer, the latter of whom ends up committing suicide so that the man and the woman can be together… or something.

So the story of a comic strip character breaking out of the frame to be with the real-world-girl that he loved was a video concept he just had to make. Not to mention the video that a-ha needed for their song, “Take On Me”, to become the Hottest Hit On The Planet.

A-ha had released “Take On Me” multiple times before, and each time it had flopped.

This lack of success was not purely due to the lack of an iconic video. It’s also because all the previous versions of “Take On Me” were rubbish.

Case in point, the original 1984 version, which became a hit in Norway.

They’ve selected the most annoying, jarring synth-setting they could find, the drum machines are way too busy, and the echo on Morten’s vocals are off the hook… but at least he looks good, all shiny and sweaty in his ripped wife-beater. There was simply something about Morten that made video directors want to cover him with shiny sweat.

But at least that 1984 original version was better than the original-original version, back when they were called Bridges, back before Morten had joined the band, back when they were a punk band with a passion for steel drums, back when “Take On Me” was called “Miss Eerie.” They also liked to call it “The Juicyfruit Song”, because it reminded them of bubble gum commercials. I guess I can see why.

And at least “The Juicyfruit Song” was better than the first Morten-led version, by which time it was called “Lesson One.” By this stage most of the verse lyrics had been written, but… it’s just so bad. See if you can make it to the part where Morten suddenly breaks out into some hollering soul aria thing. It’s so terrible, but it’s worth the wait.

It’s honestly amazing that “Take On Me” ended up as good as it did.

That they kept on working on it, realizing that when you have a keyboard riff that catchy, sooner or later a classic song will write itself around it.

And “Take On Me” is a classic song.

There’s a reason why people clamor to sing it at karaoke, even though they know – they must know – they’ll never hit that final note.

The production is perfect, featuring so much space that the hook sounds like the catchiest thing you have ever heard… and that’s because it is the catchiest thing you have ever heard.

Not only did “Take On Me” become the Hottest Hit On The Planet, but a-ha finally accomplished STEP ONE of their world domination strategy.

By the end of 1986 they had won Best Group in the Smash Hits Readers Poll (beating the Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran), whilst Morten won Best Male Singer (beating Simon Le Bon, who conceded that now he needed to learn to sing in a Norwegian accent).

And he won Best Dressed Person, almost certainly due to his love of sweaters. This appears to be Morten’s favourite sweater.

Naturally everybody wanted to know what would happen next in this love affair between a real-life girl and a cartoon boy… and all our questions were answered in the video to the follow-up single “The Sun Always Shines On TV.”

We were not going to be given a happy ending.

Our crazy kids end up in the woods, blushing at each other. But then Morten begins to transform, once again, back into a cartoon. This, apparently, is a painful process, or at the very least, it gives him stomach cramps. So he runs off into the dark of the woods… The End. The girl is left alone. In tears.

Fortunately, they then play a banging tune. “The Sun Always Shines On TV” may not possess a piano melody that Mozart would be proud of, but it may possess an even catchier chorus!

But MTV viewers were so upset that they’d killed cartoon-Morten off like that, that they appear to have boycotted the remainder of a-ha’s career. This was something that 14-year-old Pal and Mags could not have foreseen when they came up with their world domination plans.

“Take On Me” is a 10!

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Meanwhile, in Kooky Genius Land…

Kate Bush was back, Back, BACK!!! And “mash Hits magazine, in their typical disrespectful way, asked her “will you be treating us to your funny dancing all over again?”

The answer, very clearly, was yes. Even more so than before.

Kate Bush was the original-kooky genius female pop star. In the decades since Kate appeared as by magic, it’s been difficult for any alternative pop-princess– from Tori Amos to Florence & The Machine to Bat For Lashes to Fiona Apple to Regina Spektor to Caroline Polachek to Bjork, even to Madonna circa the “Frozen” video – to escape the impression that they are trying to be the second coming of Kate Bush.

Kate Bush gave hope to all the crazy cat ladies out there, that one day, they too may see their pop star dreams come true!

From the very beginning people treated Kate Bush as though she was a little loopy.

Her tendency to sing wide-eyed, whilst waving her arms in the air, had a lot to do with it.

Kate Bush was a trained dancer.

Although Kate’s mother was Irish, and although her brothers were well into folk music, neither is where her distinctive dance technique came from, otherwise it would have involved more maypoles and Morris Dancing.

Kate Bush learnt to dance the way she did at a mime school. The Lindsay Kemp Mime School. She had been a teenager at the time. Although she already had a recording contract, they decided she was too young to actually make a record. But Kate had already left school, so she had to do something to pass the time. Kate seemed to know that, as television became more central to the pop experience, dancing would also become more important. Trust Kate Bush however to decide to learn to mime when she could have been learning to Moonwalk.

But that’s the kind of unconventional career move that Kate Bush was constantly engaging in.

Only Kate would launch her career with a sing-along, dance-a-long version of Emily Bronte’s Gothic classic novel, Wuthering Heights.  Kate shares a birthday with Emily and has stated that she feels Emily’s spirit looking over her, because of course she does.

And of course, Kate Bush would write a song about nuclear fallout from the perspective of a fetus, and, what’s more, release it as a lead single?

And of course, Kate Bush would write “Running Up That Hill.” Or, to give it it’s full title: “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)”

“Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” is not about God.

It’s not one of those atheist anthems of which the alt-80s had such a plentiful supply (“Blasphemous Rumours”, “Dear God”, “It’s A Sin”… I’m sure there were others). Kate is not, as you may have supposed – and I certainly did – asking God to change places with her, so that God would understand what it was like to be like one of us, to be a slob like one of us, to be a stranger on a bus, thereby helping God do his job better, or at least stop giving us wars and famines.

No, instead Kate is asking God to engineer some sort of Freaky Friday situation with her boyfriend.

“I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised!

“And I think it would lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either… you know, I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, “well, no, why not a deal with God!” 

Why not indeed?

This obviously clears up some of the quirkier elements of “Running Up That Hill”, most notably the impression that Kate is constantly referring to God as “baby.”

The phrase “running up that hill”, then, is a reference to walking in someone else’s shoes… except that you are running, up a hill, up a building, because now that you understand each other you have become unstoppable!!

Did the farm house have a cave? Who knows? Given Kate’s famed reclusively, probably no one.

All of which is pretty intense, conceptually speaking. And an intense song-topic requires an intense, relentlessly pounding beat, one that sounds as though it were recorded in a wind tunnel. Or at the very least a cave.

Kate was recording in her quaint farmhouse, because her previous album, The Dreaming, flopped. The Dreaming possibly flopped because it featured, um, Rolf Harris on didgeridoo; particularly on the title track, that was initially titled “The Abo Song” until it was pointed out that, no, Kate, you can’t use that word (I probably should’ve have, just then). Or possibly because it featured the worst attempt at an Australian accent ever recorded.

The Dreaming had been such a flop that EMI told Kate she would have to use a proper professional producer next time (she’d produced The Dreaming herself), or they’d considerably curtail her recording budget. But if she recorded at home, they couldn’t say boo. So Kate and Del went off to look for a house.

“One day we suddenly stumbled across it and a back door had been left open so we were able to go inside. I’m sure there’s a kind of force, a magnetic energy saying, come in, we’re meant for each other.”

Yes, that’s exactly how I’d picture Kate Bush buying a house.

The farmhouse was located in quaint English countryside at the time (outer suburbia now), and Kate was able to hole up and take her time playing with her newfangled drum-machines, a contraption almost as outlandish as the cloud-buster in the video for “Cloudbusting.” Kate knew that something good was gonna happen!

If Wuthering Heights had been something of an obvious choice of book to turn into a song, “Cloudbusting” was about a book very much more obscure:

“It’s a very unusual, beautiful book, written by this man through the eyes of himself when he was a child; looking at his father, and the relationship between them.”

“Very special relationship, his father meant so much to him. His father was a psychoanalyst, very respected, but he also had a machine that could make it rain, and the two of them would go out together and they would make it rain.”

To describe Peter Reich’s father – Wilhelm Reich – as “very respected” is probably pushing it a bit.

In fact the cloudbuster worked – or would have worked if it had worked – by adjusting the levels of “orgone” in the atmosphere. This sort of lateral thinking made him very popular amongst beatniks, but not so popular amongst the FDA, who considered him a kooky mad scientist and jailed him.

You can see why Kate might be drawn to this character: kooky genius recognise kooky genius (“Cloudbusting” is a 9.)

But back to “Running Up That Hill”: it’s more than just relentless pounding beat, synth-lines tearing you asunder, and thunder in our hearts… it’s a track that keeps on (running up that) building and building and building… wailing banshees turn up in the background at some point, and it eventually sounds as though Kate and God have made their deal, and this science-defying Freaky Friday situation is taking place right there in front of our ears.

The result is a masterpiece that only Kate Bush could create; a masterpiece that only Kate Bush would ever even think of creating.

“Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” is a 10.

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Meanwhile, in Noise Land…

“We love noise. Pure noise. We make so much noise we sometimes can’t stand on our fee. It’s so glorious. It’s total excitement”

That’s Jesus And Mary Chain enthusing about their patented sound. Or should that be noise? Patented noise. A sound – or noise – that basically constituted nothing but feedback, extraneous guitar noise, and more feedback. Some people found the noise exciting. Some did not. Both groups liked to go to Jesus And Mary Chain concerts for the singular purpose of starting a riot.

Quite why Jesus And Mary Chain concerts so often ended in riots is difficult to say. They weren’t exactly screaming about anarchy or how the queen was a fascist regime. They weren’t really screaming about anything much.

The plausibly-deniable excuse for the riots was that the fans were feeling ripped off, as Jesus And Mary Chain concerts were infamously short: usually about 20 minutes. They also infamously played with their backs to the audience, for treating-the-audience-with-disdain purposes. The band figured – understandably – that all of this would be more interesting for the audience than just playing the songs like a normal band. Not everyone agreed. A lot of those who didn’t agree threw bottles and cans. Throwing bottles and cans at the Jesus And Mary Chain was a critical part of the Jesus And Mary Chain experience.

After about 20 minutes of being pelted with bottles and cans-

– the band would exit the stage… and that was when shit would really start hitting the fan, possibly literally. At the very least the audience would start trashing the joint. Because chanting “WE WANT MORE!!!” was old hat. But they knew the concert was going to be short before they bought their ticket. It was the one thing everybody knew about the band (that, and they were very loud).

Jesus And Mary Chain had somehow become the band you went to see if you wanted a bit of biffo. But all they were, were two brothers, Jim and William Reid, plus a couple of hangers on – one of whom was Bobby Gillespie, soon to start Primal Scream – playing pop songs really loud.

And pop songs were exactly what The Jesus And Mary Chain were playing.

Jim and William frequently referenced 60s girl groups as amongst their biggest influences. Usually they nominated the Shangri-Las, although they clearly also loved The Ronettes. Or at least they loved Phil Spector’s similarly loud – for its time – production on Ronettes’ records. Or at least they loved the “Be My Baby” drum intro.

Now although the drums on the intro to “Just Like Honey” pound the same as the drums on the intro to “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes, the two intros feel very much different. The drums on the intro to “Just Like Honey” sound as though they’ve taken a copy of “Be My Baby” and then they’ve dipped it in acid.

Then they’ve taken a wad of sandpaper and hacked away at it for a bit.
Before finally shoving it down the garbage disposal.

Over the top of which, Jim would mumble in a manner that you would “Never Understand”, particularly since he was mumbling in Scottish accent.

Jim extended his mumble into his interview style, acting all surly and mopey, whilst William acted even surlier and mopier.

Probably.

The typical Jesus And Mary Chain interview would involve the two brothers, a beer clenched in their hands, talking about two things: (a) How amazing they were. And (b) how everybody else, both on the charts and beneath them, were utter shite.

Q: Why are people, ah, so excited about you?

A: Because we’re so good. Because we’re so much better than everybody else. So many other people are complete rubbish, people gotta pay attention to us. It’s pretty obvious really.

Ask a silly question…

Q: Can you really say what the Jesus & Mary Chain are about?

A: We’re a very commercial group. We’ve got one eye on the charts and the United States of America… our direct competition is Culture Club and Duran Duran… we’re not competing with anybody in the independent charts at all, that’s pointless.

That interview, it’s worth pointing out, was on Belgian television whilst one of the other band members – it might be Bobby, once again, it’s hard to tell underneath all the hair – is making out with some bird right next to them on the couch.

Now, obviously” they were talking shit, but at the same time they weren’t totally wrong. “Just Like Honey” is a pop song. Even without the “Be My Baby”-In-A-Blender bite, it’s a 60s style pop song.  “Just Like Honey” is such a 60s inspired pop song, that William – similar to Paul’s reaction when he dreamt up “Yesterday” – went around asking everyone if he’d accidently written a song that already existed.

He hadn’t. He’d simply come up with a classic melody, and then completely drenched it in feedback and noise.

Most noisy bands play their noise fast. That’s the rule isn’t it? Soft and slow. Loud and fast. But what if you played your noise in slow motion? That would be beautiful, right?

And most noisy bands sing about smashing shit up. But what if you sang about listening to the girl as she takes on half the world? Or offer to be her plastic toy? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

Yes it would.

People still rioted to it though.

“People find it difficult to get over the idea that we put feedback on records as a main instrument. Too many people just concentrate on that and they don’t realize that there’s more to it than that.“

“There’s other things on our records other than feedback- there’s melodies, there’s songs, there’s words. Above all there’s noises from a guitar that I just didn’t think were possible until he started making these strange sounds in the studio.”

Jesus And Mary Chain would spend the remainder of their career focusing more on melodies, songs and words, and far less on feedback. And it turns out that they were quite good at melodies, songs and words. And fortunately for the venues at which they played, people don’t riot for melodies, songs and words.

Jesus & Mary Chain would ultimately influence a zillion bands including the entire shoe-gaze scene: few, if any, of these bands would regularly inspire riots.

“Just Like Honey” is good, so good, it’s so good. So good. It’s a 9.

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