A1 – "Take On Me"

In before dinner time.

as someone familiar with the original, this is the aural (and with the video, the visual) equivalent of a designer knockoff – Chan3l No S – superficial similarities to the original but nothing like the original fragrance, just an underwhelming generic perfume.
I associate A1 with a former, rather awkward, pupil of mine who was a huge fan. This might have been socially acceptable if she had been 11 or 12 but as she was 17/18 she was treated with derision by her peers who had learned to be enthusiastic about more credible rock or dance acts – at least in public.

4: ha! I vividly remember my wife telling me about this record on one of our earliest dates. Thankfully, it caught me right on the cusp of realising that all my years of learned credible rock-talk amounted to not a great deal, and that in the real world A1 were more significant than just about any of them.

For that, and the fifteen splendid years since: (11)

“VIRUS LOCATOR
LOCATING VIRUS”

I also note that 2:10 – 20 of the video appears to have been shot on a Microsoft Lumia (topical now, yes, but…).

The song? What’s the point, though? None of them look as good as Horten Market and perhaps just as importantly none of them sing as good as him either. Tempted to give low marks for pointlessness. “B-b-but it WASN’T pointless, they didn’t have access to the original back in ye olde days, they couldn’t just use YouTube like you can, you entitled swine!” Yeah but I’m living (and marking) in the moment, maaaaan [3]

This is actually a pretty generic cover. If you ignore superficialities like the more of-that-time keyboard sound and the r-n’-b-lite end to the chorus, it’s not drastically different to the original arrangement.

The thing that bugged me most about this version at the time- and which still does- is the part where they *did* mess with the original song itself, i.e. cutting out the first few bars of the middle eight. Minor, but cheap and nasty, and it never fails to jar.

That aside, this is too “meh” to hate. Probably helps that the original was never my favourite A-Ha single- bit too bright and synthpoppy- and has been overplayed since.

“The Sun Always Shines on TV”, OTOH, was fantastic- by far my favourite from the parent album (and possibly my favourite by them full stop). A-Ha may have only ever had a single UK #1, but if that had to be the case, who can argue that the more deserving song didn’t win?

Meanwhile, A1 may have got “Take On Me” to the top when A-Ha didn’t, but nostalgic mid-twentysomething women aside, I suspect this is an “oh yeah, I vaguely remember that” cover for most people.

Try to distance yourself from the over-worn context of the original you can hear in your mind with the original original. Here’s the first earlier stab at it as mixed/produced by Tony “New Musik” Mansfield that was released in Norway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZhrZqWaOwA

#13 oh this is great. There is something a bit Felix ‘Don’t You Want Me’ about that big-room riff isn’t there?

Hang on, that’s it – the last time I saw Jane Suck[‘s name in print] it was the very end of 1977, everyone was wondering what would come next now that punk was so obviously dead (ha!), and she was championing an artistic movement called “New Musik” – which as far as anyone could tell consisted entirely of Kraftwerk and Space (the French band). According to Wikipedia the band New Musik first formed in 1977, so maybe that was what was going on – they/she stoking up the wave that she/they could ride. Didn’t work out, clearly. Mind you, Tony Mansfield seems to have done all right – wonder what became of Jane?

Quite a bit to discuss here.

Firstly this was the last of the record breaking run of twelve one week wonders. The top spot now stabilises with a couple of two week runners before the 2000 madness begins again so it may be worth taking stock and noting that of the twelve acts involved; only Black Legend can be dismissed as one hit wonders (Spiller were never heard from again but their featured vocalist was) and only the Corrs and Sophie Ellis Bexter were scoring their only number one.

A1 were slightly lucky to make the top as they sneaked in with a low sale. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for them because like 911 before them they made a little go a long way. Their first brace of hits were so tinny and pathetic to be almost embarrassing and yet they seemed to move a little up the pop league table each time. And yet Take On Me seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with pop music at the time although it’s debatable as to how much of it was actually their fault.

I’ve got no problem with boy bands or anybody else doing cover versions. Not everybody can be a songwriter and for every million selling classic a thousand equally good songs have fallen under the radar. And yet A1 (okay, and their puppetmasters), needing a cover version, went for something obvious in order to score an easy hit. Given that it didn’t come close to the original and nobody for one minute suggested it did, one wonders whether A1 could have scored a number one single with anything. Maybe, maybe not. If they’d gone a bit more leftfield and covered (plucking a completely random example from the hat) Maps And Legends by REM would we be discussing it here? I honestly don’t know. The fact is that I’ve always detested obvious cover versions as much as I’ve hated film adaptations of best selling novels made for the purpose of a cheap buck. It’s the lowest common denominator of the arts in my opinion.

This one’s new to me (as is A1). Urgh, redundant cover will never be played again by me! As for a score, well, I tend to ask myself things like what tracks I’d rather have written or performed at the time, and which I’m indifferent between being imaginatively deleted from pop-history, and which I have marked preferences for on that front. The latter way of thinking in particular automatically pushes highly redundant covers near the bottom of the pile, and makes giving this track the same score as ‘Brass in Pocket’ or ‘Message in A Bottle’ or ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or ‘All You Need Is Love’ or ‘Something In The Air’ as Tom does seem certifiable. So be it:
1 (possibly a 2 if in a very good mood)

It seemed like this was a favorite for pop-punk bands to cover at the time (both Reel Big Fish and MxPx did versions), and I’m probably imagining the existence of a few more due to memories of misattributed Napster files. (Did Me First and the Gimme Gimmes ever do it?) So though no quality of this was particularly notable, I think I just shrugged it off as another version of what seemed to be a modern standard.

#19 – I don’t think I’ve seen curtains in the wqild for the last decade or so – are they one of the rare fashion and styling choices that has never undergone a revival of any sort, banished only to the Dead Lands of Culture that is the top of professional footballers’ heads?

#20 – might have to ask you to walk me through the “as for a score” sentence again?

#21 – Frankly this strikes me as more likely.

#23 “Presumably there are people out there to whom the existence of A1 is important in some way, but it’s harder than ever to work out how and why.” – a recurrent theme (which I think gets worse as time goes on) is that when the people for whom a track is important are presumed to be girls/young women, the obvious answer (ask them, and take their answers as honest) seems to drop off the list of available actions.

Given my heartfelt response to “The Sun Always Shines on TV” and the 10 I gave it, I expected to use this entry to wax lyrical about the original rather than the cover. But there’s not much to add other than that a-ha’s “Take on Me” and its video caught my attention at the time as it did so many others, and I still rate it highly today. I don’t even think it’s dated too badly (though of course it has dated); the original original linked by Alan @12, while fascinating to see and hear, sounds far more stuck in its 1984 moment.

But while I agree that this cover sounds utterly redundant to 2015 ears, I like Tom’s point about giving the kids of 2000 their own version to love. I remember cover versions in the early ’80s doing the same for teenage-me: one that sticks in my mind is Forrest’s 1982 cover of “Rock the Boat” less than a decade after the original. The Hues Corporation took their song to the top in the US in 1974, which certainly put the remake in redundant territory, but they might as well have done it in 1874 for all I knew.

So, points for keeping a great song alive. I don’t even mind the 2000 production touches, which work perfectly well with the song, though they’re less striking than Alan Tarney’s 1985 take. The video is hilariously dated, but that’s boybands for you. No, the main drawback here is the severe absence of Morten Harket, who lifted just about everything he touched to another level.

For the greatness of the underlying song, and for the cover’s harmless production, I’ll stretch my instinctive pointless-cover/dull-vocals score of three all the way up to Tom’s 5. I may have been influenced by listening to too many “covers for kids” CDs in recent years.

(A1’s version peaked at number 46 on the Australian charts, unlike a-ha’s chart-topping original, so you won’t find a studio band’s cover of their cover on that kids’ album. 2000 is present and correct with “Who Let the Dogs Out”, though.)

Jane Suck was Jane Solanas – wow! Another name on my list of rock writers who might drive me mad but would always be worth reading (it’s a short list, and I guess it’s just got one shorter).

As for this record, it is just awful. Apart from the falsetto, the singing is actually better than the original (and not just because it’s autotuned) – at that early stage at least, Morten wasn’t much good at the whole hitting-notes-and-holding-them side of singing (he’s multi-tracked on the demo). But it’s much less expressive. Revisiting the original, I actually choked up midway through the first verse – I don’t know what – I’m to say, I’ll say it anyway… Amazing video too, of course.

Any cover version refers back to the original – why cover a song otherwise? – and when the result lacks precisely what was best about the original, I think it deserves to be judged on those grounds. In this case they’ve taken the words, the tune & most of the arrangement, taken out anything spikey or difficult (the tempo shift on the chorus, which they use in the last verse instead), and then duplicated the whole thing with higher production values.

Awful. 1. 2 for the sheer daftness of the video (it’s the Trontrix!), revised back down to 1 for whoever heard the words ‘flight simulator’ and didn’t bother to find out what one is.

#33 not my intention; apologies!

I suspect with straight-up cover versions (as opposed to PSB-style “do something different” covers), there’s an inherent bias – with myself included – toward assuming the original is better than the cover. Interesting, if impractical, experiment: Get a statistically significant number of listeners who have never heard of “Take On Me”. Have them listen to a-ha and A1 back to back. Ask which they prefer (assuming they don’t hate both). Would a-ha win? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m just going to put this out there. I prefer the Louise version of Average White Band’s Let’s Go Round Again. Cast your stones.

If we’re talking intergenerational conflicts, then there’s a bunny in the not too distant future that also qualifies; think early 80’s imperial phase solo artist vs…well you probably know already.

#41 apologies.

#43 I bet there are at least some a1 fans who would!

@37, Pink Champale. Yes, that was me who had to have it pointed out that the Seal/Trevor Horn version of ‘Killer’ was quite a bit later. I guess I don’t find the Horn recording highly redundant in that case though; indeed it strikes me as standing to the Adamski version much more as the hit version of ‘Take on Me’ does to the Norway-only version linked @11 (but I know that less slick Adamski original has its partisans).
@24, Andrew Farrell. I just wanted to explain (since I was going to be giving an especially low score, wildly diverging from Tom’s) how I tend to think of and arrive at my own scores: reflecting the fact that (like a lot of people here) I was in bands for a few years, wrote a couple of (bad!) singles, etc., I tend to score from the perspective of how much would I like to have written/performed this rather than as a pure listener/consumer. The further idea is to articulate that writer perspective by asking of each pair of tracks which I’d rather see deleted from pop-history (I should prefer to have written/performed the track I’d prefer not to see deleted from pop-history if one had to be.). If I give two tracks the same score then I’m indifferent between which should be deleted if it came to that. And so on.

Thinking some more about the A1’s cover, I guess I find their drums and synths just as thin and hollow and deadened as A-Ha’s, only without the fizzy charm of the original (A-Ha lets you really feel the high bpm of the song whereas somehow A1 manages to lose that). So this isn’t a case like Joan Jett doing the Arrows’ ‘I Love Rock and Roll’ or Bauhaus doing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ where the original record is supercharged (by adding monster drums, more metal guitars, and lots more bottom-end generally). Tom asks ‘Why not give new 12-year olds a chance for memories of their own?’ but I just can’t hear anything here that a 12-year old would prefer.

A better case perhaps: the Labelle cover bunny coming up next year in Popular-time. I fricking hated that on principle at the time, but reflecting now, I have to admit that it translates the Labelle original into a bunch of then current styles and voices in a way that I accept probably a teen in 2001 would take as irresistably supercharging the original (much as Joan Jett and Bauhaus worked on me).

For me as I think with many the original is so interlinked with its video, more than any other 80s hit I can think of certainly (in the innovative visual effect stakes ‘Billie Jean’ comes close, ‘Money For Nothing’ too perhaps). The video’s an obvious 10 in itself but I always did prefer TSASOTV the song as I probably said on that post’s comments. Similarly I prefer A1’s follow-up to this, but by a far greater margin.

@36 The most shocking example of that for me recently was hearing the King Harvest version of Dancing In the Moonlight for the first time. The Toploader version I find excruciatingly annoying, but the (sort of) original is utterly charming.

Another example, like TOM, where modern production techniques can crush all the spirit and joy out of a song.