A-ha star says keeping apart is what keeps the band together

He was a vivid, good-looking boy who was additionally the one factor bullies hate most – totally different. Consequently, Morten Harket was punched, kicked, shoved, and insulted at college on an virtually each day foundation for 3 lengthy years. “I used to be always crushed up, it occurred quite a bit from once I was 12 or 13,” the singer with Norwegian pop sensations A-ha tells me.

“Partly as a result of I’d say issues that appeared unusual…”

He pauses and provides, “If there’s a ‘why’…I don’t suppose it takes very a lot to set off it, a way of distinction, of vulnerability.

“The folks that do the bullying are additionally very insecure. They love the joy, making different folks chuckle at their cruelty, however hurting somebody is straightforward.”

Harket, who grew up in Asker, lived a number of miles from his secondary college. “Fortunately I had time to settle down earlier than I acquired house, however generally I’d arrive again in a multitude, with tears nonetheless operating down my cheeks…”

The son of a hospital doctor father and an economics instructor mom, he was a curious little one, involved in nature and the “mechanism between issues”.

Now a severe, considerate man, Harket is philosophical about his ordeal. “It ready me for what was to return,” he says. “Bullying is an efficient preparation for stardom.

“There’s a paper-thin wall between being hailed and being crucified.”

A-ha had been the long-lasting faces of eighties pop with their pin-up appears, chiselled cheekbones, and regular provide of smash hits.

International stardom occurred shortly. Harket, who bore the brunt, likens the expertise to “standing in a cascade that by no means ends…an everlasting crescendo of noise” which continued properly into the 90s.

“When fame hits you, you’re not a part of the human group,” he says. “You develop into one thing else, an outcast; you’re not a topic anymore, purely an object. You lose the tube, buses, taxis, trains. There’s no privateness in case you’re well-known.”

Blue-eyed Morten appears an excellent twenty years youthful than his 63 years. Even now, information that he’s calling my house sends a frisson of pleasure via the feminine residents…

He’s busy selling a brand new vinyl box-set of the trio’s first album, Searching Excessive & Low.

Ratcliff requested if he might play their demo tapes to his enterprise companion Terry Slater, then touring bass-player with the Everly Brothers.

“Terry beloved us and put us again within the studio with funding. He needed to go to the US for an Everly Brothers reunion however mentioned preserve writing. We labored day and evening, utilizing the studio at any time when there was free time.”

When Slater returned, they’d amassed practically forty numbers, lots of them melancholic gems written in minor keys.

Take On Me was the stand-out. Mags had written its major riff in his teenagers; Paul constructed the music round it.

“The primary time I heard the riff, I knew it was successful,” says Morten. Getting signed to Warner Brothers was virtually a formality.

The only’s ground-breaking animated video – which noticed a pencil-drawn Harket attain out of a comic book e-book to tug in and serenade the woman studying it – helped propel the music to the highest of the charts world wide.

Their multi-platinum second album, Scoundrel Days, produced extra hits – Cry Wolf, Manhattan Skyline, I’ve Been Shedding You.

They then wrote the theme tune to 1987 Bond movie, The Dwelling Daylights, falling out with composer John Barry over their refusal to compromise. The movie music legend later likened them to the Hitler Youth in a Belgian newspaper interview.

Their largest stay viewers was 198,000 at Rio’s Praca da Apoteose stadium in 1991. Success didn’t shock Harket. “I all the time had the conviction, the strangest feeling; I by no means doubted it.”

Smart middle-class boys, on the top of their fame A-ha shunned booze, medication and groupies. Now based mostly in Oslo, Harket doesn’t smoke and drinks solely the occasional whisky.,

He has three grown-up kids with ex-wife Camilla Malmquist, a daughter with former girlfriend Anne Undlien and one other with Inez Andersson – his different half for 17 years.

As youngsters, none of A-ha had been into pop. All cite English rockers Uriah Heep and the late Jimi Hendrix as their idols. Morten even “dreamt consciously” of taking on as Heep’s vocalist after they sacked David Byron. “I knew I might do it.”

Mags and Paul, childhood associates from Oslo, fashioned rock band Bridges of their teenagers. Each performed guitar however persuasive Paul talked Mags into transferring to keyboards. They recruited Harket, awed by his sturdy falsetto and majestic three-octave singing vary.

“I wouldn’t have listened to A-ha,” says Morten. “I wouldn’t have gone there due to the picture we got within the early days, in teeny mags.”

The trio broke up in 1994, reuniting for the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Live performance, which sparked a comeback and a brand new document two years later. They break up once more In 2009, 4 months after their ninth studio album, Foot Of The Mountain.

Inner band points embrace Morten having earnt much less from their 100 million-plus gross sales than the others, who wrote the hits, Mags and Paul squabbling over who ought to take probably the most credit score for Take On Me, and each coping with Harket’s perfectionism.

Mags thinks they’d all be quite a bit happier with one another in the event that they’d break up the song-writing credit 3 ways, arguing that their songs “wouldn’t have been so profitable with out Morten’s voice”.

Because the unflinching 2021 movie, A-ha: The Film, confirmed they nonetheless endure with artistic tensions. Earlier than concert events, they’ve separate dressing rooms. They don’t battle, says Morten, “It’s that brooding Scandinavian number of uncommunicated issues.”

Even selling final 12 months’s terrific High Ten album, True North, they insisted on being interviewed individually.

Setting apart is their manner of staying collectively.

In response to the movie, they made their very own – 2022’s True North, constructed round a stay present with a small orchestra, “to make the music central” and filmed north of the Arctic Circle the place Mags owns a 2,000 acre “regenerative farm”.

Morten, the extra downbeat of the three, admits he’s essential – “that’s my nature” – however says he’s compassionate, including “It takes plenty of my vitality to take care of different folks.”

Life, he feels, “is significantly better now, folks understand how I’m, and we take care of that the most effective we will.”

A Kierkegaard fan, Morten is haunted by massive questions. “I’m involved in our scenario within the universe,” he tells me. “And the way one thing got here from nothing.

How is that potential?” He’s additionally fascinated by biodiversity. He sums up his 2018 run as The Viking on ITV’s The Masked Singer as “s***e”

Morten nonetheless will get recognised however tries to ensure followers really feel “they haven’t made an arse of themselves”.

A-ha have little deliberate. “We’ve performed plenty of work later, so we’ve got nothing for the rapid future. I’ve acquired numerous songs I’d prefer to work on. That’s what I’m doing.”

However there will likely be extra to return. “I do know the potential of what could possibly be,” says Morton with conviction. “There may be a lot greatness that has not been met.”

• The 6xLP vinyl boxset of Searching Excessive & Low is out now on BMG, together with demos and prolonged mixes