Forty years after it first hit MTV, a-ha’s “Take On Me” is still drawing a crowd online.
The Norwegian band’s music video has passed 2.2 billion views on YouTube, making it the most-watched music video from the 1980s. It has outpaced Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which was the first ’80s video to reach 1 billion views, as well as every video from Michael Jackson. In 2024, “Take On Me” became the first ’80s music video to cross 2 billion views.
The song didn’t take off right away. a-ha, formed in Oslo by Morten Harket, Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and Magne Furuholmen, first released “Take On Me” in 1984, and it went nowhere. The band re-recorded it and paired it with a groundbreaking video directed by Steve Barron, which mixed live action with pencil-sketch animation as Harket pulled a woman into a comic-book world.
The video turned the song into a smash. “Take On Me” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1985, making a-ha the first Norwegian act to top the chart. The video went on to win six MTV Video Music Awards.
In the U.S., that’s where the story usually ends. a-ha is often called a one-hit wonder in America, and the label is mostly fair, though not entirely. The band’s follow-up, “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.,” reached the top 20 in the U.S. but never matched the success of “Take On Me,” and the group didn’t have another major American hit.
The rest of the world tells a very different story. In the U.K., “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” went all the way to No. 1, and a-ha kept scoring hits across Europe for years. In 1987, the band recorded “The Living Daylights,” the theme song for the James Bond film of the same name. And in 1991, a-ha played to a crowd of nearly 200,000 people at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, an audience that earned a place in Guinness World Records.
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