Somewhere in the mid-1980s, a record label sat with a song that had already failed once and a Norwegian band that refused to give up on it. The question was simple and brutal: do they try again, or do they move on? What happened next became one of the most recognizable moments in pop music history.

The song was “Take On Me” by a-ha — and almost nobody heard the first version.

The Song’s Early Forms

Long before the glossy synth production that the world would eventually fall in love with, “Take On Me” existed in rougher, earlier forms. The three members of a-ha — Morten Harket, Pål Waaktaar, and Magne Furuholmen — had been working on the core musical idea for years. The foundation of the song, that insistent, climbing keyboard riff, was something the band had been building around since their earliest days together in Norway.

The group had moved to London in the early 1980s with ambitions that outpaced their resources. They were chasing a sound that felt modern and cinematic at the same time, something that could hold its own alongside the best British and American pop of the era. The song that would eventually become “Take On Me” went through multiple arrangements and rehearsals before it was considered ready to record properly.

That determination — the stubborn belief that the song was worth getting right — is really where the story starts. Most bands in that position might have shelved the track and moved on to something new. a-ha kept returning to it, convinced that the right recording would prove what they already heard in their heads.

The Unsuccessful 1984 Release

In 1984, a-ha released the first commercial version of “Take On Me.” It was produced by Tony Mansfield and released through Warner Bros. Records. By almost any measure, it did not work. The single failed to chart in any meaningful way, generating little radio attention and almost no sales momentum. For a young band still trying to establish themselves outside of Norway, it was a dispiriting result.

The 1984 version is not a bad recording. Listeners who seek it out today can hear the bones of the song clearly — the melody is there, the energy is there. But something about the production did not connect. The arrangement felt slightly out of step with the sound that was breaking through at the time, and without a visual or promotional push to support it, the single disappeared quickly.

Warner Bros. could have dropped the track entirely. Instead, they gave the band another chance. It was an unusual decision, the kind of patience that labels rarely extend — but it turned out to be the decision that changed everything.

Alan Tarney Produces the New Recording

For the second attempt, a-ha worked with producer Alan Tarney. The choice mattered enormously. Tarney had already proven himself as someone who understood how to make pop music feel both polished and emotionally immediate. He had worked extensively with Cliff Richard and had a strong instinct for arrangements that sounded full without becoming cluttered.

What Tarney brought to “Take On Me” was clarity and momentum. The rerecorded version, released in 1985, had a crispness that the earlier recording had lacked. The famous keyboard introduction was sharpened into something almost percussive, hitting with a precision that pulled listeners in from the very first notes. The synth lines were layered carefully, building a sense of forward motion that matched Morten Harket’s vocal perfectly.

Harket’s voice was itself a significant part of why the new version landed differently. His range and control gave the song an emotional reach that few pop recordings of that period could match. The production around him in the Tarney version framed that voice rather than competing with it. The result was a recording that sounded simultaneously of its moment and somehow timeless.

Even with the improved recording, the single needed one more element to break through. The song was strong. But the world needed a reason to stop and pay attention.

Steve Barron and the Animators

The music video for the 1985 version of “Take On Me” was directed by Steve Barron, who was already one of the most creative directors working in the format at the time. He had directed Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video among others, and he understood instinctively that the best music videos were not simply promotional tools — they were short films that needed their own visual language.

The concept Barron developed for “Take On Me” combined live action footage with a hand-drawn pencil animation style, a technique sometimes referred to as rotoscoping when live footage is traced over frame by frame. The story followed a young woman who is drawn into a comic book world where she encounters the band, particularly the character played by Harket. The two worlds — real and drawn — kept colliding and bleeding into each other, which gave the video a romantic, slightly dreamlike quality that matched the song exactly.

What made the visual effect so striking, and so demanding to produce, was the sheer amount of manual work involved. Animators traced individual frames by hand — thousands of them — to create the pencil-sketch effect that flickered between illustration and reality. The exact number cited in various accounts runs into the thousands of frames, each one requiring careful attention to keep the motion fluid and the aesthetic consistent. It was painstaking, slow work by any standard.

The finished video was unlike almost anything else being shown on MTV or music television at the time. Most videos leaned on performance footage, dramatic lighting, or abstract imagery. “Take On Me” told an actual story, used a genuinely innovative visual technique, and gave viewers something they genuinely wanted to watch more than once. In the early MTV era, when music television was still figuring out what it could be, that kind of video was powerful currency.

The video won six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986, including Video of the Year. For a band that had been essentially invisible in 1984, that was a transformation almost as dramatic as the one happening inside their pencil-drawn comic strip.

From Failed Single to US Number One

The combination of Tarney’s production and Barron’s video pushed “Take On Me” all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States in 1985. It also charted at number two in the United Kingdom and reached the top of charts across much of Europe. The same song that had quietly vanished the year before was now inescapable.

For a-ha, the success launched an international career that would carry them through decades of recordings, tours, and a devoted global fanbase. They became Norway’s most successful pop export, a distinction that still holds today. But the song itself became something larger than any chart position — it became a cultural reference point, the shorthand for an entire era of music video creativity.

It is worth sitting with how close the whole thing came to not happening. A different decision from a label executive in 1984 and the song stays buried. A different producer and the recording does not have the same precision. A different director and the video is just another clip with band members standing in front of lights. Every piece had to fall into place for the result to land as it did.

The 1984 version still exists, of course. Curious listeners can find it and hear how the melody was always there, waiting. But what turned it into something that people are still watching, still playing, still recognizing in the first three seconds of that keyboard intro — that required the full journey. The failure, the second chance, the right producer, and thousands of hand-traced frames that together created one of the most distinctive images in pop music history.

Some songs take one perfect moment to find their audience. “Take On Me” needed two attempts, one visionary video, and a great deal of quiet, patient work before it got there. The world is considerably better for the fact that it did.