erstmal in Englisch .... http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Articl…4449259,00.html
Pop
A-Ha
4 stars
Royal Albert Hall, London
More reviews
Steven Poole
Guardian
Thursday June 27, 2002
Poor Morten Harket. He is still as beautiful as ever, still makes them scream as he moves around the stage in a kind of elegant slow-motion stagger, clad in a crimson shirt and achingly tight beige jeans. He retains his unearthly, youthful perfection, while a portrait in some Norwegian attic wrinkles and rots. Which means that, after all these years, the cruel misfortune of having been successful in the 1980s will still not be forgiven.
The stage is underlit in blue neon, and banks of screens pulse with abstract computer graphics. The Albert Hall vibrates to a thunderous stamping and the deafening cheers of happy thirtysomething women. And that's just for the drummer's entrance. (Mind you, he is, as we later learn, a "Scandinavian legend" - perhaps the god Thor?) Then Harket, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen and guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy find their spotlights and launch energetically into the title track of last year's excellent comeback album, Minor Earth, Major Sky.
Harket keeps fiddling with his earpiece, and the sound mix is flappingly bass-heavy. But then, after a charming speech by Furuholmen about how happy they are to be here, come the old hits. They still sound remarkably inventive, and in many cases ahead of their time. Manhattan Skyline alternates soaring melodrama with avant-garde rock figures to better effect than Radiohead's Paranoid Android. I've Been Losing You throbs with rocky swagger, and Harket caresses a melismatic ending in his ageless, alien-pure falsetto. Stay on These Roads becomes an aching piano-led torch song, while Hunting High and Low grows inexorably into a massive rock symphony. Furuholmen gleefully stabs out the old fat synth riffs while Waaktaar-Savoy loses himself in guitar solos that are unfortunately inaudible, as the slumbering incompetent at the sound desk never turns him up in time.
A-Ha's recent material is gentler and more wistful, but the swooningly melodic structures of songs such as Time and Again or Forever Not Yours (from new album Lifelines) are hardly overshadowed by the classics. The band essay a Status Quo backline dance, slip a reggae breakdown into Bond theme The Living Daylights, and wig out in an extended ending to Take On Me, during which even Harket seems delightedly surprised that he can still hit those stratospheric vocal highs. They end with a majestic The Sun Always Shines on TV, by which time it is obvious to any rational human that A-Ha are some of the greatest unacknowledged geniuses of pop's past two decades. YEAH !