Da stimme ich Dir voll zu! Das krieg ich hin!
Interessanterweise ist TSASOTV erwähnt.
Die meisten aus dem Buch sind offenbar hier zusammengefasst: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…BKwKCvIWxOzQ261
Da stimme ich Dir voll zu! Das krieg ich hin!
Interessanterweise ist TSASOTV erwähnt.
Die meisten aus dem Buch sind offenbar hier zusammengefasst: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…BKwKCvIWxOzQ261
https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/…a-tour-42133858
OK... so manches war auch mir neu!
25 Things You Never Knew About a-ha
https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/…a-tour-42133858
OK... so manches war auch mir neu!
Ja, zum Beispiel die Sachen mit Oasis.
... oder die Drillinge Wenn alle drei kommen sollen, ruft die Mutter dann "a-ha"??
Lars Eidinger bringt a-ha in seiner aktuellen Peer Gynt-Inszenierung unter:
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/stil-individua…i-tuete-li.4850
Zum Glück gibt's Journalisten, die sich sowas ansehen und drüber berichten (müssen):
ZitatTheaterkritik | "Peer Gynt" an der Schaubühne Mach keinen Umweg mehr, Peer
13.02.20 | 08:10 Uhr
Lars Eidinger und der Künstler John Bock nehmen sich an der Berliner Schaubühne Henrik Ibsens "Peer Gynt" vor. Die Bühne ist zwar spektakulär, doch der Solo-Abend fahrig und zerdehnt. Von Fabian Wallmeier
(...)Bock und Eidinger verrühren Ibsen unter anderem mit Pop-Zitaten von A-Ha bis Kanye West, Bert Brecht und dem unvermeidlichen Heiner Müller. Nach dem Monolog über einen angeblichen Jagderfolg Peer Gynts singt Eidinger etwa mit Vocoder-Stimme A-Has "Hunting High and Low". Ähnlich kalauerhaft sind auch einige anderen der Assoziationen, mit denen Eidinger aufwartet. "Peer Rücke", sagt er, als er sich eine Perücke aufgesetzt hat, und dann geht es eine Weile so weiter: Peer Einschreiben. Rap Peer. Peer Vers.
(...)
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/lars-ei…e/25543260.html
ZitatUnd weil Peer ein peerverser Norweger war und die Musik in Eidingers Jugend fällt, singt er Hits der norwegischen Band a-ha – „Take on Me“, „Hunting High and Low“, also low. Die nimmt man in jedem Fall nachher mit in die kalte Nacht.
https://www.fr.de/kultur/theater…r-13537988.html
ZitatWährend seiner sich im Kreis drehenden Ich-Suche landet er vielleicht am nächsten bei sich, wenn er fast weinend zu entschleunigtem und entschlacktem Karaokebackground Songs von Aha (mit Peer Gynt seelenverwandte norwegische Milchbubis) singt.
https://daily.afisha.ru/music/14327-sl…rediny-nulevyh/
ZitatZum Beispiel nennt Chris Martin a-ha seine Lieblingsgruppe seiner Kindheit. Und das ist auch bezeichnend: Der Einfluss der elegant-verträumten neuen Welle der Norweger bei Coldplay ist unübersehbar. Das Bild ihres Anführers Morten Harket, eines Romantikers mit süßer Stimme am nördlichen Rand, hat Chris Martin definitiv im Gedächtnis behalten.
Teil 1:
ZitatAlles anzeigenMorten Harket was naive about girls': the story behind A-Ha's Take On Me video
As A-Ha's history-making video passes a billion views on YouTube, director Steve Barron reveals where he drew his inspiration from
19 February 2020 • 5:41pm
Steve Barron had a glimpse of the madness to come when hundreds of starry-eyed teenagers started laying siege to his flat in Notting Hill. “For A-Ha it went from zero to 100 overnight,” he remembers. “Morten Harket, the singer, used to come back and crash on my sofa. He’d hang out. And then you’d look outside and there would be all these teenage girls. He got a bit freaked out.”
Barron is responsible for some of the most memorable music videos of the 1980s: Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, Dire Straits’s Money For Nothing. The pop promo of which he is perhaps proudest is the one accompanying A-Ha’s 1985 pocket epic Take On Me. Yes, the video with the girl and the pencil-drawn bikers and Harket’s extraordinary cartoon hair.
“There was a lot of madness and euphoria,” he says of its impact. “It happened so quickly for them. It was amazing.”
The craziness had kicked in towards the end 1985. Six months before that, A-ha were unheard of. They’d moved to London from Norway and were so skint Harket recalls nearly passing out on several occasions due to hunger. Barron, then the golden boy of the pop promo, certainly didn’t know much about them when Warner Music boss Jeff Ayeroff got in touch from Los Angeles.
A-Ha had, in October 1984, put out a catchy single called Take On Me. Yet, try as the label might, they couldn’t get any momentum behind it. MTV in particular had shown negligible interest in the video – a straightforward performance piece in which Harket threw big gooey eyes at the camera. Would Barron like to have go at re-doing it? He would have a free hand and a hefty budget.
“It came together in a very strong way,” he recalls. “You’ve a gut feeling… ‘wow this could be something special’.”
“Special” hardly begins to do it justice. Barron’s take on Take On Me turned A-Ha into overnight stars. It has remained beloved ever since. This week it achieved another milestone by becoming makes it only the third pre-1990s video to notch up over a billion views on YouTube.
Other members of the YouTube “Billion Club” include Gun ’n’ Roses with November Rain (the first video predating YouTube to reach the landmark), Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen and, erm, Numb by Linkin Park.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement, however. Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You has 4.6 billion views (that’s a lot of bread for Ed) while Despacito, by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, holds the record at 6.6 billion. A-ha are in the foothills gazing up at Sheeran’s big red head.
Here is where I should probably describe in detail the Take On Me video. But is there really any need? You already know it beat by beat. Close your eyes and you can see Morten Harket, half man, half cartoon scribble, banging into the walls of a scruffy apartment block corridor as his love interest watches in anguish.
As with all great Eighties pop videos Take On Me is conceptually ambitious and slightly ridiculous. In a grungy caff a young woman (model Bunty Bailey) with a busy haircut leafs through a comic book in which a handsome biker squares off against his villainous rivals. But then he’s looking at her, from out of the page. A hand emerges, beckoning her to follow.
Teil 2:
ZitatAlles anzeigenWere that to happen today, she’d probably put it on Instagram and then go back to taking photographs of her food. This, though, was the 1980s. Things were different. She accepts the invitation and is pulled into the comic book as Take On Me reaches its chorus.
The couple are transformed into cartoons (using the venerable “rotoscope” technique by which animators draw over live footage). They dance, he shakes his very tall quiff and they are chased by his angry rival bikers, wielding scary wrenches. As this unfolds the waitress back in the caff crumples up the magazine and chucks it in the bin. Oh no!
Obviously it takes more than a scrunched comic book to defeat true love. Harket helps his star-crossed new acquaintance escape. Back in reality, she retrieves the publication and pegs it to her flat. There she finds Harket screaming in the hall: half man, half charcoal etching. He fights off the demons and stands in front of her in all his young pop star glory (think James Dean mugged by a giant tub of Brycreem). You can watch it a hundred times – a billion times even – and still get goose-bumps.
“When I was six years old I used to read lots of comic books,” says Barron, who went on to have a successful career directing hit movies such as the original 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Saturday Night Live spinoff Coneheads (1993) and now works in TV on dramas such as The Durrells.
“My idea for the video was that it was a comic book, there’s a girl, a love story across dimensions. And so I recalled a strip in The Beezer. There were side-car motorcycle racers. There are baddies and goodies. The baddies try to cheat. I sort of based it on that.”
Barron had already acquired a reputation as a miracle worker. He’s turned po-faced synth moochers the Human League into pop stars and, in 1982, pulled off something nobody else would ever achieve in making Michael Jackson cool, with Billie Jean. Still, even he must have been surprised by the impact of his Take On Me video. When it hit the airwaves in October 1985 it transformed a flop single into an instant hit. Soon Take On Me had rocketed to number one in 15 territories, though not in the UK where it was held off the top of the charts by Jennifer Rush’s The Power of Love.
The Take On Me video took nearly six months to make, with the hand-drawn illustrations alone requiring four-months. The lead animator was Michael Patterson, a recent graduate from California Institute of the Arts. The rotoscoping technique was Barron’s idea.
“Jeff Ayeroff introduced me to this animator who was out of college, Michael Patterson. Because it was rotoscoping you shoot everything first. I set about writing the concept. I was in New York making a video for Toto. I remember sitting in the hotel room thinking, ‘I’ve got to work on this A-ha video. How’s it going to work?". I had done a number of videos with effects. I thought if I could justify the effects in some way the result would be so much stronger. To have a concept rather than just the graphic quality.”
Most of the action was shot on a soundstage in London. The restaurant scenes were filmed at Kim's Café, today the Savoy Cafe, on Wandsworth Road. The lead villain was played by Alfie Curtis, who would work with Barron on subsequent projects including the movie Mike Bassett England Manager
Rotoscoping was one of the magic ingredients Barron feels. It makes the animation urgent and alive – and unique too. “It was first done in 1916. You take a live action image and sketch over the outline frame by frame. It kind of disappeared for some reason. Disney came along with the cell animation style. So it felt like 'wow, I haven’t seen this before'.
To this day, song and video are synonymous. It’s been referenced in movies such as Ready Player One and even by Donald Trump who last October put out a re-election video blatantly indebted to Take On Me (one crucial difference is that it doesn’t end with him snogging a tall-haired pop star from Aarhus).
“It was their first single and it hadn’t worked. There had been a number of attempts,” he recollects “When I first met them there were young and fresh. They’d had these disappointments. It wasn’t quite happening. I met them in a youth hostel in Bayswater. They were all there on single beds. It was pre-fame, definitely pre-fame. They had no money. I sat down and explained my idea. They were totally up for it.”
This was something of a gold star year for Barron. He went straight from Take On Me to directing the Money For Nothing video for Dire Straits (the one in which the CGI removal men watch Mark Knopfler on TV). Money For Nothing was a huge smash, too, and named video of the year by MTV. Among the competition it saw off was Take On Me.
“I didn’t connect with that song,” says Barron of Money For Nothing. “I love Dire Straits. Money for Nothing was a bit silly for me. I could see it was an opportunity. There was also a bit of a slagging off of boy-bands and music videos. I liked the irony. Mark Knopfler was the one who was saying this is not where music should be going. He was anti-music video.”
Teil 3:
ZitatAlles anzeigenBarron was born in Dublin in 1956 and grew up in London, where he attended St Marylebone Grammar School. His first experience of the entertainment industry was as a clapper-loader on Richard Donner’s Superman, where his duties included loading raw film-stock into the cameras. He got into music when he became friendly with the mod band Secret Affair, directing their 1979 video Time For Action.
The Jam and Adam Ant were among the artists with whom he worked in those early years. His big break came in 1981 with the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me. Barron drew on his love of Truffaut and the concept of a movie within a movie: highfalutin stuff when the pop video was still a rudimentary art. That caught the attention of Michael Jackson, who wanted the promo for his next single to have an element of “cinematic fantasy”
“Doing Billie Jean, I found him really lovely and charming,” recalls Barron. “Very soft spoken. Almost shy. This was before Thriller had come out. When we did the video nobody had yet reacted to Thriller, nobody had heard it. So he was still super creative but not 100 per cent sure of his direction.”
Strange as it may sound, there were budget issues which Jackson had to work around. Barron’s concept was for the singer to walk down a yellow brick road that lit up as he proceeded. Jackson had created a new dance routine which he didn’t want to rehearse, so as to keep things spontaneous. But because of cash limitations not all the flagstones would light if stepped upon. Barron had to take Jackson to one side and explain all this.
“I was a bit embarrassed,” he says. “We couldn’t give him the freedom because of the concept and what we could afford with the paving stones. He brilliantly drew on this trepidation about what was going to happen and brought it into his dance. I remember looking through the camera and seeing this incredible thing.”
Jackson has since come to be regarded as a bit of an oddball – and that’s setting aside the child abuse allegations. How did Barron find him? “He seemed really natural. He was a very smart person. Just pretty soft-spoken. He wasn’t demonstrative. And he was a little childlike. Definitely childlike. But a smart-childlike.”
Barron took a break from music to shoot a movie, Electric Dreams, in 1984 (the one with the Phil Oakey song). It flopped in America and so he returned to videos. Straight away he scored a brace of era-defining hits with A-ha and Dire Straits.
His love for storytelling on screen was rekindled when he met Jim Henson while directing the video for David Bowie’s Underground in 1986. The song is from the soundtrack to Henson’s Labyrinth. The video sees Bowie crooning in a darkened street as Henson’s puppets peer from the gloom. As with much of what Bowie did in the 1980s it is terrible but also somehow fantastic.
“Bowie was wonderfully creative and light and sweet and excited,” says Barron. “I only worked with him for a few weeks and I remember thinking, ‘what a positive being”. He was really enjoying being surrounded by the animatronics and fantastical creatures.”
Several years later, Barron found himself directing the big-screen version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He sought out Henson to assist with the creature designs (the remote-controlled turtle helmets kept breaking down). And he hired a young film editor named Sally Menke, later to collaborate extensively with Quentin Tarantino (prior to her death in 2010 at age 56).
“I met Tarantino with her at the Baftas. He was so funny. He had told Uma Thurman that he’d got 'Sally' to edit for him. And she said, ‘who’s Sally?” He said, “Sally was the one who made [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle] Donatello fight. He was a bit obsessed with it.”
He remains friendly with A-ha and caught up with them the previous night at their concert in Cape Town (where, by sheer coincidence, he is directing David Tennant in Around the World in 80 Days for the BBC). The same isn’t true for Warners, with whom he has an ongoing difference of opinion regarding royalties.
Barron would rather not talk about that. A cuddlier question, then. Is it true Harket and the Bunty Bailey were a real life couple?
“She became his girlfriend on set,” he says. “I saw it happen. We went looking for someone with a good spirit, who wasn’t necessarily a trained actress and could dance a little.
“I’m sure Morten wouldn’t mind me saying that he was naive about girls and things. He wasn’t that experienced in relationships. There was one scene where they were holding hands. We did about six takes. I suddenly looked around and they were holding hands off camera as well. I thought, ‘oh, of course’. Soon it was all over Smash Hits that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
https://www.abc.es/cultura/musica…w.google.com%2F
Google-Übersetzung:
Die norwegische Band erreichte dank eines der besten Musikvideos aller Zeiten die Spitze, schaffte es jedoch nicht, ihren Erfolg zu erzielen
Es wird diejenigen geben, die ihre Hände an den Kopf legen, wenn sie sehen, dass wir sagen, dass A-Ha ein "One-Hit-Wunder" war, weil sie in Europa mehrere Erfolge hatten und in ihrer Heimat Norwegen Kolosse des Pop waren. Aber die Wahrheit ist, dass sich nur sehr wenige Menschen an ein Lied von ihm erinnern, das nicht das berühmte "Take on me" ist. Ein Song, der ohne seinen Videoclip nichts gewesen wäre: Die Single war kein sofortiger Erfolg. Tatsächlich blieb es unbemerkt, bis dieser beeindruckende animierte Kurzfilm es in unsere Köpfe einbettete.
Der Keim der Gruppe hatte sich 1976 gebildet, als der Gitarrist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy und der Keyboarder Magne Furuholmen die Band Bridges gründeten. Nach einem gescheiterten Debütalbum parkten sie das Projekt und suchten einen Sänger mit einer guten Stimme, Einstellung, Ausstrahlung und Image. Sie versuchten, die Dienste von Morten Harket, dem Sänger von Soldier Blue, in Anspruch zu nehmen, und nach mehreren Monaten Tauziehen nahm er sein Angebot Mitte 1982 an.
Beim Lesen der Briefe einer von Savoys Kompositionen fand Harket einen süchtigen Ausdruck: A-ha. Das Lustige ist, dass das fragliche Thema "Nothing to it" erst 2010 in einer Neuauflage veröffentlicht wurde.
Das Trio ging, um eine Staffel in einer Kabine von Savoys Eltern zu verbringen, um zu komponieren, und aus diesem kreativen Prozess würde der Großteil von A-Ha's Debütalbum entstehen, das Ende 1982 aufgenommen wurde. Geladen mit Ehrgeiz und Illusionen, Die drei reisten nach London, um ihre Arbeiten mehreren Plattenfirmen vorzustellen. Aber sie wurden von allen abgelehnt und litten in der britischen Hauptstadt, bis der Schlag der Realität sie nach Norwegen zurückbrachte.
Aber welche Wikinger gaben sie nicht auf und kehrten einige Monate später zurück, um einen neuen Streifzug nach England zu unternehmen. Und so gelang es ihnen im Winter 1983, bei Warner zu unterschreiben, der sofort einen Treffer forderte. Sie machten sich an die Arbeit an einem alten Bridges-Thema, "The Juicyfruit Song", dessen Titel in "Lesson One" und schließlich "Take on me" abgeleitet wurde. Der Start im Oktober 1984 führte zu einem Totalausfall: Dreihundert Exemplare wurden verkauft.
Von der Überzeugung überzeugt, dass das Lied Dochte getroffen hatte, mischte A-Ha es neu, um es im April 1985 erneut zu veröffentlichen, aber es stürzte erneut ab. Dann kam die Idee, die alles verändern würde: ein revolutionärer Videoclip, der auf einer Kombination aus echtem Bild und Schwarz-Weiß-Animationen basiert und die Geschichte einer Romanze zwischen einem Mädchen und einer Comicfigur erzählt, einer Liebe zwischen zwei Welten, die verführt hat Millionen von Zuschauern weltweit. Unter der Regie von Steve Barron und in vier Monaten harter Arbeit, in denen mehr als dreitausend Frames montiert wurden, wurde das Video zu einem sofortigen Erfolg, der im folgenden Jahr sechs MTV-Preise gewann. Schließlich erreichte "Take on me" nicht nur in Europa, sondern auch in den USA die Spitze der Verkaufsliste.
Die Single, die mehr als neun Millionen Mal verkauft wurde, führte im Oktober 1985 zur Veröffentlichung von A-Ha's erstem Album "Hunting High and Low". Weitere Hits kamen heraus, insbesondere "The Sun Always Shines on TV". Das war die Nummer eins in England.
Sade stahl den Grammy als bester neuer Künstler, aber nichts hinderte ihn daran, 1985 an Popularität zu gewinnen, was seine Firma nicht missen wollte. Die Gruppe nahm ihr zweites Album ("Scoundrel Days") in Eile auf, und obwohl es fast sieben Millionen Mal verkauft wurde, konnte es sich der mit "Hunting High and Low" gekennzeichneten Bar nicht nähern. Sein Lied für den Film «James Bond 007: High Voltage» mit dem Titel «The Living Daylights» war eine Bombe. Aber dann begann die Abfahrt.
Im Mai 1988 veröffentlichte A-ha ihr drittes Album "Stay on These Roads", das einen neuen Umsatzrückgang verzeichnete. Diesmal wurden vier Millionen Exemplare versandt. Obwohl das Ende der achtziger und Anfang der neunziger Jahre glücklich war, mit massiven Konzerten wie dem in Rio de Janeiro (1992 vor fast 200.000 Menschen) oder dem bei den Olympischen Spielen in Lillehammer, tauchten seine nächsten Werke sie allmählich unter die Oberfläche, bis sich die Band 1994 auflöst und ihre drei Mitglieder Solokarrieren machen.
1999 kehren jedoch alle zurück und 2002 geben sie ihr mit Spannung erwartetes erstes Konzert in Spanien auf einer harten Tournee, da es durch den Streik der Fluglotsen im Juni 2002 um einen Monat verschoben werden musste. Vier Scheiben später kehrten sie zurück Im selben Jahr verabschiedeten sie sich von unserem Land mit einem Konzert in Vistalegre, das leider durch die schmerzhafte Akustik des Geheges rasiert wurde.
2011 versammelten sie sich zu einem Konzert zu Ehren der Opfer der Anschläge vom 22. Juli in Oslo und Utøya mit dem Versprechen, nicht auf die Bühne zurückzukehren. Aber vier Jahre später würde er zu seinem aktuellen Schwanenlied "Cast in Steel" gelangen, einem Album, das auf einer großartigen Welttournee präsentiert wurde.
Es schien, dass dies das Ende von A-Ha sein würde, und es wäre kein schlechtes Ende gewesen: Sie hatten hundert Millionen Platten verkauft. Aber, Dinge des Lebens, dort ist "Nimm mich an" zur Rettung zurückgekehrt. Der Videoclip des Songs ist wieder zu einer Neuigkeit geworden, da er eine Milliarde Aufrufe auf YouTube überschritten und die Gruppe wieder in Umlauf gebracht hat. Am 27. Juni sind sie beim Rock in Rio Festival in Lissabon wieder auf der Bühne zu sehen.
Ab 31.50 Interview mit Morten:
Auch wenn Paul noch keine Meinung zu dem Song hat... ich find ihn scharch-langweilig!
Ich versteh den Hype um die Frau nicht...
gefällt mir gar nicht der song..irgendwie langweilig
Auch wenn Paul noch keine Meinung zu dem Song hat... ich find ihn scharch-langweilig!
Ich versteh den Hype um die Frau nicht...
Sie ist halt anders und entspricht nicht dem gängigen Klischee. Mal sehen, wie lange.
"Anders" ist aber nicht direkt "gut"
"Anders" ist aber nicht direkt "gut"
Ja, da hast du Recht. Ist halt Geschmackssache.
Und eine Interviewaufzeichnung: