It was the last day of the Scottish football season and I went to the pub with two friends - we'll call them Andy and Ronan, since that's their names - to watch the exciting, pulsating climax to another entirely predictable two-horse race in the SPL.
Andy is Scottish, a Celtic fan, and we watched what was expected to be his team's victory over Motherwell in The Yucatan, a thoroughly Irish - and thoroughly Celtic - pub in Stoke Newington, north London. Things didn't go to plan and despite Celtic leading for most of the match, Motherwell's Scott McDonald scored two late goals to hand the title to Rangers, who had been playing out a narrow win over Hibernian.
Some hours later, we're very drunk in another Stokey pub, Father Ted's, which is thoroughly faux-Irish. It's after midnight, but they're setting up karaoke. Andy doesn't do karaoke, but since he hasn't spoken since the trauma of seeing a football team lose a football match, that probably doesn't matter. I've got my name down to murder Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman and Ronan's going to sing a-ha's Take On Me.
The two big things that I discovered in the ensuing conversation about Ronan's love of a-ha were: 1 - that Morten sings "in a day or two" in that high bit at the end of the chorus and; 2 - they were still on the go. Not only that, but Ronan was going to see them live in the near future and they had a new album due later in the year. I was surprised - I'd assumed that they'd split some time in the late 80s/early 90s, but here they were about to release their 8th studio album.
The point of this lengthy and tedious preamble is this - can there be a better example of a band peaking too early than a-ha? Take On Me - their first single, mind - was a huge, huge hit, topping the charts all over the world (although not here in the UK, where it was kept off the top spot by Jennifer Rush's horror-ballad, The Power of Love (careful with that link, now!) - for three weeks. Ouch). Their first album, Hunting High And Low, sold over 11 million copies. Not that they were, by any stretch of the imagination, one hit wonders - over 36 million in worldwide album sales, 16 UK top-40 singles - but the success graph of their 25 year recording career would, I think, show a steady, constant downward trend.
They released their ninth and last studio album, Foot Of The Mountain, in 2009 and it was their first release not to get to number one in their native Norway. A good time for their farewell tour, I think - they split in 2010.
I'm really rather fond of a-ha and I wish I had more of their music. As it is, I have only 4 songs (I thought I had 5, but it turns out that Manhattan Skyline is not the a-ha single, but is actually David Shire's excellent track of the same name from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).
Take On Me is lovely, sweet, melancholic - an absolutely smashing song. Here's the famous groundbreaking video:
I also have The Sun Always Shines On TV and Hunting High And Low, because I'm too cool to like the later stuff, obviously, and The Living Daylights, because I do like a James Bond theme. It's not a particularly good Bond, mind you - better than Sheena Easton or Tina Bleedin' Turner, but not as good as, say, Duran Duran's effort, let alone some of the early classics.
I still hang out with Andy and he's even started talking again after the footballing trauma, but I've not seen Ronan in a few years - he moved abroad with work. But thinking of a-ha has prompted me to look him up on facebook and I've sent him a friend request. Don't you just love a happy ending?
(Worth a read if you have even the smallest amount of music geekery about you is Sound On Sound's take on Take On Me as its Classic Track.)
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