In 1985, they gained fame with ‘Take On Me’. Now the Norwegian pop band a-ha, whose fans are even Coldplay and U2, did a new album.. ‘Die Presse’ met singer Morten Harket for an interview.

‘Foot of the Mountain’, the ninth album of a-ha, is done. What kind of feeling do you have now?

It is used to be ambivalent. I have always the feeling of being in a never ending tunnel of work accompanied by doubts. The creative process of an album goes always with pain. The prouder I am about the result.

How can this be? You write real good stuff, proven by your pleasing solo albums. Nevertheless, you are not being mentioned as co-author for the new songs. Doesn’t that hurt?

Not at all, I never thought about it until the media made an issue of it. What Pål and Magne present as a song is never a completed song. I as a singer, have many options to create. If I can’t do anything with the lyrics, I deny singing it. Otherwise I was a bad singer. Only if I can identify with a song, it has a chance becoming a good one.

But this is a financial matter, too. You participated in the writing of ‘Take On Me’, the greatest hit of a-ha. Don’t you care about it?

The Norwegian journalists also like it to focus on this topic. But I assure you, that I have a different kind of mentality. a-ha are the only international successful pop band from Norway.

The Swedish, however, have a number of amazing bands. Not too long ago, Sweden and Norway were united in one empire. Where do the differences come from?

The Mentality of the Swedish and Norwegians has been different even then. To keep it simple, the Swedish have always been fleet-footed, the Norwegians more thoughtful. This explains the Swedish pop dominance very well.

On their new album, a-ha return competently to its original synthie-pop-aesthetics. Which role producer Steve Osborne played here?

Steve played the central role in turning the album to the compact statement which it is now. The work for it began even some years ago. We started with some brilliant ideas concerning fresh synthesizer sounds. Everybody who heard this at this experimental stage was exited, because we were acting like we used to at the beginning of our career. As it has always been difficult with a-ha to agree on something, we very soon couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Doubts arose. We got stuck. Steve helped us coming out of that. After several detours we came back to our starting position. And behold! The old magic was back.