It is no secret that A Ha singer Morten Harket’s high notes on Take On Me made it one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. What surprises people is how he can still hit those notes live more than twenty years after the song first came out.
A Ha’s stripped-back acoustic version gives a whole different vibe and lets you focus on the melody and the words in a way the original didn’t. That soft version of Take On Me has pulled in 89 million views on YouTube, so there is no doubt it connected with people.
It is A Ha themselves performing it in a simple setting, and fans online have called it beautiful and a masterpiece. It is a relaxed version that is very different from the big production that most people know.
Harket was already proving his voice still had power when he performed at Live 8 in 2005 at the Berlin Victory Column. At 45 years old he still sounded close to the young singer from 1984. When the opening keyboard kicked in and the crowd knew what was coming, he sang the chorus with his bandmates in three part harmony and then hit the famous high falsetto note clean and strong.
The live arrangement in Berlin leaned a little more toward rock with a driving groove. Fans online gave their thoughts, with one writing: “It’s the mark of a great singer how he hits the high notes, with generally perfect pitch after so many years.
No Auto-Tune, no nonsense.” Another said: “Morten Harket’s vocal range is virtually unmatched. Strangely, it wasn’t an immediate hit and took years of hard work and dedication to turn it into the classic that it is.”
That Live 8 show drew 80 million views on YouTube and is now their second biggest live video behind only their MTV Unplugged set. The unplugged version passed 105 million views and once again proved how well Harket’s voice works in a stripped-down arrangement with just guitar and piano. Both versions have become proof that the song still holds up decades later.
Listen for yourself below:
