A-ha and the video for lovers of fictional characters

[Tabouli]

Christian:
> A lot of the change may have something to do with Morten Harket being 
much more involved with songwriting now than he was in the first 
heyday of A-ha.  One of the reasons A-ha broke up back then was that 
Morten was annoyed that the creative process was monopolised by Pål 
and Magne, while he was simply a pretty face singin' and swingin' up 
there by the mic.<

Admittedly, Morten was very good at doing that!  Quite apart from his looks, his voice (as my professionally trained singer/architect brother reliably tells me) is superb.  What a range.  And hey, how do you do the circle thing on top of the a?  Are Norwegian keyboards specially equipped?  As for Magne, I though the couple of songs on the early albums which he wrote were pretty weak.  Did you ever get Morten's solo effort, Wild Seed?  Should I?

Martin (re: Take On Me):
> Wasn't that the video that had the band going in and out of a cartoon?  I 
think it was pencil drawn as I recall...  Great song though!< 

It's a video for anyone who's ever been in love with a fictional character.  Briefly, it has a young woman in a coffee shop reading a comic.  She sees one of the faces drawn in it wink at her, and then suddenly Morten's pencil drawn hand emerges from the page, beckons, and then she takes his hand and he pulls her into the comic, where she and he alternate between being drawings and real people (when looking through a pane of glass in the middle of the comic frame).  A menacing group of pencil drawn soldiers arrive to cast out the intruder, smashing the glass, and they run away. Just as they are trapped, Morten rips a hole in the paper wall for her to escape back to the real world, where she grabs the battered comic and runs home.  As she is sadly looking through the comic, a figure in one of the frames moves, and she turns to see Morten, half drawing, half real, in agony in the corridor behind her.  He bashes himself against the walls, driving the pencil lines from his body, and at the end of the video is crouching, exhausted but real, in her doorway.  They run to each other and hug as the video ends.

Awwww....

Tabouli

(who spent ten years of her life in love with a fictional character.  "Clovis, who has a father, said I fall in love easily --but only with unreal men -- because I didn't have a father", Chapter 1, The Silver Metal Lover.  Though I do, of course, have a father)


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