a-ha under the Shoreham flyover: the making of “Butterfly, Butterfly” and the road from “Take On Me”

The last hurrah: “Butterfly, Butterfly” (2010)

In October 2009 a-ha announced that they would stop at the end of 2010, after one last world tour, Ending on a High Note. Their parting single, “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”, had its world premiere on 14 June 2010, and a month later the three came to England to film its video.

For it they went back to the man who had made their name. Steve Barron had directed seven of a-ha’s early videos, “Take On Me” among them, and he set the band under the Adur flyover at Shoreham, among the curving concrete slip roads, with images from the videos they had made together in the 1980s woven through the film. It premiered online on 13 August 2010, and four months later, on 4 December, a-ha played their final concert at the Oslo Spektrum.

The making of the video

a-ha’s own behind-the-scenes film takes you onto the set under the flyover, with short interviews with Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy.

The location is a piece of Shoreham history in its own right. The Adur flyover was built at the end of the 1960s as part of the new A27, with a cloverleaf junction and a long bridge over the river; when it opened, the old wooden toll bridge a mile downstream at Old Shoreham closed to road traffic. Local historians remember it as the backdrop for a-ha’s last video.

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From Oslo to London

a-ha’s story runs through England. Pål Waaktaar (today Paul Waaktaar-Savoy) and Magne Furuholmen first came to London from Norway in 1982, hoping to break into the British music business. After six months they went home, where in September 1982 they joined forces with the singer Morten Harket. In January 1983 Morten and Pål were back in London, and by late March all three were there for good, sharing, as Pål has put it, “the same tiny apartment in London”.

They found a small studio in South London, Rendezvous, run by John Ratcliff, who quickly saw the band’s potential. They recorded there on and off from April 1983 to October 1984, played showcases at the studio for record labels in June 1983, and signed to Warner Brothers that December. London became a second home: they made later albums in the city, filmed videos across it, from Teddington to the Docklands and Abbey Mills, and in October 2010, in their farewell year, played their whole first album at the Royal Albert Hall.

“Take On Me” (1985)

The song began life as “Lesson One”, first taped in Norway in late 1982 and demoed at Rendezvous in the summer of 1983. The first released version, produced by Tony Mansfield, came out on 19 October 1984 and sold, by the band’s own account, just 300 copies. a-ha were sure it was the right song, so it was re-recorded with the producer Alan Tarney, and the new version came out in April 1985.

Then came the video. Steve Barron filmed the band in live action, and the animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger drew over it frame by frame, so that a pencil-sketch Morten reaches out of a comic book and pulls a reader into his world. Shown first on American television in May 1985, it carried the song to number one on the Billboard chart in October; reissued in Britain in September, it reached number two. At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards it won six awards, and on a-ha’s official channel it passed two billion views in September 2024.

Steve Barron, the director

Steve Barron was one of the directors who invented the music video as we know it. He made his first promo, for The Jam, in 1979, and with his company Limelight went on to film The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”. In 1984 he directed his first feature film, Electric Dreams, and later Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Coneheads.

With a-ha he made, in his own words, “their first seven or eight” videos, among them “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.”, filmed at Teddington on 9 October 1985, the very evening the band heard that “Take On Me” would be number one in America. It became their first British number one. Twenty-five years later, “Butterfly, Butterfly” brought him back to music videos, and back to a-ha.

“The Living Daylights” (1987)

In 1987 a-ha sang the title song for the James Bond film The Living Daylights, written by Pål Waaktaar with John Barry, the composer behind so many Bond scores. It reached number five in Britain. The band later recorded their own version for their third album, Stay on These Roads.

The original 1987 promo is not on a-ha’s official channel, so here is the song as they played it at their final concert in Oslo in December 2010, the farewell that “Butterfly, Butterfly” was made for.

“Stay on These Roads” (1988)

The title song of their third album is one of a-ha’s great ballads. It reached number five in Britain in the spring of 1988, as the band set out on a world tour that began and ended in the UK.

“Summer Moved On” (2000)

After 1994 the three went their separate ways. In the summer of 1998 they were asked to play the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo; they met again, recorded a new song, “Summer Moved On”, that November, announced a new album and tour, and on 11 December 1998 played the song on the Nobel stage to an overwhelming response. In March 2000 they filmed the song’s video in Cádiz, in southern Spain, with the director Adam Berg.

“Forever Not Yours” (2002)

From the album Lifelines, “Forever Not Yours” premiered on a-ha.com in February 2002, and four days later the band filmed its video with the Norwegian director Harald Zwart. Watch closely: the guests arriving at the VIP area include look-alikes of some very famous faces.

“Foot of the Mountain” (2009)

a-ha surprised their fans by putting “Foot of the Mountain” online on 24 April 2009, just hours after the song was finished. The video, made in Germany with the director Olaf Heine, was filmed in Berlin and along the Baltic coast, and the song became the theme of the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in Berlin. The album reached number five in Britain; that October, the band announced that 2010 would be their last year.

Seeing the flyover today

a-ha did not stay away for good: in 2015 they announced a new album, Cast in Steel, and in February 2018 they ended their MTV Unplugged tour at the O2 in London. The flyover is still there, carrying the A27 over the Adur between the South Downs and the sea, and the river below it, with its salt marsh and the Downs beyond, is one of the loveliest corners of the coast. Shoreham is about 15 minutes west of Brighton by train.

Our advice: start at the old toll bridge at Old Shoreham, look upriver to the flyover with the Downs behind, then walk down into Shoreham itself; our Shoreham and Worthing guides have the places we recommend.

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