There's no end to the lengths I'll go

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

22/06/86 : Hunting High And Low - A-ha

I've never listened to this album - I liked the singles but never got round to listening to any more of it. However, having listened to their follow-up, I'm quite looking forward to it.

We start off, obviously, with "Take On Me" which is a fine track and what drew a lot of people in - but it's not actually all that representative of the album, which generally has a more downbeat feel to it in the style of "Hunting High And Low" and "The Sun Always Shines On TV". Both of which I've always really liked, so I'm pretty happy with what we've got here - Morten's got a nice mournful voice when he chooses to use it that way. All in all, it's an interesting album which sounds very much of its time, but hasn't dated - I liked it and at only 37:10, I could have done with some more of it. I'm not entirely sure too many people were crying out for the 41 track, 150 minute deluxe version though.

We're at #6 in the charts this week on their 34th week of an impressive 74 week run, with #2 being as high as it got - for five weeks, kept off the top by Brothers In Arms for the entire time. It also managed a three week run in '95 and a single week in '15 - I assume anniversary celebrations were responsible. The top five this week were Genesis, The Smiths (a new entry), Queen, Peter Gabriel and Simply Red and the next highest new entry is Sting (#17) with Bring On The Night, which is a live album featuring jazz-ish versions of some Police and solo tracks - which sounds like it should be absolutely dreadful, but I actually really like it and still have it on cassette somewhere.

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album (148 milliPeppers) but doesn't tell us an awful lot - it's their debut album and it all really took off because of the video for "Take On Me", which still looks pretty well done even now (except maybe for some of the outfits) and it recently hit two billion views on YouTube. The band was nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy award and as a result became the first Norwegian group to be nominated - I did a quick Google and the only other Norwegian group I'd ever heard of was Royksopp. The critics were nice about the album both at the time and in retrospective reviews - with one suggesting it guided Coldplay, which I'm not sure they'd agree with, but I can see the argument. Commercially, it did pretty well globally, getting to #1 in New Zealand, Sweden and (of course) Norway and a decent #15 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Kajagoogoo, Alphaville, Cyndi Lauper and Cutting Crew - a somewhat peculiar mix, but I can kinda see them all. This was an enjoyable first visit though, possibly the best of the year so far - 1986 has hit a good streak (and didn't it take its own sweet time about it?)

15/06/86 - A quite enjoyable not-my-kind-of-thing
29/06/86 - Yeah, I liked this