Report: Rockfeedback @ iTunes Festival Night 24 – A-Ha, 24/7/09
4/5
By: Chris Helsen
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This year, Rockfeedback is delighted to be the official blog partner for the rather exciting iTunes Festival, taking place at London’s Roundhouse every night in July. Over the course of the festival, we’ll not be missing a night, delivering morning-after reports on everyone from Oasis and Bloc Party to Franz Ferdinand and Kasabian playing intimate sets to fans lucky enough to have won tickets to the shows.
So this most eclectic of music festivals ends its third week of packed out shows at the Roundhouse with perhaps the most surprising name on the whole bill. ‘80s pop sensations A-Ha are back with their first album in four years and tonight Chalk Farm plays host to the ever youthful and impossibly chiselled Morten Harket and friends. Rumour has it that brand new album Foot of the Mountain is a return to the soaring synths and memorable choruses of their classic mid-‘80s pop pin-up period, and on the evidence of tonight it might just be.
With synths popping up (excuse the pun) where you least expect them these days, A-Ha seem to have picked the perfect time to re-pitch their Scando-pop to a new generation of UK fans (I don’t think the rest of Europe ever went off the idea), and from the opening bars of ‘The Sun Always Shines On TV’ – and the feverish screams from seemingly every female member of the audience that accompany them – any thoughts that A-Ha might be out of place among the many younger bands performing over these 31 nights are immediately dispelled. In fact, for an hour, the Norwegians give the increasingly impassioned crowd a masterpiece of a pop concert. Old favourites are mixed in good proportion with some of the new tracks, and the Foot Of The Mountain cuts do seem to fit in fairly seamlessly with the hits of yesteryear.
If there’s a benefit to every single new band in 2009 trying to rip off every last part of the 80s, it’s surely that it gives the people who got it right the first time round a chance to show what they can still do. A-Ha pretty much perfected the 80s pop thing, and from ’Cry Wolf’ to ‘The Living Daylights’ and its mass singalong, the old songs all still stand up, both through nostalgia and the fact that – for a few months at least – it’s actually ok (nay necessary) to like pop music right now. And in Morten Harket they still have a heartthrob frontman with an undeniably impressive voice, something he gets to show off during the mid-set, arm-sway-inducing balladeering, which includes a poignant acoustic version of ‘Hunting High And Low’ and proper clenched fist anthem ‘Stay On These Roads’.
And it’s not just Morten and the band who make an impression. The graphics, oh the graphics. Wow. If you could distil the phrase ‘so bad it’s good’ and transmit what resulted onto four giant video screens, surely this is what you would get. In what seems to be an attempt to actually bring shit 80s graphics into line with 21st century technology, each song is illustrated with its own computer-generated literal backdrop. ‘Cry Wolf’ has a spooky, bat infested forest, ‘Manhattan Skyline’ has a faux helicopter ride through New York skyscrapers, and several have their own firework display to celebrate their respective soaring choruses. It’s fun, but also the one area in which nostalgia threatens to slip into a little bit of embarrassment.
Of course, despite the many other hits, A-Ha are a band that will always be defined by one song – one video even – and, second only to the fervour that fills the pregnant minutes before the inevitable encore, the biggest cheer of the night unsurprisingly comes when the opening drum beat of ‘Take on Me’ reverberates through the venue. Five minutes of singing every word later and the night is over, with the crowd just about sated but with the definite feeling that somehow it was all over a bit quickly. Whether the new album is successful or not, A-Ha have in their possession – and can still do justice to – an array of effortless pop music that twenty of today’s breed of synth-loving bands will do mighty well to match between them.
Artists in this article: A-Ha
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