I’m actually Margaret too…it’s my proper name, but I’ve always been known as Marjorie which is a Scottish derivative of Margaret…which I have shortened to Marje.

@Marionville Of course, not all Margaret's are the same. I'm Jack, think of all the scofflaws in history with that name.

Take On Me is still being played on airwaves on the radio, in TV, in Films, and is used in Video Games. It gets around 500,000 hits a day on IPlayer and, a similar number on Spotify…and it will be 40 years old in 2025. By that time it will have far exceeded 2 Billion views on YouTube where it garners on average around 700,000 views per day and currently stands at 1.79 Billion. The problem for a-ha is that it has overshadowed everything else that the band have ever done…even though it is not by any means their best composition musically speaking. If it hadn’t been their first hit song it wouldn’t have had the same distorting effect on the complete body of their work the way it has. For a long time they resented the fact that it is so massive a success that people only want to talk about it, as though they never released 11 studio albums with many other great hit songs on rhem. Now they’re completely relaxed about TOM and jokingly say it lives a life of its own outwith their control, and has proved to be much better at being a pop star than the 3 band members themselves who were always pretty cheesed off at being written off as a pop band for teenage girls, when they wanted to be regarded as serious musicians who composed and performed their own original material. It is of course a nice little earner for the 3 guys…Magne said in an interview that TOM earned him 1million pounds a year, and I presume the same amount goes to the other 2 as it was a 3-way co-write.

@Marionville & guess what? I'm not one of the 1.79 billion who have heard it. Incidentally has it been covered by other performers or is it exclusively a-ha?

@FrayedBear It’s been covered by quite a few…AI who were a British/Norwegian boy band also had a hit with it in 2000…it reached #1 in the U.K.

@Marionville if covered by others it becomes eligible for folk music status. Even better if it gets amended for local conditions or slants.

@FrayedBear It’s already been given the folk treatment, rock treatment, heavy metal treatment, ska, punk, classical, orchestral and choral treatment. It’s also been parodied, sampled & copied by people like Jim Carey, Madonna, Pitbull, Christina Aguilera, The Weeknd and Harry Styles. The band themselves refashioned the song into a slowed down acoustic version in 2017 which was included in the soundtrack of the blockbuster movie Deadpool 2 in 2018.
Here is an American group callled Boyce Avenue doing their acoustic interpretation of the song….

Yes…he certainly did…we had that recording at home when I was growing up.