A Ha

Manchester Apollo

Friday 11 October 2002

This might seem an odd inclusion in my list of concerts - all pop and girlie so you might think, nothing for a proper rock fan to be interested in. But that would be a mistake, because although A Ha did have a great female following (many of them were here tonight, well into their thirties) and although they did have a number of big chart successes, they are very definitely rock based. When I think of A Ha, I always think also of a virtually now unknown Canadian group called Saga, who were out at the same time as A Ha and used to be regularly in Kerrang. The instrumentation and production were exactly the same as A Ha, and the songs were remarkably similar, but where Saga made concept albums with ten minute tracks telling stories about witches and wizards, A Ha were "lookers" and produced shorter love songs which were guaranteed to appeal to teenage girls rather than sad blokes in their mid twenties. Sadly, Saga disappeared without trace and the albums I owned have gone the same way, whereas I have downloaded A Ha's greatest hits and made a CD, which is proudly played. I thus had no qualms of conscience about going to this concert, along with eighties pop enthusiast Mr Mark Ernest Gut (of Wigan LVO). Although A Ha are starting to get on in years they obviously still appeal to the littil beauties, witness the many screams and calls for Morten to get his kit out etc. As there were plenty of littil beauties there, there were also plenty of alternative sights for Mr Gut and I to feast our eyes on. The concert was as you would expect, very professional and with an excellent selection of material, some new stuff but with a healthy bias towards the classic stuff. It was louder than I expected, but perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised bearing in mind what I said above about their rock credentials. My favourite A Ha track is "Manhattan Skyline" which has a real bone crunching guitar riff that wouldn't feel out of place at an AC/DC concert. I had doubts that due to political correctness in the aftermath of 9/11 it might not be played, but fear not, it came up early doors and I was hard put to not to get my old air guitar out. The problem was that this meant that they peaked too early, because it was obvious that stuff like "Sun Always Shines On TV"  etc was going to be brought out at encore time. Therefore it started to get a little tedious for me, but only a minor complaint. I enjoyed watching the Greatest Hits on a video purchased later, but this was later sensibly given as a Xmas present to a female acquaintance who was a fan of them in their heyday but somehow didn't materialise at the concert. (28.10.03)