MAGNE FURUHOLMEN. POPSTAR. AGAIN. (2000)

The painter Magne Furuholmen is back to where he started: a pop star! He is the quiet one in a-ha - even more quiet than Paul Waaktaar. Or is he?
He isn`t so very quiet as he has led us to believe. The day after the Spellemann-awards at the end of February, he ended up in hospital, where they had to press the restart-button on his heart with full anesthesia and electroshock. Right now he seems - excuse the expression - fully recharged. Here he sits in a hotel room at Grand Hotel giving an interview - not his favourite hobby. That`s why he calls it "to give" an interview. "Well, you don`t get anything in return." says Furuholmen. He is a verbal person and is effortlessly using English phrases when Norwegian does not quite express what he wishes to say.. And he is not quiet at all. And unfavourite hobby or not, during the next months he will be extensively interviewed in connection with the attempts to bring the biggest Norwegian pop-success onto the scene of pop again, with the album "Minor Earth | Major Sky" launched in April in Paris. "I see the promotion as a pure working day. When you have invested so much hope and so many dreamsin a project, it doesn't seem fair unless we give it our maximum attention. It`s important to me that the audience get to hear the music. And that`s important to the audience too. "There is no room for modesty." Yes, it seems he is. Because when Magne Furuholmen, after a-ha`s last album "Memorial Beach" in 1993, became a full-time painter, and debuted [sic] with an exhibition at the Henie-Onstad Art center, he received the following review from the art-historian Oyvind Storm Bjerke: "Magne Furuholmen is refreshingly nonabrasive, and lacking an oh-so-Norwegian vice of modesty." Not modest and not quiet. So he willingly answers us when we ask for a guided tour of a-ha`s past and future. - What was the original idea behind a-ha when you started out- ideological world dominion or just making money and meeting girls?
"After a Rock Against Drugs-concert in Asker in the very beginning with the band Bridges, Paul and I were quoted by Asker og Bærums Budstikke [local newspaper] by saying that we were going to England to become bigger than The Beatles. We put ourselves in a situation where it was impossible to back out, and I am not sure if we had a principal idea. At least making money and meeting girls was way down the list. A-ha`s stay in London is already pop-history, but it is perhaps more unknown that Magne and Paul almost chose an English harpist to be the frontman of the band. Unfortunately - or perhaps luckily - the harpist was more interested in playing guitar, and so they agreed to give up on that idea.
Not much happened during their first stay in London, except that Magne and Paul moved into increasingly worse apartments, that the record company Decca at regular intervals repeated that they were rather uninterested, and that the guys kept the spirit by cheering: "Wow, the same thing happened to The Beatles!" "After we [Bridges] had performed at NM i rock [the Norwegian rock-championship], this guy, Morten Harket, came over to us and said: "You are the best band in Norway, but you need a vocalist." That wasn`t exactly what Paul, who was singing at that time, needed to hear. But there was something about this guy..." And so Morten came with them on the next trip to London, and once of a sudden Decca weren`t "rather uninterested" anymore. The keyword was Take on Me. "Which isn`t clumsy Norwegian-English for "take on me", as some Norwegians thought" Magne explains. And we`re hoping that he will also explain to us, like John Lennon did with the Beatles-songs in the famous Playboy-interview, who in the band that originally wrote "Take on Me". "It`s probably correct as it says on the cover, that it was all three of us. But I wrote the well-known opening-riff already when I was 14 years old, in the bombproof cellar where I used to rehearse. We called the song "The Juicy Fruit Song" in the beginning, kind of contemptuously. The song went through several stages, and at one time we proposed to Decca that it should be called "Kykeliky" ["Cock-a-doodle-doo"]. They thought it was a bad idea. They were right." They probably were. "Take on (Kykeliky) Me" sold directly and indirectly ten million albums for a-ha, and made the three guys make millions. So many that it hardly can be the money that make them risk their reputation by trying to do a comeback fifteen years after "Take on Me". Or? "This time it`s actually just to make money and meet girls." He smiles wryly. Popstar-irony. - But on a scale from one to six, how glad are you that a-ha are back together? "Right now I`m 100 % comfortable with it. We`ve had a tendecy to make a big fuzz about small things, and I guess that I earlier was more ambivalent to the idea of us getting back together again. But things start happening when we are together. It`s a special chemistry which, when it`s not treathening to destroy everything on the inside and on the outside, makes one and one and one become more than three. I had spent several years keeping a low profile and doing frequent exhibitions, to get rid of the image as a-ha-Magne. But I now realize that it was just vanity that made me think like that. You just have to do what you feel like doing." - What`s it going to be with that throw of the dice? "Oh, I didn`t know you were like that." - Come on. "For me, a dice usually just has two different sides - one or six. That`s why I`ll say six." Outside the window, in Karl Johan`s street, a nasal voice comes from a loud-speaker. It`s cross-country world cup, from Stortinget [the Parliament] to the royal castle and back. At least. And in this strange country, thousands of people are gathering to see one of the world`s least popular sports. "Norway and Norwegians are very focused on being a Norwegian" Magne Furuholmen says, and makes his own version of an often used expression: "It`s typical Norwegian to be a Norwegian". - And maybe you sometimes felt that the Norwegian media forgot the music, and instead focused on a-ha as athletes with the Norwegian flag on their chest, who competed in a sport called pop? "Well, I do see that music journalists promote things they don`t personally like, as long as it is successfull. I personally refuse to respect anything based on that. I sense that the critics give good reviews to things they think will be a hit, but at the same time they make sure to say that they don`t like the music. I don`t like that kind of behaviour." - Speaking of old-fashioned and the media - you have been together with the same girl, the girlfriend from your youth, Heidi, through a long pop-career, and it seems that you`ve never given the tabloids a chance to link you with other women.
Isn`t Magne Furuholmen aware of what he has got to do to maintain his reputation as a popstar? "I haven`t thought of it in that way. It`s probably pure egoism from my side, because of a wish to still be appreciated by the person I love the most in this world. In addition, the idol-worshipping of a-ha was to a great extent very surreal, it didn`t have anything to do with you as a person, but as a concept. And I had a relaxed attitude towards the idea of me being a pop-idol. OK, I screwed up once, when I pretended to have a date with Miss Brazil to confuse Morten, who was always very quick making eye-contact with other girls and such. It has to be said that I brought my bodyguard with me, as a chaperon and witness that everything had been done in a decent way, but the biggest mistake was that I told it to Heidi later, and I thought that she would find it a funny story too. I guess I was a bit wrong on thinking that way..." - Would you want a popstar-career for one of your two sons? "When I grew up, my mother used to say that I could do anything I wanted, as long as it made me happy. I wouldn`t wish for anyone to go through the same things I have done. But if you feel that you have to, that you have no choice, then you`ll do it, no matter what." Such as travelling around the world to answer the same questions for months. He tells me more about his heart problems. He is not quiet.

[Translation by Jakob Sekse and Ingerid White]