A-ha "The Sun Always Shine On T.V."

"The Sun Always Shines on T.V." is a song by Norwegian pop rock band A-ha. The song was written by guitarist Pål Waaktaar. It was released as the third single from their debut studio album Hunting High and Low (1985). In some commercial markets the single was not as popular as their previous (debut) single "Take On Me", which had achieved #1 in the United States and several other countries around the world, but in the United Kingdom, and Ireland, it improved upon the #2 charting of "Take On Me", reaching #1 on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in January 1986, having been released there on 16 December 1985. Its success secured for the band the prestige of having achieved #1 single status in both the primary Anglo-American popular music charts on either side of the Atlantic.

The song was re-released by the band as a live version in 2003 with some minor success in Eastern Europe. It has sold over 5 million copies worldwide.

The band's Paul Waaktaar-Savoy said,

… we wrote "The Sun Always Shines On T.V.," that Andrew Wickham's secretary felt was a hit. She convinced him to make room for it. When we recorded it, we were really sick with influenza. Magne and Morten were lying in the studio on camping beds with high fevers.

Waaktaar-Savoy wrote and composed the complete drum track for this song.


The bass line for the song was performed using a Yamaha DX7. Other synthesizers include PPG Wave, Roland Juno-60 and sampled instruments such as the oboe during the introduction.

"The Sun Always Shines on T.V." was released in autumn 1985, becoming the second successful single from Hunting High and Low and one of the band's most recognizable and popular songs. The song peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also went Top 5 in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, as well as in the band's home country of Norway. The single reached number one in Ireland and on the British Singles Chart which was a higher chart position there than for "Take On Me".

Tim DeGravine of Allmusic later wrote of the song,

"The Sun Always Shines on T.V." is just as thrilling [as "Take on Me"]. Starting as a sad ballad, it explodes into something much more, as chugging guitars and operatic synths keep pace with Harket's evocative vocal stylings. If ever a 1980s song qualified as Wall of Sound, "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." would be it.

None of the versions released on the single were available on the band's album. The single mix was shortened down to 4:30, while the 12" featured an extended mix and instrumental version mixed by Steve Thompson. The b-side, "Driftwood" is a non-album track produced by the band.


There are two versions of the extended mix. The first UK release is 7:09, it starts with a slow piano intro, while the second one is the commonly known remix by Steve Thompson.

In early October 1985, A-ha recorded the video for "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." (using the shorter single version) at Saint Alban the Martyr Church and Udney Hall Gardens at Teddington, Middlesex, in England over three days with the director Steve Barron.

The video opens with an epilogue to the highly successful video for "Take On Me", continuing with the use of rotoscoped animation. The young lovers (played by Morten Harket and Bunty Bailey), having survived the ordeal of the story in the first video, now face one another in a wood at night. Suddenly the young man begins physically reverting to his original animated state from the storyline of the video for "Take on Me". The young woman, distressed, realizes that he cannot remain in her world. In pain, he flees the scene into the distance back to his comic-book world, and she is left behind. At this point the camera rises away from her and closing credits roll in the style of the end of a Hollywood classic film, stating The End, A Warner Bros. First National Picture, followed by an animation of a television graphic with the text: you are watching channel 3, followed by the A-ha stylized brand logo.

The next scene opens on A-ha performing "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." (with a session drummer (Lindsay Elliot) and a bass player also being present) within the dramatic setting of the interior of a deconsecrated English Victorian Gothic church. The performance is filmed mainly in black-and-white footage, with splashes of pastel coloring; spectating at the performance is a dense crowd throughout the church of bare mannequins, some being clothed in formal concert dress holding musical instruments to represent the song's classical instrumentation arrangement. The video ends with A-ha being cut out from the background and becoming a still frame.


The music video for the band's next single, "Train of Thought", would pick up from this cue shot, making a visual & story trilogy of "Take On Me", "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." and "Train of Thought".