Picture by Jakob

Morten was a guest on Richard Green’s show on BBC Radio Devon today. The interview is available here (starts at 23 minutes).

Among the topics discussed was next year’s summer tour/world tour. As we learnt several months ago, a-ha is planning to go on the road again next summer with a full electric band, starting in the UK in June 2018 before continuing through mainland Europe, the USA and South America.

Although only four outdoor concerts in Norway have been announced so far, a-ha manager Harald Wiik said there will be 30-40 concerts in total. Later reports have mentioned as many as 60 concerts.

When asked about returning to the UK for more gigs next summer, Morten says:

“I believe, from where I stand now, that it will be more outdoor venue influenced. It’s not gonna be like the [Cast in Steel] tour, for instance. It will have elements of that, I think. I can’t promise that, but it’s what I think today. It will have elements, to an extent, from the Giske sessions, to create the dynamics that we would want. Certain songs might work in outdoor arenas, based on what we did in Giske, but only some of them would work that way. Then certain songs work by far best the way we have normally set it up with our full electronic stuff. And then certain songs will come to their form in a sort of analogue type of live playing. Sometimes we’ve played to synthesizers and computers, so it’s a mix of our live playing against the computers, that’s partly a-ha’s music. And some will be like that, some will be maybe all analogue and some will be stripped. I think it will be a mix.”

Planning such a major tour has raised questions if the band might be aiming to release a new studio album before next summer, but that will not be the case, according to Morten:

“Not an a-ha album, [that’s] not planned. But we have plans in that we’re now releasing this album from Giske, which leads on to the acoustic tour in January and February. And then we go into rehearsals and planning of the shows in the summer later on. So that will take us through most of next year. But the autumn is fairly open. And then there are other plans, there are a lot of offers for the band. But we have no concrete plans for a studio album.”

There are also no immediate plans for another solo album, he says:

“It would be wrong for me to make plans for my own stuff now, but there is a lot of stuff that is available and ready to be responded to, whenever it opens up for that.”

Earlier in the week, on Monday, Morten and Magne were guests on Becky Want’s show on BBC Radio Manchester. That interview is available here (starts at 1:45:30).