The Sun Always Shines on T.V.

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.[4]

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. The oboe during the song was played by Clare Jarvis.

"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 recognisable 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".[5][6]

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.[7]

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.[8]

The Victorian Gothic St Alban's Church, Teddington

The music video for "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." was directed by Steve Barron and was shot on location over three days early October 1985 at Udney Hall Gardens and the Victorian Gothic Church of Saint Alban the Martyr, both situated in Teddington, Richmond upon Thames, in England.[9]

The video opens with a short sequence which forms an epilogue to the video for "Take On Me", the band's previous single, 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 the woods at night. Suddenly the young man begins physically reverting to his original animated state seen in the "Take on Me" video. 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. 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 animated television graphic which reads "you are watching channel 3" and the A-ha logo.[10]

The main sequence of the video consists of A-ha performing "The Sun Always Shines on T.V.", supplemented by session drummer Lindsay Elliott,[9] and a bass player,[11] inside a Gothic church, filmed mainly in black-and-white with splashes of pastel coloring. Spectating at the performance is a dense crowd throughout the church of bare mannequins, some 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".

A-ha performed this song at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 1998 alongside the new song "Summer Moved On."[7]

A live version of "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." was the only single released from the 2003 A-ha album How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head, the music video for it being directed by Pal Waaktaar's wife Lauren Savoy.

U2 stated that "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." heavily influenced the composition of their 2000 single release, "Beautiful Day."[13] Bono paid tribute to it by combining the two songs together at a concert in Oslo, Norway, in 2005.[14]

Before U2, indie-pop band The Beloved, in 1987, used a part of the chorus lyrics in their own song, "Please Understand", which should have been on their first album, finally aborted. The song is available on YouTube.

"The Sun Always Shines on T.V."
Single by Diva
from the album Compromise
B-side	"Remix"
Released	1994
Length	4:58
Label	PolyGram
Songwriter(s)	Paul Waaktaar-Savoy
Producer(s)	Ole Evenrud G. O. Bøkestad
Diva singles chronology
"The Sun Always Shines on T.V." (1994) "Stand and Deliver" (1995)
Music video
"The Sun Always Shines on T.V." on YouTube

A cover version of "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." was released 1994 single by Norwegian Eurodance group Diva, consisting of the singers Helene Sommer and Elene Nyborg.[47] It is a cover of the 1985 single by Norwegian band A-ha. The song reached number 9 on the charts in Norway.[48] In 1995 it reached number 53 on the charts in UK.[49] A music video was made to promote the song, directed by Lauren Waaktaar-Savoy. The video was banned by Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK; they found the video too controversial. A new video was made for the UK version. This version received remixes from the Perfecto crew (Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne).

• Interactive covered the track in a single released in 1996.
• In 2003, Milk Inc. released a cover of the song which charted at No. 2 in the Belgian Dance Chart.
• In Strict Confidence covered the song in a single release in 2005.
• Norwegian metal band Susperia included a cover on their 2005 EP Devil May Care.
• Danish metal band Meridian released a cover in June 2020 from forthcoming EP "Taking Cover"[55][56]

• The Sun Always Shines on T.V. official video on YouTube