Steve Barron had a glimpse of the madness to come when hundreds of starry-eyed teenagers started laying siege to his flat in Notting Hill. “For A-Ha it went from zero to 100 overnight,” he remembers. “Morten Harket, the singer, used to come back and crash on my sofa. He’d hang out. And then you’d look outside and there would be all these teenage girls. He got a bit freaked out.”

Barron is responsible for some of the most memorable music videos of the 1980s: Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, Dire Straits’s Money For Nothing. The pop promo of which he is perhaps proudest is the one accompanying A-Ha’s 1985 pocket epic Take On Me. Yes, the video with the girl and the pencil-drawn bikers and Harket’s extraordinary cartoon hair. 

“There was a lot of madness and euphoria,” he says of its impact. “It happened so quickly for them. It was amazing.” 

The craziness had kicked in towards the end 1985. Six months before that, A-ha were unheard of. They’d moved to London from Norway and were so skint Harket recalls nearly passing out on several occasions due to hunger. Barron, then the golden boy of the pop promo, certainly didn’t know much about them when Warner Music boss Jeff Ayeroff got in touch from Los Angeles. 

A-Ha had, in October 1984, put out a catchy single called Take On Me. Yet, try as the label might, they couldn’t get any momentum behind it. MTV in particular had shown negligible interest in the video – a straightforward performance piece in which Harket threw big gooey eyes at the camera. Would Barron like to have go at re-doing it? He would have a free hand and a hefty budget. 

“It came together in a very strong way,” he recalls. “You’ve a gut feeling… ‘wow this could be something special’.” 

“Special” hardly begins to do it justice. Barron’s take on Take On Me turned A-Ha into overnight stars. It has remained beloved ever since. This week it achieved another milestone by becoming makes it only the third pre-1990s video to notch up over a billion views on YouTube.

Other members of the YouTube “Billion Club” include Gun ’n’ Roses with November Rain (the first video predating YouTube to reach the landmark), Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen and, erm, Numb by Linkin Park. 

There’s still plenty of room for improvement, however. Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You has 4.6 billion views (that’s a lot of bread for Ed) while Despacito, by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, holds the record at 6.6 billion. A-ha are in the foothills gazing up at Sheeran’s big red head.

Here is where I should probably describe in detail the Take On Me video. But is there really any need? You already know it beat by beat. Close your eyes and you can see Morten Harket, half man, half cartoon scribble, banging into the walls of a scruffy apartment block corridor as his love interest watches in anguish. 

As with all great Eighties pop videos Take On Me is conceptually ambitious and slightly ridiculous. In a grungy caff a young woman (model Bunty Bailey) with a busy haircut leafs through a comic book in which a handsome biker squares off against his villainous rivals. But then he’s looking at her, from out of the page. A hand emerges, beckoning her to follow. 

Were that to happen today, she’d probably put it on Instagram and then go back to taking photographs of her food. This, though, was the 1980s. Things were different. She accepts the invitation and is pulled into the comic book as Take On Me reaches its chorus. 

The couple are transformed into cartoons (using the venerable “rotoscope” technique by which animators draw over live footage). They dance, he shakes his very tall quiff and they are chased by his angry rival bikers, wielding scary wrenches. As this unfolds the waitress back in the caff crumples up the magazine and chucks it in the bin. Oh no! 

Obviously it takes more than a scrunched comic book to defeat true love. Harket helps his star-crossed new acquaintance escape. Back in reality, she retrieves the publication and pegs it to her flat. There she finds Harket screaming in the hall: half man, half charcoal etching. He fights off the demons and stands in front of her in all his young pop star glory (think James Dean mugged by a giant tub of Brycreem). You can watch it a hundred times – a billion times even – and still get goose-bumps. 

“When I was six years old I used to read lots of comic books,” says Barron, who went on to have a successful career directing hit movies such as the original 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Saturday Night Live spinoff Coneheads (1993) and now works in TV on dramas such as The Durrells.

“My idea for the video was that it was a comic book, there’s a girl, a love story across dimensions. And so I recalled a strip in The Beezer. There were side-car motorcycle racers. There are baddies and goodies. The baddies try to cheat. I sort of based it on that.” 

Barron had already acquired a reputation as a miracle worker. He’s turned po-faced synth moochers the Human League into pop stars and, in 1982, pulled off something nobody else would ever achieve in making Michael Jackson cool, with Billie Jean. Still, even he must have been surprised by the impact of his Take On Me video. When it hit the airwaves in October 1985 it transformed a flop single into an instant hit. Soon Take On Me had rocketed to number one in 15 territories, though not in the UK where it was held off the top of the charts by Jennifer Rush’s The Power of Love.

The Take On Me video took nearly six months to make, with the hand-drawn illustrations alone requiring four-months. The lead animator was Michael Patterson, a recent graduate from California Institute of the Arts. The rotoscoping technique was Barron’s idea. 

“Jeff Ayeroff introduced me to this animator who was out of college, Michael Patterson. Because it was rotoscoping you shoot everything first. I set about writing the concept. I was in New York making a video for Toto. I remember sitting in the hotel room thinking, ‘I’ve got to work on this A-ha video. How’s it going to work?". I had done a number of videos with effects. I thought if I could justify the effects in some way the result would be so much stronger. To have a concept rather than just the graphic quality.”

Most of the action was shot on a soundstage in London. The restaurant scenes were filmed at Kim's Café, today the Savoy Cafe, on Wandsworth Road. The lead villain was played by Alfie Curtis, who would work with Barron on subsequent projects including the movie Mike Bassett England Manager 

Rotoscoping was one of the magic ingredients Barron feels. It makes the animation urgent and alive – and unique too. “It was first done in 1916. You take a live action image and sketch over the outline frame by frame. It kind of disappeared for some reason. Disney came along with the cell animation style. So it felt like 'wow, I haven’t seen this before'. 

To this day, song and video are synonymous. It’s been referenced in movies such as Ready Player One and even by Donald Trump who last October put out a re-election video blatantly indebted to Take On Me (one crucial difference is that it doesn’t end with him snogging a tall-haired pop star from Aarhus). 

“It was their first single and it hadn’t worked. There had been a number of attempts,” he recollects “When I first met them there were young and fresh. They’d had these disappointments. It wasn’t quite happening. I met them in a youth hostel in Bayswater. They were all there on single beds. It was pre-fame, definitely pre-fame. They had no money. I sat down and explained my idea. They were totally up for it.” 

This was something of a gold star year for Barron. He went straight from Take On Me to directing the Money For Nothing video for Dire Straits (the one in which the CGI removal men watch Mark Knopfler on TV). Money For Nothing was a huge smash, too, and  named video of the year by MTV. Among the competition it saw off was Take On Me. 

“I didn’t connect with that song,” says Barron of Money For Nothing. “I love Dire Straits. Money for Nothing was a bit silly for me. I could see it was an opportunity. There was also a bit of a slagging off of boy-bands and music videos. I liked the irony. Mark Knopfler was the one who was saying this is not where music should be going. He was anti-music video.”

Barron was born in Dublin in 1956 and grew up in London, where he attended St Marylebone Grammar School. His first experience of the entertainment industry was as a clapper-loader on Richard Donner’s Superman, where his duties included loading raw film-stock into the cameras. He got into music when he became friendly with the mod band Secret Affair, directing their 1979 video Time For Action. 

The Jam and Adam Ant were among the artists with whom he worked in those early years. His big break came in 1981 with the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me. Barron drew on his love of Truffaut and the concept of a movie within a movie: highfalutin stuff when the pop video was still a rudimentary art. That caught the attention of Michael Jackson, who wanted the promo for his next single to have an element of “cinematic fantasy” 

“Doing Billie Jean, I found him really lovely and charming,” recalls Barron. “Very soft spoken. Almost shy. This was before Thriller had come out. When we did the video nobody had yet reacted to Thriller, nobody had heard it. So he was still super creative but not 100 per cent sure of his direction.” 

Strange as it may sound, there were budget issues which Jackson had to work around. Barron’s concept was for the singer to walk down a yellow brick road that lit up as he proceeded. Jackson had created a new dance routine which he didn’t want to rehearse, so as to keep things spontaneous. But because of cash limitations not all the flagstones would light if stepped upon. Barron had to take Jackson to one side and explain all this. 

“I was a bit embarrassed,” he says. “We couldn’t give him the freedom because of the concept and what we could afford with the paving stones. He brilliantly drew on this trepidation about what was going to happen and brought it into his dance. I remember looking through the camera and seeing this incredible thing.”

Jackson has since come to be regarded as a bit of an oddball – and that’s setting aside the child abuse allegations. How did Barron find him? “He seemed really natural. He was a very smart person. Just pretty soft-spoken. He wasn’t demonstrative. And he was a little childlike. Definitely childlike. But a smart-childlike.”

Barron took a break from music to shoot a movie, Electric Dreams, in 1984 (the one with the Phil Oakey song). It flopped in America and so he returned to videos. Straight away he scored a brace of era-defining hits with A-ha and Dire Straits. 

His love for storytelling on screen was rekindled when he met Jim Henson while directing the video for David Bowie’s Underground in 1986. The song is from the soundtrack to Henson’s Labyrinth. The video sees Bowie crooning in a darkened street as Henson’s puppets peer from the gloom. As with much of what Bowie did in the 1980s it is terrible but also somehow fantastic. 

“Bowie was wonderfully creative and light and sweet and excited,” says Barron. “I only worked with him for a few weeks and I remember thinking, ‘what a positive being”. He was really enjoying being surrounded by the animatronics and fantastical creatures.” 

Several years later, Barron found himself directing the big-screen version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He sought out Henson to assist with the creature designs (the remote-controlled turtle helmets kept breaking down). And he hired a young film editor named Sally Menke, later to collaborate extensively with Quentin Tarantino (prior to her death in 2010 at age 56). 

“I met Tarantino with her at the Baftas. He was so funny. He had told Uma Thurman that he’d got 'Sally' to edit for him. And she said, ‘who’s Sally?” He said, “Sally was the one who made [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle] Donatello fight. He was a bit obsessed with it.”

He remains friendly with A-ha and caught up with them the previous night at their concert in Cape Town (where, by sheer coincidence, he is directing David Tennant in Around the World in 80 Days for the BBC). The same isn’t true for Warners, with whom he has an ongoing difference of opinion regarding royalties. 

Barron would rather not talk about that. A cuddlier question, then. Is it true Harket and the Bunty Bailey were a real life couple? 

“She became his girlfriend on set,” he says. “I saw it happen. We went looking for someone with a good spirit, who wasn’t necessarily a trained actress and could dance a little. 

“I’m sure Morten wouldn’t mind me saying that he was naive about girls and things. He wasn’t that experienced in relationships. There was one scene where they were holding hands. We did about six takes. I suddenly looked around and they were holding hands off camera as well. I thought, ‘oh, of course’. Soon it was all over Smash Hits that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”