FAME AND FORTUNE

Magne ‘Mags’ Furuholmen: ‘I get £1m a year from A-ha, but I’m still a no-nonsense Norwegian’

Before making it big with the pop trio, the keyboard player slept on polystyrene sheets in a dingy recording studio and earned £1 an hour working in London pubs

Mags Furuholmen at the BMI awards in 2014
Mags Furuholmen at the BMI awards in 2014
ALAMY
The Sunday Times

Magne “Mags” Furuholmen is the keyboard player in A-ha, the Norwegian band that had seven UK Top Ten albums and hits including the 1985 No 1 The Sun Always Shines on TV and the 1987 James Bond theme tune The Living Daylights. A-Ha won eight MTV Video Music awards for Take on Me, a No 1 in America in 1985, and they set a world record in 1991 when they played for 198,000 in the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the largest paying audience in the world. This year they released the film and album True North. Now an artist as well as a musician, Magne, who was 60 last Tuesday, lives with his wife, Heidi, in Nesoya, Norway.

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