I don't abuse my body - I don't drink much alcohol, don't smoke and never have - but that's the same of many people. I don't think I've ever stopped ageing myself.
My brother was an avid Stoke City fan and a good footballer. We shared a room, growing up, and the walls were covered with 1970s Stoke players, like Peter Shilton, Gordon Banks, and Jimmy Greenhoff.
One of the good things about being away is to digest things and maybe learn from things and see if there are better ways to get to where you want to be.
We ceased to be a band the moment we made it. It left us with nothing. We felt like a failure although we had commercial success.
If I didn't travel so much, maybe my perfect Sunday would be skin diving on a coral reef - not scuba diving, as skin diving is more physical, and I prefer the lightness of it. Skin diving means wearing just goggles. Oh, I could wear some trunks, maybe.
We sent a guy called Terry Slater a couple of demos, using the last of our money. And then things turned. He landed us a deal with Warners and said just keep coming up with songs, because when success hits you, you won't even know your name.
The pin-up thing took us completely by surprise. I found it hard because I got singled out, and I didn't like it. There was a lot of disillusionment.
If looks help, that's great, but we don't want it to be the featured thing. It's totally superficial.
My younger brother was a big Stoke fan, and I was sucked into it. I was kind of waking up every morning and looking at Gordon Banks' face! We had all these small football cards - literally hundreds of them - and swapping them was the currency back then.
People think the chorus is the hard part in 'Take on Me,' but they're wrong. The hard part was making the verses bounce.
I didn't feel like I fitted in. I felt like I was a hindrance to A-ha.
We had to leave Norway and go where it was all happening, which was London. We loved it there, but it was hard. We had no money - we were literally starving. It started to get ugly.
When we were kids, Stoke was massive in Norway.
I grew up in a small mountain town in Norway, and I remember miming to the Beatles on the couch when I was about six, singing into a broomstick, but this was a country that only had one radio station. There was no music around, really.
I love just being in the sphere of nothingness looking inwards.
I had always wanted to make music on a big scale but never knew how it was going happen - until I saw a band in Oslo called Bridges. I was stunned. They had everything. The only thing they didn't have was me. I knew I needed to join, not for my own sake but for the band's. I knew I was a necessary ingredient.
We've never been very good at servicing fans. I'm here to concentrate on music, not to be a pen pal to people who write to me.
We wanted the freedom to be playful, to experiment and do what we felt like doing, but we were heavily affected by the success that the first record gave us.
