Hunting High And Low live in the Comic City of Leeds

Back in 2017, I went to my first ever Thought Bubble festival in Leeds, where I met Brian K Vaughan (WHO?)

Brian was kind enough to sign my first copy of Paper Girls...

You can see my snippet of Brian's talk here.

And Rick And Morty comics legend Marc Ellerby really wanted me to table with my A-ha themed comics :-)

So when A-ha included Leeds in the Hunting High And Low tour, and timed around the time for Thought Bubble, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity not only to see A-ha, but to table at Thought Bubble at the same time.

However, a couple of factors have spoilt this plan.

The first was the announcement of the festival being moved to Harrogate this year. The other was some unexpected and unfortunate financial issues caused by austerity, which meant that just to make it to see A-ha was much needed respite.

Commuter

For the opening of the gig, before A-ha themselves appeared on stage, the audience were treated to a showing of Commuter, the original animation that inspired the Take On Me video.

Someone sitting in a better seat than me took some footage of this. 

From this, the A-ha logo appeared...

Morten, Magne, Pal and the band appeared to a rapturous welcome, and went straight into Take On Me, with visuals from the video combined with live images c/o Stian Andersen for those of us unlucky enough to be sat too far away.

A-ha live in Leeds - Take On Me

 Here's the Making Of Take On Me

A-ha performed the rest of the Hunting High And Low album, with stunning visual accompaniment, with the band seemingly trapped in The Phantom Zone from Superman II for Dream Myself Alive (!) and some interesting new (old?) keyboard interpretations of the song by Mags.

The gig ended with the A-ha logo animated for us former graphic design students and illustrators.

Whilst in Leeds, although missing out on Thought Bubble, I dropped into Travelling Man and admired the rather epic effort that went into the Thought Bubble counter display, and bought the next edition of Paper Girls

Double your 80's comics vibes!