Robbed hit of the week 4/27/15 - a-ha's "Cry Wolf"...

"Cry Wolf" - a-ha
from the album Scoundrel Days (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #50

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the Norwegian new wave trio a-ha, who broke big around the world and in America with their debut album Hunting High and Low, which scored them a #1 hit with "Take On Me" and a top-20 follow-up with "The Sun Always Shines On T.V." in 1985. The following year the band released their second album Scoundrel Days, which expanded on their sound and was a big hit around the world. The first single from the record, "I've Been Losing You" (my personal favorite song of theirs), went to #1 in their homeland and top ten in Britain and Ireland. The second single, "Cry Wolf", was carried by a chorus punctuated by lead singer Morten Hacket's cool howl and Bond-like synth riffs (which would come in handy later), and the video was just as high-tech as their iconic "Take On Me" clip...

"Cry Wolf" made it to the halfway mark on the American pop chart in March of 1987, while climbing to #14 on Billboard's Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the track went to #5 in the UK, #2 in their native Norway, #4 in Ireland, and top-40 in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

The band was then contracted to provide the theme to the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and the results were a worldwide success but a miss completely on the American chart. In Europe, a-ha continued to sell massive, including hitting the top-10 in England as recently as 2006 with "Analogue (All I Want)".

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Here's the band performing to a horde of rabid female fans in 1987...

The trio at the peak of their worldwide success (and hotness) in 1989 in Rio..

 ..and again on tour in 2009...

...and lastly, with the Oslo Philharmonic at Royal Albert Hall in London in 2010...