A-ha frontman Morten Harket has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease
MORTEN HARKET, THE frontman of synth-pop band A-ha, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
The 65-year-old's diagnosis was announced in
an article on the Norwegian band's website
, written by their biographer Jan Omdahl.
Omdahl said that he was asked to contribute the article to the band's website revealing Harket's condition after it was initially kept strictly private.
Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. It primarily affects movement but also impacts other bodily functions. There is no cure.
'It used to bother me to think about my sickness becoming public knowledge,' Harket is quoted as saying in the article. 'In the long run it bothers me more to have to protect something that is strictly a private matter by treating it as a secret.'
A-ha was formed in 1982 with Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy alongside Harket.
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The trio's most well-known hit is widely regarded as being 'Take On Me' from their 1985 debut album.
Norwegian pop group A-Ha in London,1985.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Now a father of five and a grandfather, Harket said of his condition: 'I've got no problem accepting the diagnosis. With time I've taken to heart my 94-year-old father's attitude to the way the organism gradually surrenders: 'I use whatever works''.
He has already undergone two successful neurological procedures to minimise in symptoms in the last year.
When asked by Omdahl if he could 'sing now at all', Morten replied that he didn't know.
''I don't really know. I don't feel like singing, and for me that's a sign. I'm broadminded in terms of what I think works; I don't expect to be able to achieve full technical control. The question is whether I can express myself with my voice. As things stand now, that's out of the question. But I don't know whether I'll be able to manage it at some point in the future.'
Harket said that he 'won't process' alternative theories and opinions from well-meaning individuals, saying that he is in the care of professionals.
To his fans, he said, 'Don't worry about me. Find out who you want to be – a process that can be new each and every day. Be good servants of nature, the very basis of our existence, and care for the environment while it is still possible to do so. Spend your energy and effort addressing real problems, and know that I am being taken care of.'
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He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring's Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now. 'His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip' – Mendez, novelist Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I'd found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that's not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day. 'He showed us what was really going on' – Tom Crewe, novelist Edmund White in New York City, 2000. Photograph: David Corio/MichaelEdmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the 'San Francisco look': A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume. But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic's outsize impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn't memorialise a lost Eden – 'Gay life,' White said, 'will never please an ideologue; it's too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.' At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered 'an unusual degree of integration with the straight community' worthy of remark: 'A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.' It's a reminder of how amazingly far we've travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn't think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-pend pointwas just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn't ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, 'is some give in the social machine'. 'His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour' – Seán Hewitt, writer Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy's Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White's camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him forever. White's books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference. In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: 'Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West's hit comedy Sex: 'She's flushin' my play down the terlet!''. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I'm grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page. – Guardian
