Songfacts®:

• This was the theme tune to the James Bond film The Living Daylights, which was Timothy Dalton's debut in his short reign as 007.
• A-ha were the last act to collaborate with score composer John Barry. The Norwegian pop group were hot at the time but they treated their role with cool disdain and the English composer did not see eye to eye with the young upstarts. Barry later compared working with them to "playing ping-pong with four balls."
• This reached #1 in a-ha's native Norway.
• A-ha do not have happy memories of working with John Barry on this song. Vocalist Morten Harket recalled to The Guardian in 2016: "He was not an easy guy to like, quite honestly. He was very strange in that he started to befriend us by talking bad about Duran Duran [who sang the previous Bond theme, "A View To A Kill"]. He made some degrading comments about them and what they'd been doing and that didn't sit well with any of us."
  
  He added: "Then he made some derogatory comments about women and it was all uncalled for. There will be people who knew him who will have a very different view of him. But he didn't go down well with us."
• Despite the band's tense relationship with the composer, a-ha guitarist Pal Waaktaar admitted he liked what Barry brought to the song, especially the "really cool string arrangement." He explained in a Bond music retrospective: "That's when it, for me, started to sound like a Bond thing."
• A-ha included a reworked version on their 1988 album, Stay On These Roads.