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SØRLANDET (VG) - "Of course one can admire the body of a woman without insulting her," says Morten Harket just before he smiles to the waitress who happily carries the entrecôte all the way to back corner of Lyngrillen (The Lightning Grill) in Fiane.

She tries to suppress a spreading smile and blushes becomingly while hurrying to get some tableware she forgot to bring with her from the tray by the cash register.

"She knows she is a girl," announces Morten.

On the door outside hangs a sign announcing the fact that 'Kjell Elvis' will be appearing here soon. Morten Harket was hungry after several hours on E18 (a major highway that unites Oslo and Kristiansand), and arrives at Lyngrillen first.

"Girls give me energy," he says. "And it's not about sex. Their essence has a positive effect on me."

It is 18 years since Take on me, plus one marriage, several stormy affairs, and four children since Morten Harket from Asker became Norway's first and largest world-reknown pop star.

At the age of 43 he has a new baby with his cohabitor, Anne Mette Undlien, and has released a new record with a-ha. The live album rounds off something that has been.

The little girl is the beginning of something new.

"I've grown older, but so has the rest of the world. And I am in better shape," says Morten. Even though this is said with an ironic undertone, it is of course true - in several ways.

"Is it OK that women also objectify you without you taking it as an infringement on your personae?"

"Yes, naturally. They have a right to do that. And they do."

"You become a compensation for their dreams and an object for their fantasies?"

"Or only a very small acknowledgement that there is life out there. But that which is interesting about this is that I go around with the same crushes myself. I can have little affairs (of the mind) with someone I see out there in the crowd."

"From the stage?"

"Absolutely. Or somewhere else - when someone is just passing by. It is the character of a girl that I can be moved by. I am also only just a person in the middle of all this. But I have at the same time a devil-may-care outlook and lack of respect for limits that is the reason it is precisely me that is playing the role of a pop star."

He peers through the narrow frames of his glasses. We are on our way to his cabin in Sørlandet - a beautiful piece of property, but an unpretentious place without indoor plumbing or electricity.

Unlike a pop star, but in absolute keeping with the guy who for the past few days has restricted his morning toilet to two handfuls of water onto his idolized face, he tells me about some earthshaking occurrences that have enriched his life.

Morten Harket is a man full of curiousity and passion - a tightrope walker in constant struggle with chaos and control.

He can be interpreted as an extremely conservative missionary, yet at the same time a visionary idealist. And he is constantly in a rush.

"We must have spelt bread!" exclaims Morten into the dashboard on the Mercedes.

He hasn't eaten wheat or potatoes since the recording of the video for Summer Moved On nearly four years ago because he says it steals energy and makes him sluggish and dull.

Anne Mette bakes bread with "spelt" instead of wheat flour and Morten explains how the dough 'cold' rises overnight, and must be kept so wet that it is poured into its loaf pans for optimal results. "With all due respect to Fedon Lindberg - Anne Mette beats his bread by several points."

We have already picked up one of his Swiss espresso machines at his parents' house so that Morten can perform 'bar art' with the gas-powered machine in order to "create small moments."

"Believe me, it is worth it," he says and calls Anne Mette, who sends two loaves of newly baked bread by Ekspressgods from Oslo to Kristiansand so that we can have it for breakfast tomorrow.

"You can choose if you want to have the body and abilities of a 25-year-old for 25 more years, at least. That applies to your mind, as well."

"You must poke the fire a little - be aware and playful. It is exactly that which decides how youthful you remain," he says.

"Look at a 40-year-old (for example) that suddenly falls in love. Love stimulates so much in the body: Everything tastes better, smells better, one sees more clearly - everything inside of you wakes up. One becomes more lively, more playful."

"Now you are speaking from personal experience?"

"Yes, actually; but it is a fact. And it means of course that ways can be found to stimulate the body and mind."

Almost five years ago rumors flew that he had crashed on this same highway to Sørlandet with Lene Nystrøm on the back of a motorcycle. They are supposed to have had an intense and passionate love affair.

Now it has been more than four years since he met Anne Mette Undlien, a sweet and natural Roufoss girl with a track and field background that takes part in all of Morten's pleasures and whims.

"Those four years have flown by," he smiles.

Morten calls himself a vagabond and chuckles over the descrption. He switches between nearly reactionary conservativism to rebellious anarchy in arguments over everything from Norwegians' fear of foreigners, to the war in Iraq, to the copyright problem in the recording industry.

"Bush and Blair have taken a big moral risk, but I believe they have done the only right thing. The war was probably not avoidable; it would have come sooner or later," says Morten. He believes Norway is in need of sincere open debate on the handling of important but unpopular problems.

"There are many actions I don't take because I am not interested in getting involved with the process of what needs to be done in order to accomplish anything. In Norway we long ago stopped an effective debate on the issue of abortion. The same applies to the European Union, immigration politics, gene manipulation, and sexual descrimination."

"Where do you stand on the abortion issue, then?"

"I observe that society has chosen to distance itself from the problem by saying, 'It is a responsibility the woman must take alone.' This is presented as the conclusion in the attempt to solve a matter that is insolvable. It becomes the woman's right, but I read in that that it is the woman's responsibility."

"You are in principal against abortion?"

"I cannot see that we can give ourselves the right to take life in that way. I don't understand how a person cannot distinguish between a woman's body and a completely new individual's body."

"What will be history's judgement of a society that accepts the taking of the its unborn lives to this extent?"

The wind drives the fog in over the archipelago, but the sun wins the first round. He halfway lies in the chair with his back to the sea as his image mirrors iconically onto the window pane.

Morten emphasizes that it is not women, but society's responsibility and men's behavior he is attacking. "90% of all career women carry a sorrow inside themselves because they also want something else," he says.

"Men and women are very different and represent a rich spectrum of joint activity. We are of equal value, but will never be the same. Naturally women and men should have the same salary for the same work, with the same possibilities and the same rights. But today we don't dare talk about our differences in any other way than as a political problem."

"We don't dare talk about the way the woman responds to a man's strength and enjoys the opportunity of submitting to him in certain situations."

"The problem for women, I believe, is finding a man who is more resourcefull than they are themselves (a man they actually need, and who doesn't get in their way and become just one more person they need to take care of)."

"What type of men do you think women actually want, then?"

"A guy that is wild enough so that they can't completely capture him, but who at the same time is kind at his core. He must have courage enough to listen to his own inner voice, and it is from this he gets his vigor. What girls don't need is yet another child to take care of."

We drove for five hours without one note of music, or one word from the radio. Morten seldom listens to music when he isn't working with it. Least of all his own. But he likes Coldplay and has made note of Eva Cassidy and Jeff Buckley.

"They are vocalists who really interest me, that have come further than I have. They stimulate me."

Though there is no CD player in the cabin, on a table lies a copy of Gert Nygårdshaug's Mengele Zoo that he is reading for the second time, and a paperback of Forføreren, another book Morten Harket has bought but isn't finished with yet.

Beside a lithograph from an artist friend hangs the classical kitch portrait of the old seaman with a pipe. It came with the cabin.

We light the dry birch in the fire and taste the cognac recommended by Morten's healer.

This is a man with whom he is in contact several times a day and that he often speaks of, and who he obviously takes rather seriously.

"I believe our true existence is of a spiritual character, that it is the physical world we should question," he says.

The last hour he has spent strumming new tunes on his acoustic guitar. It was the consequences of a soul-stirring love affair that made Morten Harket into a songwriter. But the prelude to the changes began with a completely concrete experience at the giantic Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro in 1991.

He stood at the edge of the enormous stage and looked out over the 194,000 people - a sea of people that each and every one had come for the sole purpose of hearing a-ha. To see Morten Harket.

"I swore under my breath," he says. "I looked out over the crowd and had a flashback of all the milestones we had passed since we began. I saw how I still could not shake myself free of the cancer: I said to myself: 'Fine, Morten. Now you've managed to gather together almost 200,000 people in one evening. The only thing they ask you to do is to open the floodgates and give them everything you have. What is holding you back now? What is it you need before letting go?'"

"You thought all this while you stood on the stage and sang to them?"

"Yes. They did not notice anything, I think. It was a good show. But I had not learned to really give of myself yet," he explains. "The strange thing is that only in hindsight did it dawn on me that people actually had the right to expect me to be a pop star. I had the whole time believed that a person should not take themselves too seriously. But I set myself up too high by not accepting that I had this role to play," says Morten.

It was the beginning of a process that took a year-and-a-half and that formed him both as a person and as a pop star. "I began to let go. I stopped picking up everything that fell, stopped preventing things falling apart. I just let things and processes happen without involving myself in them."

"Even your own marriage?"

"It was not as if I let go of my marriage during this period, but I rather simply let things be without trying to control them. I had to believe that those things that were genuine would stand such a process and be there in the end, regardless," he explains, and exclaims: "There was a lot of naked unpleasantness connected with it. But it was for me a necessary housecleaning I had to undergo in order to get in touch with a kind of bedrock inside of me (who I really was - my basic self - the person I was at bottom - my inner core)."

We breathe in the night's fresh air in the darkness of the pier as he speaks about how he watched, spellbound, Paul and Magne on stage at Asker High School and thought, "the only thing they're missing is me."

Some years earlier he had been beaten up on a daily basis by boys at Heggedal Elementary School as if it were a kind of accepted local ritual. "It was Hell, plain and simple. I hated school. I had fantastic daydreams of being stronger than anyone. I would be the world's strongest man - so strong that they had never seen the likes of me."

"In many ways that is what you have become?"

"Maybe. When I was 17, I knew that in spite of everything I would one day be an international star. It was not something I believed, but something I knew. I went around celebrating this fact inwardly."

His daughter, Tomine, calls to say she doesn't want to go to the ballet today. Pappa says that it's OK, and recommends other things she can do. When the 10-year-old hangs up, Morten talks about his responsibility for the children after the divorce.

"We only have two choices as parents: to have a good relationship together, or to have a good relationship apart."

"Did you have no reservations about having more children with someone new, even though you already had three?"

"It was right and important both for Anne Mette and myself to have children. But I was almost unprepared for the effect it has had on me - how suddenly the child brightens everything up like an endless treasure, and what a large place I have for her beside the other children (in my heart)."

It was the beginning of a process that took a year-and-a-half and that formed him both as a person and as a pop star.

"I began to let go. I stopped picking up everything that fell, stopped preventing things falling apart. I just let things and processes happen without involving myself in them."

"There was a lot of naked unpleasantness connected with it. But it was for me a necessary housecleaning I had to undergo in order to get in touch with a kind of bedrock inside of me (who I really was - my basic self - the person I was at bottom - my inner core)."

We breathe in the night's fresh air in the darkness of the pier as he tells about how he watched, spellbound, Paul and Magne on stage at Asker High School and thought that "the only thing they are missing is me."

Some years earlier he had been beaten up on a daily basis by boys at Heggedal Elementary School as if it were a kind of accepted local ritual.

"It was Hell, plain and simple. I hated school. I had fantastic daydreams of being stronger than anyone. I would be the world's strongest man, so strong that they had never seen the likes of me."

"In many ways that is what you have become?"

"Maybe. When I was 17, I knew that in spite of everything (that had happened to me) I would one day be an international star. It was not something I believed, but something I knew."

"I went around celebrating this fact inwardly."

His daughter, Tomine, calls and says she doesn't want to go to the ballet today. Pappa says that it's OK, and recommends other things she can do. When the 10-year-old hangs up, Morten talks about his responsibility for the children after the divorce.

"We only have two choices as parents: to have a good relationship together, or to have a good relationship apart."

"Did you have no reservations about having more children with someone new, even though you already had three?"

In a room at Morten's place there are four large aquariums connected by a computer-controlled network. The coral and fish can be seen as a natural development of his consuming interest in butterflies and orchids as a child.

He spots a Camberwell Beauty (nymphalis antiopa), a Red Admiral (vanessa adalanta), and a Swallowtail (papilio machaon) outside his cabin. And there will certainly be orchids growing on the islands around about.

The apartment gives an impression activity - of people on the move, of creativity, creative energy, and children. His chaotic side is clearly echoed here. "I am not a perfectionist," he says. "My place looks like a rubble heap!" he laughs. "But Anne Mette has made a home out of a center for the processing and development of prototypes."

The office apartment in Grünnerløkka is suprisingly the antithesis of this one. It is stringently designed, with complete attention down to the smallest detail. It could almost be called a work of art. It is here he creates music - for himself and for a-ha.

"The potential of a-ha is still greater than we have been able to realize," says Morten. "We failed in so many ways. There was a wide gap between our actual musical identity and the image we were given. I also looked like the grave on stage, and still do. We did not exert our opinion. We did nothing to define who we were. Everything happened, like, five minutes before. And we could see after a while that we were being interviewed by pure teen magazines."

"Can a-ha at some point in time live up to its potential?"

"The way we have worked together on the last two albums shows that it is possible. But I am not sure that I can answer 'yes' to that. Today we feel the need to follow up on our private and personal things. We all of ous have families and will not sacrifice them for the sake of the band. There are other things we must consider than when we were 20-something."

"You sound as if we may have heard a-ha's last album."

"It would anyway not be the first time (you've heard that). But we need to feel that the band is not simply a container that we have to keep filling up. It is the same with a love relationship. It must be able to withstand uncertainty and fragility to be to able to be strong."

"How much contact do you, Paul and Magne have when you are not working together?"

"Very little - because it is so intense when we are all in the same boat. But that doesn't change what we feel and mean to each other."

"Would you say you are more like colleagues than brothers?"

"'Brothers' describes better how it feels to me."

"So if it came down to it, would you give your right arm for the guys?"

"I do it all the time."