Tears For Fears - Quiet Desperation, Pop Style

One of the key moments in the 2000s rediscovery of musical “Eighties” was the resurfacing of Tears For Fears' “Mad World” in the 2001 cult movie “Donnie Darko”. Gary Jules's stripped-down version, for piano and voice, used to underscore the film's choral moment of pathos, pointed to a plain fact: stripped of its coat of synthetic sounds, the song revealed a melodic, aching heart, well suited to warming even the chill of the 2000s. Thus, in the Eighties, people found what everyone had always insisted wasn't there: melodies, human warmth, even pain. In a word, great songs. The first decade of the 2000s closed out (at least in Europe) in a frenzy of synth-pop revivalism, confirming that by this point even the sounds, not just the songs, had been reclaimed, and that there would be no need today for a Gary Jules to strip down “Mad World” - if only because, it has to be said, the song is gorgeous exactly as Tears For Fears conceived it. It's worth examining the story of a band that perhaps represented the human face of synth-pop, the side furthest from the futuristic chills of Human League, from the erotic perversions of Soft Cell, and from the social satire of Pet Shop Boys, and closer to the everyday feelings of the general public.

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were two young men barely into their twenties when they split off from the ska quintet Graduate in 1980 to pursue what would become the defining format of the decade: the electronic duo. While the songs were originally written by Orzabal (the band's creative mastermind, now and forever) on an acoustic guitar in their hometown of Bath, it was their encounter with keyboardist Ian Stanley that introduced the two of them to the use of sequencers.

It was a crucial realization: technology allowed them to free themselves from the burden of a full band, launching them into the field of synthetic pop that would also explode commercially in 1981, with Human League's “Dare” and Depeche Mode's “Speak And Spell”.

In 1981 came “Suffer The Children”, a manifesto for that blend of electronics and “real” instruments (Orzabal's guitar) that would become the Tears For Fears trademark, yielding a result that was pop in the noblest sense of the word. Besides the epic chorus, the album version also featured a radio staple of the era: the children's choir!

The following year came “Pale Shelter”, already a masterstroke, with the electronics stretching into a linear, airy ballad, swept by flourishes of acoustic guitar and pulled back toward the most majestic melancholy by the synths in the background. Add a nostalgic melody and a noticeably more confident vocal performance from Smith, and you get a true madeleine of 1982, a melancholy gem that pairs with the equally memorable “This Is The Day”, released by The The the following year.

Success, however, only arrived in December '82 with the aforementioned “Mad World”. A true three-and-a-half-minute masterpiece, this song made it clear to everyone that Roland Orzabal, far from wanting to sweep away pop's past like his futurist peers, carried the memory of entire decades of British pop, devoured and digested over long years of listening at home and watching “Top of the Pops” on TV. Above all, he remembered the Beatles. It is precisely this bourgeois, ordinary yet “mad” world, evoked for Orzabal by the view of Bath in the morning from the window of his small flat above a pizzeria, that becomes the epos of “Mad World”. For anyone who has never heard it, it's a pop ballad that opens solemnly in the verses, accompanied by a dark synth drone, before opening up into an urgent chorus, where the keyboards back the drums in a percussive role, finally unwinding into the dreamy repetition of the title words. The result is a masterclass in dynamics, with the rhythmic element building and growing throughout the track.

The feat was repeated in January of the following year with another standout track, “Change”, and then again with a new version of “Pale Shelter” in April. “Change” is by far the most fun thing the early Tears For Fears ever did, a danceable track driven by a funky bassline, a hammering keyboard carillon mimicking Latin sounds, and slashing rhythm guitar, adding up to something that recalls both the most danceable black music and its new wave reinterpretation (Duran Duran had already come out the previous year).

For an essentially pop band, hitting the charts was the ultimate goal, even if it came somewhat belatedly. The success of “Mad World” surprised even the duo themselves, who had almost resigned themselves to obscurity when they suddenly found themselves rushing to London to buy suitable clothes for their induction into the home-grown Olympus of “Top of the Pops”.

As The Hurting, the first LP, finally released in March 1983, makes clear, there was more to this duo than met the eye - and the unsettling song titles alone would have been enough to signal it, not to mention the band's very name (“tears for fears”). It was a nameless pain, nurtured through adolescences of “quiet desperation” (to borrow Pink Floyd's phrase), that led the two of them toward an obsessive interest in psychoanalysis, and in particular the theories of Arthur Janov, author of “Primal Scream”, which had already inspired John Lennon (no coincidence there) and would later lend its name to another legendary British band. The original idea, according to Smith, was to earn enough money through music to afford therapy, which at the time was expensive and only available in places like New York or Los Angeles. The cheaper alternative was to get it all out (“get it out of our system”, in Smith's words) through songs, hence “The Hurting”, with pain scattered throughout the record, from the titles (“Ideas As Opiates”, “Prisoners Of Pain”, both already chapter titles in Janov's books) to the lyrics, starting right with “Mad World”: “And I find it kind of funny/ I find it kind of sad/ the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I ever had”. That's why the song ended up in “Donnie Darko”...

The same goes for childhood memories and traumas, evoked right from the cover art, and destined to populate many of the songs, from the choirs of “Suffer The Children” to the schoolday memories of the ever-present “Mad World” (“Hallo teacher tell me what's my lesson/ look right through me”), to the point of suggesting a psychoanalytic concept album, a genuine successor to “The Wall”, which was still on tour at the time these songs were written, back in '81.

Even the music of the tracks not released as singles, which make up the rest of the album, fits the dark themes of the lyrics, playing on atmospheric electronics and rhythms as slow as they are intricate, the offspring of repeated listens to “Peter Gabriel III”. If the opening “The Hurting” is thus a fairly straightforward introduction to the album's themes, with prominent basslines, guitar flourishes and Curt Smith's signature sung refrain (“is it an horrific dream?”), other tracks are often less structured, taking the form of atmospheric ballads, even featuring sax solos, as in the case of an “Ideas As Opiates” steeped in soul, which strongly recalls the songs sung by Martin Gore in later-period Depeche Mode, or indeed “Memories Fade”.

In other cases they veer toward a rather dark, electronic new wave, as with "Watch Me Bleed," which replays the formula of the early acoustic-guitar singles in a darker key, or "Prisoner Of Pain," built entirely around sound texture (with the openly acknowledged influence of "The Intruder") rather than melody and lyrics. The grand finale comes with the piano and melancholy textures of "The Start Of The Breakdown," the emotional summary of the whole record, where Orzabal painfully recalls his father's illness and breakdown, completing the album's underlying idea: projecting memories and suffering outward in order to be freed from them and no longer have to repress them.

Unlike the singles, most of these tracks find Orzabal taking on vocal duties as well, with Curt Smith already reduced to a supporting role (he limits himself to playing bass).

Ultimately, the album manages to strike a rare balance between pop melody and personal unease, which was the hallmark of the decade's best bands (the Cure, New Order, Cocteau Twins), and it's precisely the element that the 2000s new wave revival missed almost entirely, devoted as it mostly was to perfectly dignified entertainment, far removed from the youthful rage that other musical movements instead captured.

On the other hand, the influence of The Hurting went well beyond rock, as shown by the fact that it was also claimed as a source of inspiration by American R&B artists like Wyclef Jean and Black Sheep. These declarations of admiration from the hip-hop world point to a dance-leaning streak that surfaces even in Tears For Fears' more straightforward hits (that disco bassline driving the close of the romantic "Pale Shelter"), which now sounds dated to rock audiences' ears, so much so that Gary Jules felt the need to strip "Mad World" bare. The point is that in 1983 pop's language was far less codified and sorted into genres than it is today — perhaps one reason for the love-hate fascination with the Eighties that has marked our last decade.

After the success of The Hurting, Tears For Fears get stuck in a studio-perfectionist cul-de-sac (a preview of troubles yet to come) that yields the less-than-inspired single "The Way You Are." It's a sign that something needs to change.

On the surface, Songs From The Big Chair (1985) continues the themes of the previous album: the title refers to the TV series "Sybil," in which the protagonist, afflicted with multiple personalities, found relief only in her analyst's big chair. The track "Big Chair," released as the B-side of the "Shout" single, even features sampled dialogue from the series. In reality, though, the title introduces a sense of security that wasn't there before, and this comes through above all in the music.

"Shout," destined to become an international hit, is a true anthem, with the duo shouting out a renewed zest for life against the backdrop of a grandiose wall of sound built from synthesizers and rock instruments. Particularly notable is the presence of a biting rhythm guitar, which adds body and physicality to what is simply a majestic build, stretching past the six-minute mark. The change is both psychological and musical: the need for greater extroversion is answered by tearing down new wave's taboo against guitar rock. It would be naive, though, not to notice that this move was also a shrewd commercial calculation: having taken a beating earlier in the decade from a second "British invasion" of synth-pop acts launched by the newborn MTV, the United States was responding with a return to order and more traditional sounds. To break down the doors to success on a massive scale — something only America could guarantee — Tears For Fears steer toward a more organic sound, in which the synths are more decisively paired with the instruments of a real band (Manny Elias on drums, Mel Collins on sax, Ian Stanley on keyboards), and the sound gains warmth and physicality at the expense of the cold, pictorial quality of the past.

What's needed is more soul, and that's exactly what Curt Smith's voice delivers in the massive chart assault that is "Everybody Wants To Rule The World." Also decisive in the song's composition is the contribution of Chris Hughes (who produced The Hurting but is credited here as a co-writer), who pushes Orzabal to write a triumphant anthem in the vein of his own heroes, the Beatles. The result is a veritable soundtrack for Reagan's America, a luminous track with a measured stride that seems tailor-made to be enjoyed on the radio while driving, and lyrics that reflect the everyman's desire for redemption and social climbing. "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" is one of the defining songs of the Eighties, the point at which the band's ability to stack radio hooks one on top of another reaches its peak, from the shimmer of the synths to the guitar's energetic jabs, to vocals that amount to one giant invitation to sing along, culminating in a refrain that could repeat forever. With this song, Orzabal wrote his pop masterpiece.

Along the same aggressive lines come the danceable "Mother's Talk," fitted out with a funky bassline and gospel backing vocals, and "Broken," more straightforwardly rock, driven by its guitar riff. The high point of this energetic streak, fixated on horror vacui, is "Head Over Heels," which opens up into yet another killer chorus, a veritable synth-pop experiment on steroids, built to fill the vast spaces of America's biggest arenas. All this without losing the hypnotic quality that lets Tears For Fears stretch these songs out over long run-times without wearing the listener down — who instead ends up lulled, surrendering to the ocean of sound that Orzabal pours out of his imagination, ablaze with psychedelic colors. When "Head Over Heels" morphs into a mini-suite with a live reprise of "Broken," it's clear the duo are ready to take their music to the masses. The echo of Depeche Mode is no accident, since this record's influence on the Basildon heroes seems undeniable (the sound of "Shout" is genuinely close to "Never Let Me Down Again"), though Depeche Mode would be the ones to complete the transition from synth-pop to stadium rock foreshadowed here, exploiting it in a more sustained way.

The secret of Songs From The Big Chair, though, also lies in the ballads where Orzabal takes center stage, from the lush paradise of "Listen," which is new age ante litteram, to the delicate soul of "I Believe," all the way to the warm Latin night of "The Working Hour," which glides along on soft keyboard beds, gentle percussion and saxophone breaks, leading the listener to a kind of redemptive ecstasy: ⟦Q1⟧.

Songs From The Big Chair is not a betrayal of the spirit of the first LP; if anything, it clarifies the band's true calling: to reach the widest possible audience with music of universal appeal, grounded as it is in the true pillars of English pop culture — Beatles-style pop and soul music. Even though the album strays into arena-rock territory, its ambition is rooted in genuinely popular foundations, and its success is all the more remarkable considering how rarely such transatlantic landslides have been repeated since. The album thus stands as a fitting emblem of the mindset of the new pop that followed new wave, which, rather than trying to dismantle the music industry along post-punk lines, instead sought to infiltrate it from within, through a cynical and shrewd awareness of commercial logic. Tears For Fears therefore took part in two musical utopias: the iconoclastic (and often intellectualized) utopia of electronic new wave, and the populist utopia of mid-decade pop — and yet total detachment from reality was about to hit them hard. The era of "music for the masses" and genre cross-pollination was about to be disowned in favor of a new breed of purists and an extreme fragmentation of musical knowledge.

While on a triumphant tour of American stadiums, Orzabal also grows increasingly impatient with the duo's musical formula, which, built on synth and drum-machine programming, leaves no room for improvisation and no opening to let the music breathe — so much so that it starts to feel like a "straitjacket" (his own words), identical to itself night after night. In Kansas City, after a particularly emotionally hollow mega-concert, the two recharge by listening to a performance by soul singer Oleta Adams at the hotel bar. They decide to lean more on the band and start jamming with them during soundchecks, even producing a song, "Badman's Song." It's the first new track in a long while. Back in Bath, Tears For Fears try to write a new record, first working with keyboardist Nicky Holland, then with producers Langer and Winstanley, and finally bringing Hughes back on board, who pushes them to hold on to an inspiration similar to what they found meeting Adams on tour. Unable to manage it, the duo decides the only thing left to do is track the woman down, even if it means launching into what seems like a hopeless search.

Oleta is found in another Kansas City bar and invited to join a lineup of musicians that now includes guitarist Neil Taylor, Pino Palladino on bass, drummer Manu Katché and percussionist Carole Steele. Dave Bascombe, already the sound engineer on The Big Chair, co-produces alongside Tears For Fears themselves, who perform the songs live, then break them apart and reassemble them through a long editing process in which electronics are layered over live playing, somewhat in the spirit of Miles Davis's "Bitches' Brew." Only in 1988 is Bob Clearmountain able to mix at least seven tracks and, crucially, Oleta is able to record her vocal contributions to songs like "Woman In Chains." Her influence can also be felt in the very musical structure of the songs, often built on the simple piano-and-voice pairing before the addition of highly elaborate arrangements. The direction suggested is that of an "organic" electronic sound similar to that of Blue Nile, another band of perfectionists known for the scarcity of their releases. It's no surprise, then, that the album's delivery date keeps slipping. Only in June 1989 do the recordings wrap up — but by then England and its pop music have changed radically.

Thatcherite free-market policy in the UK has by now definitively won out; every form of cultural resistance (and post-punk had, at bottom, also been that) has revealed itself to be obsolete, while the working class is preparing to throw itself into that grand collective dream of escape from reality that rave culture will become, with the spread of acid house, nightclubs and ecstasy, for a "Second Summer Of Love" imported straight from Ibiza. In June 1987, Roland Orzabal watches on TV the announcement of yet another re-election victory for the "Iron Lady" at the country's helm, and, seized by the urge to react, writes a song. Since political invective isn't his trade, he decides instead to create a positive anthem about the power of love's utopia, linking the era of his beloved Beatles to the more recent dance revolution: the result, "Sowing The Seeds Of Love," will be Tears For Fears' last masterpiece. The track, launched by a drum roll that immediately recalls "Sgt. Pepper's," is a long tour de force of hymn-like refrains and instrumental flourishes, amid horn fanfares and majestic strings, with the two playing at being the Lennon (Curt Smith comes reasonably close) and McCartney of the Eighties, in a joyous mood only barely tempered by the lyrics. Here one can sense the wistfulness of ⟦Q2⟧, entirely directed at the Sixties, though coupled with an awareness of the new musical revolution underway (⟦Q3⟧ says it all).

The rest of the album The Seeds Of Love has almost nothing to do with the single, being steeped in references to black music, even jazz, both in the arrangements and in the vocal approach, where the already soulful Orzabal is joined by Adams's heartfelt contributions (he would go on to produce her solo debut). The tempos are almost always slow (the more upbeat rhythm and blues of "Year Of The Knife" is the exception), the structures complex (at least compared to the three-minute singles they started out with), the sounds dense and soft. Standouts include the intense gospel of "Woman In Chains," the updated Philly sound of the breezy "Advice For The Young At Heart," the soul-blues of "Badman's Song," the hazy jazz of "Standing In The Corner Of The Third World," dominated by Palladino's fretless bass, and the orchestral crescendo of "Famous Last Words."

Everything here is pleasant and velvety, but much of it sounds generic and bland compared to their earlier work; at times, rather than the intensity of Blue Nile, what's evoked is Simply Red or other exponents of that new British soul that dominated the second half of the decade. It's a genre that, however lightweight, still represents an authentic bond between England and black American music, so it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand (and really, how beautiful is Hucknall's much-maligned "Holding Back The Years"?). Overall, though, this leans toward what Americans call "Adult Oriented Rock," a tendency that would be confirmed by the albums that followed.

If The Seeds Of Love proved to be yet another success, its long gestation left its mark on the band, which saw the definitive rift between Orzabal and an increasingly estranged Curt Smith during work on the follow-up, Elemental. Throughout the Nineties, Tears For Fears effectively became a vehicle for Orzabal alone, backed by legions of collaborators on the aforementioned 1993 album and on Raul And The Kings Of Spain in '95, both steeped in a soul-tinged pop and increasingly grandiose structures (the latter is almost a concept album on the singer's Latin roots). These are albums that don't really work.

It wasn't until 2004 that the reunited duo resurfaced with Everybody Loves A Happy Ending. The album, however, comes across as a restyling exercise of dubious taste, a centrifuge of references drawn as much from the band's own past as from the Beatles' songbook, over which Orzabal seems convinced he holds some kind of first right of refusal. While the single "Closest Thing To Heaven" retains a semblance of pleasant pop songwriting, even if its arrangements are photocopied from the old single "Sowing The Seeds Of Love" (complete with that big drum roll break!), listening to the other tracks proves, when not cloying, downright hilarious, so clumsy and blatant are the imitations contained within. You don't have to wait long to hit the peak of the duo's compositional delirium: just try the opening "Everybody Loves A Happy Ending," where no effort whatsoever is made to disguise repeated listens to psychedelic pop à la "Sgt. Pepper's," just as in "Call Me Mellow," where the listening—and corresponding imitation—extends to Xtc seduced by those same Beatles. Too bad Xtc possess an art that today's Tears For Fears know nothing about: control of nuance, and above all a body of songwriting that has rarely, across an entire career, gone off the rails. Even straining to find something, all there is on this album are cloying, unbearable easy-listening songs that would make even Justin Timberlake's teen-pop aficionados turn up their noses.

The reunions of Eighties stars that now crowd the 2000s are, after all, designed to justify lucrative tours that amount to a triumph of nostalgia, so fans won't be particularly shocked by this album's lack of success. As for everyone else, it's worth noting how the ongoing revival has done justice to a pop decade that used to be treated with plenty of prejudice. Within that context, Tears For Fears played not the role of avant-gardists, but of those who knew how to mediate certain technical innovations (the fundamental shift brought about by electronics) with British songwriting tradition and, above all, with mainstream taste. Since pop is by nature also, and above all, entertainment, the role played by musicians of this kind should not be underestimated critically.

For Record Store Day 2021, Live At Massey Hall is finally released, the live album documenting the successful 1985 tour staged to promote the release of Songs From The Big Chair.

Some of the tracks on the setlist had, in fact, already appeared on promo releases and, above all, on the deluxe box set released in 2014 for the thirtieth anniversary of the Bath duo's second album.

The careful remastering carried out from the original multitrack tapes has made it possible to release the British band's first true live album, capturing them here at the very peak of their success.

After 17 years marked by repetitive greatest-hits releases and celebratory tours that followed the reunion album, along comes The Tipping Point (2022), which, despite being portrayed as the consequence of a tragic event (the death of Orzabal's wife from causes linked to alcoholism), actually has a much more complex genesis, dating all the way back to 2013. A record that, according to the duo themselves, is meant to appear as a cathartic celebration of the life of someone who survived a traumatic experience, the perfect testament to how heartbreak, suffering and tragedy can be transformed into transcendent art.

Among the ten sketches that make up this point of no return, we find a few echoes of their more emphatic past, chief among them the title track, which revisits the shuffle groove that had elevated "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" into the pop pantheon, albeit in a more intimate, dreamy, melancholy version compared to its reference point, while "Break The Man" ties back to the flowers of love, practically a pro-feminist sequel to "Woman In Chains" without, however, having the same explosive emotional force.

A few surprises come courtesy of the folky "No Small Thing," which opens in Dylan-style (not forgetting Cash) with an almost noise-like finale, but the best moments—aside from the lead single—come, courtesy of Gandalf Orzabal and Duke Smith, in the more twilight-toned tracks: the synthesized midtempo of "Long, Long, Long Time" and ballads like "Rivers of Mercy" and "Please Be Happy," prayers uttered at the bedside of a dying wife. These are sincere, honest songs, stripped of that labored pursuit of easy listening that instead drapes over and ruins, for instance, "End Of Time" and especially the painfully tacky "My Demons," with its dystopian lyrics and a sound that winks at unprecedented electronic/industrial exuberance in a pompous, pretentious synth-rock. That's not their style, and it never has been.

Beyond the noble and painful reasons that reignited the spark, The Tipping Point deserves a barely passing grade and nothing more. It's "merely" a collection of tracks, some good, many less so (none memorable), written over far too long a span of time. A record that lacks the strength to rise to the level of a concept album the way that unreachable opening trilogy did—proof that, unchanged affection aside, the Tears For Fears story is one that was born and, artistically, died within that decade we still carry in our hearts.

Two years later, Tears For Fears released their first officially globally distributed live album, Songs From A Nervous Planet (2024). "I think a lot of people don't realize we're actually a good live band!" writes Smith, introducing the album. "They see a duo and think it'll just be two people with some keyboards and a bit of pre-recorded backing, and that'll be that. Over the years we've improved enormously compared to our golden years in the Eighties."

Adding a bit of extra curiosity to the release is the presence of four (not exactly earth-shattering, truth be told) unreleased tracks recorded in the studio: the single "The Girl That I Call Home," a tender love note from Orzabal to his wife Emily Rath, presumably also referenced in the album's third track ("Emily Said"), plus the joyful but deceptive "Say Goodbye To Mum And Dad" ("Go tell all your friends that society has gone mad") and the art-pop of "Astronaut," another attempt at a "Shout"-style communal anthem urging listeners to find peace in solitude.

Taken from a July 2023 concert in Franklin, Tennessee, the live album includes numerous classics plus songs from The Tipping Point, which hold up mainly thanks to their blend of professionalism and sonic consistency.

What's most refreshing is hearing the old warhorses again, performed with real vigor and remarkable cohesion by a solid band, one that now sees British singer-songwriter Carina Round stepping into the shoes of the Woman In Chains herself, Oleta Adams.

Alongside the album's release comes a concert film shot and recorded at the FirstBank Amphitheater at Graystone Quarry in Franklin, Tennessee, during their Tipping Point Tour Part 2: "Tears For Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film)" premiered in over 1,100 cinemas worldwide.

Contributions by Marco Bercella ("Everybody Loves A Happy Ending"), Cristiano Orlando ("Live At MAssey Hall"), Mauro Caproni ("The Tipping Point"), Claudio Fabretti ("Songs From A Nervous Planet")

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