Tears For Fears

The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had

(Mad World)

A necessary premise: this milestone arrives at least ten or fifteen years late. It happens, when a band forces you to choose between two masterpieces and you just can't make up your mind: on one hand, "The Hurting", the blinding purity of a debut that married singer-songwriter craft with synthesizers, painful introspection with instantly catchy choruses; on the other, "Songs From The Big Chair", the classic breakthrough album, practically flawless in capturing the evolution of a now-mature band, finally free of the shoals of a genre that was losing momentum and fully aware of its formidable songwriting gifts. In the end, the former won out (which, incidentally, is also the English duo's own favourite). Perhaps precisely because of its memorable choruses, those four or five spine-tingling instant classics. Starting with that "Mad World", brought back to life after its inclusion in "Donnie Darko" (2001). Gary Jules's stripped-down piano-and-voice version, used to underscore the film's collective moment of pathos in a movie that would go on to shape a decade's youth culture, revealed a plain truth: shorn of its blanket of synthetic sounds — inevitably dated ones too, from the fretless bass to the drum machine, from the synth effects to the sax solo — the song exposed a melodic, aching heart, warm enough to thaw even the chill of the 2000s. Just as the film travelled back to that infamous decade, as if seeking there the root of contemporary malaise, many probably made a similar journey backwards in music, rediscovering in the '80s what they had always denied was there: melody, human warmth, even pain. In short, great songs.

Perhaps, though, it was too late. At least to bring to its senses that portion of critics who for years had snubbed the celebrated firm of Orzabal-Smith. A few examples? In the bible that is Simon Reynolds's "Post-punk", they're mentioned only to recall Paul Morley's nasty quip — the music journalist on loan to Art of Noise — who claimed that "a monkey wrench is inherently more interesting than the singer of Tears For Fears". Not a single line about them in Riccardo Bertoncelli's Enciclopedia rock anni 80 (620 entries!). And among the "Thousand Essential Albums" of the well-established duo Cilia–Guglielmi? Nowhere to be found.

Three random examples, though indicative of how the Bath band's brand has often been superficially associated with frothy, chart-friendly electropop, without acknowledging the depth of intent and authorial dignity that actually distinguished it. All this despite the fact that an opening like that of "Pale Shelter" might already be enough to justify the word "masterpiece".

"The Hurting", then. The best psychoanalytic session ever pulled off by a synth-pop group. Because the young Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, having just left a ska quintet (Graduate), were literally obsessed with psychoanalysis and in particular with the theories of Arthur Janov, author of "Primal Scream", the primal scream that had already inspired John Lennon (see "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band", 1970) and would later give its name to another legendary UK band. Tears can replace fears, Janov argued: Tears for Fears.

The initial idea - as Smith has revealed - was to earn enough money through music to afford therapy, which was expensive at the time and only available in places like New York or Los Angeles. Failing that, there was the cheaper, Janovian option of getting it all out through songs. Hence "The Hurting", the pain, scattered throughout the record, from the titles - "Ideas As Opiates", "The Prisoner" (of pain), already chapters in Janov's books - to the lyrics, starting with "Mad World" itself: "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" (which is why the song ended up in "Donnie Darko").

The two members of Tears For Fears, children of families torn apart by divorce and raised by working, largely absent mothers, felt that their parents - to borrow the words of "Pale Shelter" - had given them no love, only a pale shelter. Scars that were mirrored in a lonely adolescence, wholly wrapped up in music, to the point where early record-industry commitments made college or university impossible. And childhood trauma, evoked right from the iconic cover (with young Gebbie Serafin-Jaeger, hands in his hair), hangs over everything, from the choir on "Suffer The Children" to the school memories of the ever-present "Mad World" ("Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson/ look right through me"), eventually suggesting a psychoanalytic concept album, a hypothetical successor to "The Wall", which was still on tour while these songs were being written, in 1981.

At the dawn of the most glamorous decade, synthetic sounds were already all the rage, but Orzabal (the band's creative mind) was of the old school. A Beatles disciple, a fan of Peter Gabriel. He wrote all the songs on his acoustic guitar, in his hometown of Bath. Smith, whom he'd met at thirteen when he was singing Blue Oyster Cult songs, backed him on vocals. It was meeting keyboardist Ian Stanley that revealed the use of sequencers to the duo. A crucial discovery: the technology allowed Tears for Fears to free themselves from the burden of being a full band, propelling them into the field of synth-pop that would explode onto the charts in 1981 as well, with "Dare" by Human League and "Speak & Spell" by Depeche Mode. The duo format also suited the operation well, and indeed it would become a hallmark of the decade, from Soft Cell to the Pet Shop Boys, from Eurythmics to Yazoo.

A whole world was opening up for these two former sad British middle-class teenagers.

By the time they came to release their debut LP in 1983, Orzabal and Smith already had a rock-solid reputation, secured by a killer run of four singles that would form the backbone of "The Hurting". The first came out two years earlier and already says it all: "Suffer The Children". A genuine j'accuse aimed at their parents - "Cos he knows in his heart you won't be home soon/ He's an only child in an only room/ And he's dependant on you". Complete with an apocalyptic closing dilemma: "The pain of birth/ What is it worth/ When it don't turn out the way it should?". Musically, it's a manifesto of that blend of electronics (the menacing synth pulses) and "real" instruments (Orzabal's guitar) that would become the band's trademark, resulting in something that is pop in the noblest sense of the word. Beyond the epic chorus, the album version would also feature a radio staple of the era: a children's choir!

"Pale Shelter", released a year later, does even better, with the electronics stretching into a linear, airy ballad, swept by bursts of acoustic guitar and pulled back toward stately melancholy by the synths in the background. Add a nostalgic melody and a far more assured vocal performance from Smith, and you get a genuine madeleine of 1982, a melancholy gem that pairs well with "This Is The Day", released by The The the following year.

The knockout blow, however, came in December '82, with the third single, the much-quoted "Mad World". A marvel that, in three and a half minutes, condenses all of Orzabal's encyclopedic musical culture: whole decades of British pop, devoured and digested through long years of listening at home and watching "Top of the Pops" on TV. It's the bourgeois world, ordinary yet "mad", that came to Orzabal from the view of Bath in the morning from the window of his little flat above a pizzeria (the "Worn out faces/ Bright and early for their daily races"), transformed into the epic of "Mad World". The ballad opens solemnly in the verses, accompanied by a dark synth drone, before opening up into an urgent chorus, where the keyboards support the drums in a percussive role, finally settling into the dreamlike repetition of the title words. The result is a masterclass in dynamics, where the rhythmic element develops and grows throughout the song, almost absent in the first verse but propulsive in the second, decisive in the first two choruses and downright pounding in the third, yet still able to make room for the stillness of the song's main hook: "Mad world, mad world".

The fourth pillar single from "The Hurting" is "Change", that is, the more driving, anthemic side of Tears For Fears (the one behind "Shout" and "Sowing The Seeds Of Love", to be clear), distilled into a danceable track, well sung by Smith and driven by an electro-xylophone intro, a funky bassline, a hammering carillon of keyboards and marimba mimicking Latin sounds, and slashing rhythm guitar, all adding up to something that recalls both the danciest black music and its new wave reinterpretation (the previous year had already seen the release of "Duran Duran").

Thanks to this quartet of hits, Orzabal quickly went from being a spectator to a star of Top of the Pops. When "The Hurting" hit record shops, it did even more: it topped the UK Chart, dethroning none other than "Thriller" by Michael Jackson.

But "The Hurting" isn't just a greatest-hits collection of early Tears for Fears. Even the tracks not released as singles fit the album's dark themes, playing on atmospheric electronics and rhythms as slow as they are intricate, the offspring of repeated listens to "Peter Gabriel III". While the opening title track is a fairly straightforward introduction to the album's themes, with prominent basslines, guitar flourishes and a typical sung refrain from Smith ("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 a soul-drenched "Ideas As Opiates", which recalls the songs sung by Martin Gore in later-period Depeche Mode, or a "Memories Fade" steeped in nostalgia, with the ticking piano underscoring Orzabal's languid reflection on memories that fade while the scars remain ("Memories fade but the scars still linger").

Elsewhere, the album ventures into rather dark electronic new wave territory, as with "Watch Me Bleed", which replays, in a darker key, the formula of the early singles with acoustic guitar and a sinister lyric ("Watch me bleed/ Bleed forever"), or the paranoid "The Prisoner", built entirely on the texture of the sounds (with the acknowledged influence of "The Intruder") rather than on melody or lyrics.

A grand finale comes with the piano and melancholy textures (but also tribal drumming) of "The Start Of The Breakdown", an emotional summary of the whole record, in which Orzabal painfully recalls his father's illness and nervous breakdown, bringing to completion the album's underlying idea: projecting memories and suffering outward in order to be freed of them and no longer have to repress them. Most of these tracks, unlike the singles, feature Orzabal on lead vocals, with his soulful vocalizing, while Smith takes more of a back seat, limiting himself to bass.

Bolstered by sophisticated songwriting and a skilful balance between acoustic instruments (besides Orzabal's guitar, Mel Collins' sax and Phil Palmer's guitars) and synthetic production, "The Hurting" marries irresistible pop appeal with a personal unease that is the hallmark of the decade's best bands (from The Cure to Cocteau Twins) - and it's precisely this element that escaped the new new wave imitators of the 2000s, who would settle for perfectly respectable entertainment, far removed from the youthful anger captured instead by other musical movements of the era.

Over the years, tributes have come from all directions – from Mansun to Smashing Pumpkins – along with more or less explicit references. But the influence of "The Hurting" went well beyond rock, given that American R&B artists like Wyclef Jean and Black Sheep also claimed it as a source of inspiration. These declarations of admiration from the hip-hop world highlight a dance leaning that also surfaces in Tears For Fears' more straightforward hits (that disco bassline driving the finale of the romantic "Pale Shelter"), one that now sounds dated to rock audiences' ears, to the point of requiring the "cleaning up" of "Mad World". Perhaps in 1983 pop language was less rigidly coded by genre, which may explain the love-hate relationship with the 80s that characterized the first decade of the new century.

But, beyond all this, "The Hurting" remains a practically perfect record from start to finish. And, with all due respect to Jules' admirable cover, let us add that the original "Mad World" is unbeatable. Memories fade, but great songs endure.

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25/09/2016