In the late 80s, Joe Strummer of The Clash made the cover of Musician magazine. In the article he related many great and humorous anecdotes. The best may have been his telling of the time he accosted Roland Orzabal (main writer and instrumentalist of TFF) in a restaurant:
“You owe me five quid!”
“Why?”
“You stole my lyric!”
The first line of “Charlie Don’t Surf” from Sandinista (released in 1980, four years before Songs From the Big Chair) is “Everybody wants to rule the world”. According to Joe, Roland dug into his pocket, pulled out a fiver and gave it to him right there!

Roland shared with SuperDeluxEdition:

I mean that track has just got a life of its own. It’s crazy, I mean, it was always popular, but then… I did an interview with Reuters or something like that, a while back, with this lady who went on Spotify and worked out that there are about 140 cover versions of that song; I mean, from Don Henley to Patti Smith, to Weezer, to Lorde, obviously. It’s crazy, it’s one of those songs, isn’t it? I remember from my childhood, there’d be songs like ‘Lola’ by The Kinks, it just, you know, it’s always going to be around; it’s a classic. I don’t get it and I didn’t get it at the time, I mean, I think it was the way that Chris made us improvise it every day, after our recording session, I would get on the guitar and Ian would get on the keyboards, Chris would be on the Fairlight and it soon became effortless. Every time we’d push up the faders, even if they were out of balance – because you didn’t have total recall back then, and nothing like we have nowadays with computers, Pro Tools and Logic – every time we pushed them up it was just, “wow”. There’s something intrinsic to it, you know, it’s just, it’s got a magic quality and so damn bloody simple.