Latest Release
- 25 OCT 2024
- 22 Songs
- Songs from the Big Chair · 1985
- Songs from the Big Chair · 1984
- The Seeds Of Love · 1987
- The Hurting (Remastered) · 1983
- The Seeds Of Love · 1989
- Songs From the Big Chair (Super Deluxe Version) · 1985
- Songs From the Big Chair (Super Deluxe Version) · 1985
- Songs For A Nervous Planet · 2024
- Rule The World (Everybody) - Single · 2023
- The Tipping Point · 2021
Essential Albums
- When Tears for Fears convened to make their second album in 1984, they were young, ambitious and dead set on making sure the world knew they were something more than the Thompson Twins or Duran Duran. Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal’s first album under that name, 1983’s <I>The Hurting</I>, was some of the bleakest music to make a commercial impression since Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, bridging the introversion of goth with the extroversion of pop. <I>Songs From the Big Chair</I> was more polished and more accessible, too, but still sounded out of sync with the prevailing trends of the time—too big, too complex, too intellectually loaded. Where <I>The Hurting</I> had explored ideas about trauma repression and inner darkness, <I>Chair</I> cast its eyes outward. These aren’t songs, they’re billboards: “Shout, shout, let it all out!”; “Everybody wants to rule the world!” The words are clear and the melodies broad, but the treatment is sophisticated enough that the band still scanned as highbrow no matter how many arenas they booked. Smith and Orzabal knew what Depeche Mode and Soft Cell were up to, but remained more interested in stuff like Peter Gabriel, spending 10 hours a day in the studio trimming trees without ever losing sight of the forest. As synonymous as the album is in the collective memory with ’80s music, the reality is that <I>Chair</I> is a hodgepodge. Isolate the tracks from their context and you can hear industrial music (“Shout”), jazz ballads (“I Believe”), new-age (“Listen”) and ’60s-style pop (“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”)—a mix so discontinuous that the band said the album’s name was meant to nudge listeners towards the idea that this was more of a collection (“Songs From…”) than a unified creative statement. Still, the album’s modes of expression—complex, finessed, helplessly earnest—come through with such force they may as well have been applied by firehose. Smashing Pumpkins got it, and Arcade Fire too, not to mention Kanye, Drake and Nas, all of whom prominently sampled the band—artists and producers who balanced all-caps feelings with an attention to detail and pop legibility. In November 1985, the band released a documentary called <I>Scenes From the Big Chair</I>, alternating music videos with live performances and interview clips. At one point, the cameraperson addresses a photographer from the German teen magazine <I>Bravo</I>. “Who are you photographing today?” the cameraperson asks. The photographer struggles to articulate the name, turning to Orzabal, standing in the background. “Tears for Fears,” the photographer says. “Is that right?” Orzabal shakes his head. “No,” he says. “We’re the Beatles”—a joke, of course, but evidence of the fences they were swinging for.
Albums
Artist Playlists
- Dark, percussive synth-pop that helped define a generation.
- Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
- Their original tunes have been the source material for some of modern music’s biggest hits.
More To Hear
- The band on their album 'The Tipping Point.'
More To See
About Tears for Fears
After the dissolution of their first group, a mod outfit called Graduate, in 1981, childhood friends Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal (along with keyboardist Ian Stanley) set out to form England’s next big synth band. But while they were aiming for Duran Duran, they ended up with “Mad World”, a darkly relatable song that offered an early sign that Tears for Fears were more contemplative. After all, they took their name from Arthur Janov's book on primal therapy and imbued their lyrics with many of his ideas, like the lines concerning dreams about dying on “Mad World”. Their 1983 debut album, The Hurting, earned them success in the UK, but their 1985 follow-up LP, Songs from the Big Chair, introduced their sobering pop to the world. First, there was the brash “Shout”, which paired synths with a catchy chorus, metal guitars and a rumination on political protest, and then the plaintive sing-along hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, which tapped into Cold War anxiety. Four years later, they returned with a soulful, Beatles-esque sound for 1989’s The Seeds Of Love, featuring "Sowing The Seeds Of Love", the band’s reaction against Thatcherism and most overtly political single to date. Smith left the band shortly after, but Orzabal persevered, releasing Elemental in 1993, buoyed by the pop-rock anthem “Break It Down Again”, and 1995’s Raoul and the Kings of Spain. After Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World” was featured in 2001’s Donnie Darko, Smith and Orzabal reunited for 2004’s aptly titled Everybody Loves a Happy Ending. That title may have sounded final, but it wasn’t the end. Eighteen years later, the two returned with The Tipping Point, their seventh studio album. They’d toiled on the record for years, working with several contemporary songwriters—but only when the duo sat down together and began writing on acoustic guitars did the album begin to flow. “Albums for us should be a journey,” they told Apple Music. The Tipping Point proves that if there’s a will to keep going, no journey is ever finished.
- FROM
- Bath, England
- FORMED
- 1981
- GENRE
- Pop