Tears for Fears’ history was rooted in trauma, something a lot of the band’s fans in the 80’s identified with. But by the ’90s, the band hit some turbulent times.
“We both come from broken homes.” – Curt Smith
Tears for Fears’ leaders, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were both products of broken homes growing up in Bath, England. Smith revealed to VICE, “We both come from broken homes. We were both brought up solely by our mothers, more or less.”
Curt Smith had a brief career as a criminal, serving time in juvenile detention. That came to a head when he was arrested for stealing cameras from his school.
Roland Orzabal had exposure to show business early on in his childhood. Before his parents divorced, they ran an in-home promotion agency for working men’s clubs. The entertainers who came through his childhood house included strippers, musicians and ventriloquists. It was this exposure that gave him an introduction to the world of show business.
“I sort of fell in love with the guitar.” – Roland Orzabal
Orzabal told the Morning Call newspaper, “It was an unorthodox house. Always a lot of entertaining people around including these 3 absolutely great guitarists who used to come by. From watching them, I sort of fell in love with the guitar.” Orzabal became a self-taught guitarist at the age of 9 and soon started playing in bands with his musical tastes including Paul Simon and the Talking Heads.
Smith and Orzabal met at the age of 13, after being introduced by a mutual friend. Orzabal told The Morning Call about his first meeting with Smith, “We went to call for Curt but his mother said he wasn’t allowed out because he’d been in a fight.” Instead, the boys stayed inside and played records. Orzabal added, “We found we had a lot in common. We seemed to have the same sense of humour and we both liked cute girls. What’s more, we were the same height.” Orzabal was blown away by Smith’s singing talents after witnessing him sing a Blue Oyster Cult album.
The pair started soon started playing together, first in heavy metal cover bands before taking some time apart. They soon reconnected and played together as part of a mod group called Graduate, who landed a record deal in 1980. Despite Graduate having a little taste of success in Spain, the band broke up the following year.
Roland Orzabal is Introduced to Scream Therapy
At 17 years of age, Orzabal was introduced to the writing of psychologist Arthur Janov. Janov was most famous for pioneering something called scream therapy which theorizes that neurotic behaviour in one’s adult years has its roots in repressed feelings and childhood trauma.
Orzabal introduced Smith to scream therapy, telling Rolling Stone, “I rushed out to everybody I knew and started blubbering to them about it. Everybody thought I was a nutter. The only person who could see any sense in it was Curt.”
Tears for Fears would record a handful of demos with the help of Ian Stanley who allowed them to use his 24-track recorder. It was those demos that got them a record deal. The band’s 1983 debut record, The Hurting was coloured by the pair’s childhood experiences.
Orzabel revealed, “We believed we were victims and that very much coloured our approach to The Hurting, thinking that we were born neutral beings and that our tough upbringing troubled us. The way of releasing the trauma of my childhood was to do primal therapy, which I did for six years. It was really gimmicky and very Californian.”
“It was hard dealing with those feelings…” – Curt Smith
The press made a lot out of the primal scream therapy influences and lyrical content of the pair’s first record, something that irritated the members. Smith looked back at the album years later, telling the LA Times in 1985, “It’s hard to look to now – it seems like what was on our minds so long ago. We made it when we were 20, and it had a lot to do with our emotions between 10 and 15… It was hard dealing with those feelings… The press has made too much about this. It’s been written about so often that people should be bored with it. I know I am.”
While the group’s debut album wasn’t a huge hit in America, it still sold a million copies worldwide. The success of their first record did little to impact the lifestyles of Smith and Orzabal. They both stayed close to their hometown of Bath and didn’t have a ton of celebrity friends or live a promiscuous life, marrying their high school sweethearts.
As the duo began working on their follow-up record, they were caught between what their record company wanted and where they wanted to go, artistically. Orzabal told Las Vegas Weekly, “…When we finished the album, it was almost like, ‘Okay, well, we’ve kind of said our bit. What are we going to do now?’ But, of course, we were successful, and the record company was pushing us to come up with another single.”
“The Way You Are”
Bowing to record label pressure to strike while the iron’s hot, the band returned to the studio to work on new material, which resulted in the standalone single, “The Way You Are”. The single peaked at No. 24 and it proved to be a commercial disappointment, following the momentum they’d achieved from their debut album. The band members themselves felt angry that they had compromised themselves artistically to fulfil a commercial obligation.
Smith told Consequence of Sound, “’The Way You Are’ was the least favourite song of either of ours. Definitely one of the worst recordings we’ve done. We were basically coerced by the record company to go in and do something to release quickly after The Hurting was successful and that’s what we came up with. The A&R guy behind us at the time thought it was the best thing we’d ever done.”
“The Way You Are” made the band realize they had to change their musical direction. Smith told the LA Times, “We started an album at the end of 1983 but we didn’t like it. It was too much like the first one, and we were determined to do something different. There was record company pressure after the first album. It was successful worldwide and they wanted us to do another album, no matter what the quality, just as long as we did it quickly. But we weren’t willing.”
While the album connected with listeners who could relate to the difficult upbringings of the duo, critics labelled their debut record as pretentious. As a result of all the pressure, the band changed their approach. Smith added, in the same interview, “We took a break from serious recording. A couple of months to experiment and play around with music, try things we had never tried before.”
Songs From the Big Chair
The result was a more straightforward pop album in 1985, titled Songs From the Big Chair. Smith told the LA Times, “The material on the album is basically straight pop. The kind of stuff played on the radio all the time.”
The heavy focus of the band’s dark and gloomy lyrics led the group to not include a lyric sheet for their sophomore effort. Orzabal revealed to The Morning Call, “We noticed people were reviewing the lyrics apart from the music but you’ve got to lump it all together. People took what we put across in the first album to be all there was to us. Such an expression of feelings may have been a bit heavy for people to accept and some people got the impression that we didn’t know how to smile.”
“Songs From The Big Chair shows more maturity, this is us becoming men.” – Roland Orzabal
Orzabal added, referring to the group’s second album, “What I think we’ve done with this album is put across a more balanced picture of our personalities by combining emotion with humour and the album is far more representative of us. Songs From The Big Chair shows more maturity, this is us becoming men.”
Based on the strength of several big singles including “Shout”, “Head over Heels”, and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, the album went platinum 5 times in America.
When Songs From the Big Chair took off in such a big way, Smith and Orzabal agreed to take a long rest following the incessant touring and interviews that accompanied the project. After a much-needed break, the duo began writing again in late 1986 before entering the studio the following year. These sessions, however, weren’t fruitful.
“We wanted a more accessible feel to the music.” – Curt Smith
Smith told the Sun Sentinel, “We got together that year and started playing, and realized after several months, we really hated what we had done.” The band ended up throwing away 2 years’ worth of work. Smith added, “We realized we wanted to produce the new album ourselves. We wanted a more accessible feel to the music.”
The band added a young pianist and vocalist named Oleta Adams. The band spent nearly another year and a half working on new music, resulting in 1989’s album, Seeds of Love. The album contained more politically themed songs, a sign of a divided country during the re-election of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
While the album was a huge success, critically acclaimed and spurred several successful singles, the band wasn’t without their detractors. The Sun Sentinel wrote in 1990, “Because of the band’s unique writing style and penchant for avoiding conventional bridge and chorus formations, many have dubbed them pompous — throwbacks to the mid-’70s art-rock era that featured such groups as The Moody Blues and Genesis.”
Critics also accused the band of borrowing a bit too heavily from the Beatles. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” contains arrangements and several progressions that are similar to the Lennon-McCartney classic, “I Am the Walrus”.
Smith answered back these accusations, saying, “Well, yes, it was completely intentional but I think we did it in such a way that people liked it. I read that Paul McCartney said on Italian television that we’d ripped him off. Well, fair enough, we did but no one should own a rhythm. No one owns any kind of music.”
Curt Smith Leaves Tears for Fears
Despite their success, Smith and Orzabal seemed to know that the end was near for the time being. Smith left the band in the early ’90s, while Orzabal kept the band’s name.
Tears for Fears released a Greatest Hits album in 1992 but none of Smith’s compositions made the record. The Hartford Courant summarized the breakup and who the creative leader in the band was, “While he distinguished himself as the guy with the shorter hair, it was clear that Roland Orzabal was responsible for most of the band’s creative direction.”
The Washington Post echoed the same sentiment in 1993, “Tears for Fears had one guy who seemed to do all the work and all the talking, while the other one apparently just showed up for the video shoots.”
The band’s follow-up album, Elemental was released in 1993 and it was their last album with Phonogram and Mercury Records. Orzabal released another album under the Tears for Fears moniker in 1995 titled Raoul and The Kings of Spain before the band underwent a period of inactivity.
Everybody Loves a Happy Ending
In the early 2000s, the pair reconnected after dealing with some band-related business. Orzabal was still living in England, while Smith had moved to America. They reconvened and in 2004, released their first album together in nearly a decade, titled Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.
In the subsequent years, the band toured extensively with other ’80s era acts and celebrated the anniversary of their older albums, but not all of it was smooth sailing. Orzbul was dealing with turbulent times, reeling from the death of his longtime wife, Caroline in 2017, who he’d been married to since 1982. She dealt with addiction and mental illness, leading Orzabal into his own addiction before going to counselling.
Orzabal told MSN, “Things started to look up. I did therapy, grief counselling and a couple of rehabs, met a new woman, and my general demeanour and approach to life started to brighten up.”
Orzabal started writing new music with Smith, leading to the group’s latest record, Tipping Point, which was released in 2022 and peaked at No. 8 on the US Billboard album charts.
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