Tears For Fears: "Musically, we feel we are the best we’ve ever been"

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith met in their hometown of Bath, when they were 14, bonding over a shared love of heavy rock music like Thin Lizzy and Blue Öyster Cult, and later over Arthur Janov’s concept of primal therapy, particularly its focus on repressing emotions from childhood. One of the tenets of Janov is that repressed pain can be resolved through re-experiencing the incident during therapy, hence the name Tears For Fears.

“The Bath music scene was dominated by the sounds emerging from Crescent Studios, where Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and The Korgis recorded,” says Roland. “S0 we were aware of the cosy Bath sound, which was always pop, always a little bit vain. We were also aware of the Bristol sound and how cool that was, in terms of the personalities. It was always a competition between Bath and Bristol. And Bath had the pop hits, right? It was only until later, in the ‘90s, with people like Roni Size, Massive Attack and Portishead, that Bristol finally won and shoved two fingers up to Bath.”

Later, Roland played in a mod revival/new wave band called Graduate, whose wonderfully titled ‘Elvis Should Play Ska’ proved a minor hit. Dissatisfied with a series of unreliable bass players, he looked up his old pal, “who was a singer who didn’t play bass at all,” Curt quips.

“What I hadn’t realised at the time,” Roland expands, “ was that by inviting Curt into the band, I was also sowing its downfall. Curt and I always had a lot in common. We’re both the middle children of three boys, we both came from broken homes, and we both got into this thing called primal scream, or primal therapy. We both believed and became evangelical about it. Our philosophy and approach to life was different to the rest of the band, totally different.

“They were great guys, they’re still great guys, but we were united by these forces and we decided we’d go off on our own. And it coincided with a time where synthesisers were coming into fashion. The duo became de rigueur - people like Soft Cell and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. It allowed Curt and I to jettison the band, because we could use synthesisers and a drum machine and recreate what a band was doing.”

During their Graduate recording days, Curt and Roland would invariably find themselves in front of the mixing desk.

“We were interested in sounds and how the record would end up sounding,” Curt explains. “We were curious about music, production and sound, and we still are. We certainly have not got to perfection yet, so the reason you do it is to try and achieve that. Undoubtedly, we never will, but we try.”

You’ve made a rather good shot at it, more than a few times, I suggest. I point out the timeless nature of Tears For Fears songs, which continue to attract a young audience mixed in with TFF lifers. Take ‘Mad World’ from their debut album The Hurting – I propose it’s as relevant today as it was in the early ‘80s.

“I had the radio on all the time,” Roland details, “and amidst all these chart-toppers was a song by Duran Duran called ‘Girls On Film’. Now I didn’t particularly like them, but I liked the guitar part. It was first down beat on the beat, with second down beat pushed – it’s as simple as that. So I wrote ‘Mad World’ in about five minutes, and it was up-tempo and on the guitar.

“We’d also been listening to a band we really loved called Dalek, I Love You, who were a synthesiser band. So it was a combination of all of that, plus a little bit of Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’. We thought it was a good b-side for ‘Pale Shelter’. We put the track onto synthesisers and drum machine, Curt sang it, and it just utterly transformed the song.”

The record company flipped it to be the a-side, and ‘Mad World’ was the band’s first top five single and continues to strike home. I wonder, considering Roland & Curt’s evangelical zeal for Janov, is there a Jungian archetype at play, in which people can see themselves in songs such as ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’?

“That’s an interesting question,” Roland replies. “We could talk forever about Jungian archetypes, and why Curt and I have longevity. We can talk about the planet Saturn and the archetype of the senex, the wise old man, but we won’t! I do think though there’s always been a dichotomy between what we were saying and how we were presenting the songs. So, you get a song like ‘Mad World’, for instance, or ‘Everybody Wants to Rule The World’. Some people used to believe that was a pro Republican, pro right-wing son. That it was happy about, ‘Yes, everyone wants to rule the world. It’s fine. Lift yourself up. It’s possible for anyone.’ It wasn’t about that at all. It was written during the Cold War.”

“It definitely still resonates,” Curt continues. “Obviously, our audience is far broader now in age range, that’s a lot to do with who’s covered our music [Lorde, Brandi Carlile, Lily Allen], who’s sampled our music [Kanye, The Weeknd, David Guetta, Drake], people mentioning that they’re influenced by us. But you know, The Hurting and Songs From The Big Chair resonate with people of the age we were when those songs were released. For instance, we were playing a festival called Bonnaroo that was primarily 18- to 25-year-olds, and this entire audience was singing all the lyrics to the songs from The Hurting, and that album wasn’t a big hit in America. But younger kids now, or young adults now, relate to it – it’s the emotions they’re going through.”

TFF follow their superb return to form on 2022’s The Tipping Point with Songs For A Nervous Planet, the band’s first live album.

“When we played The Tipping Point live,” Curt says, “and placed the new songs in with the old songs, we realised, and the audience realised, that the new songs are as strong as the old songs. We felt it was the right time to release a live album. Musically, we feel we are the best we’ve ever been.”

The album also includes four new studio tracks, ‘Astronaut’, ‘The Girl That I Call Home’, ‘Emily Said’ and ‘Say Goodbye To Mum And Dad’.

“Faced with the success of The Tipping Point,” Roland says, “we were like, ‘Don’t fuck it up. Just don’t fuck it up.’ So how do you follow that up? We both independently said a live album, because of the programming and because of the music industry need for a greatest hits-type record. At the same time as that was going on, we felt so strongly about the new songs, we decided to make things interesting and put together new songs and a live album.”

Along with the album, the duo have presented their global fanbase with a stunning concert film, shot and recorded at the scenic FirstBank Amphitheater at Graystone Quarry in Franklin, TN, during their sold-out, global Tipping Point Tour Part 2. Watching it, the first thing that strikes you is this is a guitar band, whereas many people probably expect two dudes stood behind two synths, Kraftwerk-style

They both laugh loudly.

“That’s another good reason to release it,” says Curt. “People, because they see us as a duo, presume it’s a couple of synthesisers. But as you mentioned, both of us play guitar, so, it was always weird for us to have that label. Obviously, people that have been to see us know that’s not the case, but yes, there’s a large swathe of our audience that has never been to see us. They don’t realise that we’re a live band, we have great musicians who play with us. And we play much better than we ever did, sing better than we ever did. So it seemed the right time to release a live show on film.”

Songs For A Nervous Planet is out now.