FEATURE:
Shout
Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair at Forty
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THE mighty Tears for Fears…
IN THIS PHOTO: Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears in London/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images
released their debut album, The Hurting, in 1983. I was born that year. I have listed to it in years since and there is a marked difference between the sound of that album and what they produced in 1985. Their second studio album, Songs from the Big Chair, was released on 25tth February, 1985 by Mercury. Songs from the Big Chair was a stylistic and sonic shift from The Hurting. That album contained darker, introspective Synth-Pop, whereas Songs from the Big Chair includes a more mainstream, guitar-based Pop-Rock sound. Reaching two in the U.K. and one in the U.S., this was a massive success story. I have written about this album before though, as it turns forty soon, I wanted to spotlight it again. A more politically conscious effort from Roland Orzabal and Ian Stanley, Songs from the Big Chair has endured to this day. I want to bring in some reviews and detailed features for this album. I am starting out with the full feature from Classic Pop. Writing in 2022, they observed how Tears for Fear made major waves on their debut but their follow-up made an even bigger impression:
“Having achieved a level of success which far exceeded everyone’s expectations with the synth-pop and psychoanalysis of 1983’s The Hurting notching up sales in excess of a million copies and scoring three Top 5 singles, pop’s patron saints of outsiders found themselves experiencing pressure of a different kind when it came to follow it up.
“I suppose our whole thrust, musically and philosophically, as Tears for Fears came out in The Hurting,” Roland Orzabal told Las Vegas Weekly. “When we finished that 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.”
Bowing to record label pressure to “strike while the iron’s hot”, the band returned to the studio to work on new material, the result of which was standalone single The Way You Are. Peaking at No.24, it was a commercial disappointment following the momentum they’d achieved from The Hurting – though the band themselves thought even that lowly chart position was better than it deserved, feeling angry that they had compromised themselves artistically to fulfil a commercial obligation.
“The Way You Are was the least favourite song of either of ours,” Curt Smith later told Consequence of Sound. “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. It was just so fragmented to me and so not a song; it’s just something created in the studio.
“We realised for us it’s the song first and then you produce it. With that we definitely produced it, made it different, made it clever, and I think it was a failure. For us personally, I don’t think it was anything we enjoyed. And I think it was listening to other people, and what we tend to do, and what we prefer to do, is just go away and make our own records.”
Writing in the liner notes to the B-sides and rarities compilation Saturnine Martial & Lunatic, Orzabal describes the song as, “the point we knew we had to change direction”, though they were unsure of which direction, feeling unsettled by the failure of the song. “It was a stuttering beginning to the whole Big Chair thing,” he said.
“The Way You Are didn’t do very well and that got us a little bit worried. And then we almost did the same thing with Mothers Talk, but the record company at that point said: ‘No. Stop. You’re not doing this kind of music. We need more oomph, more of a human side than what you’re doing. We want more guitars, we want more force.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ We re-recorded Mothers Talk in a much more robust way, but that set the tone then for the songs that followed. We had sort of broken the back of, in a sense, a new direction, which was less precious, less shoegazing, less moody, less black, as in a black mood.”
In order to create their desired sound described by Smith as, “a little more bombastic and a little more proud”, the band enlisted new musicians and worked briefly with Jeremy Green before reuniting with The Hurting’s producer Chris Hughes.
“After the first album was released, naturally, they went off and did their own thing,” Hughes told RBMA. “They were young pop stars, so they were doing tours, TV, and all that kind of stuff. I went off and did a Wang Chung album. When I finished that, I got a call from the group saying that they were looking to start their second album. They asked me if I wanted to hear some songs and to become involved again. It was quite easy, because by then, I knew them very well. When you’ve shared some success, those dialogues are always easier.”
To create something so different to The Hurting, the environment in which it was written and recorded was also markedly different.
“Making The Hurting had been a very, very painful process,” Orzabal reveals to Las Vegas Weekly. “We were young kids and spending a lot of time away from home. And it was just the way we were recording with Chris Hughes and Ross Cullum; there was so much analysis on every aspect of the recording, it just became a little bit too tedious. This time around, I bought a recording console and we put it in our keyboard player Ian Stanley’s house. And then all of a sudden we were going home every night and had familiar surroundings, surrounded by our girlfriends, wives, whatever. It was just so much easier.”
“It was a kind of hobby studio, really,” producer Chris Hughes told RBMA. “It wasn’t like a professional recording studio. We just built the record up over time at his place. It was essentially Roland, Ian and I working together as a three-piece. Then, Curt would come in and be involved with vocals and other ideas, but essentially, the day-to-day operations on that record was Roland, Ian, and I with Dave Bascombe who was the engineer.”
As well as having a base where they were surrounded by family and friends, the fact that they weren’t in an expensive studio paying by the day lent the sessions a laid-back feeling and allowed the song ideas to develop organically.
“Some of this music was worked out on a sofa,” Hughes recalls. “We weren’t in a big corporate recording studio, there would be people hanging around, our friends would come by – the house was quite large. During the evenings, girlfriends and friends would turn up. It wouldn’t be party time, but there was a good social scene – the vibe working on the album was great.”
“We would start working in the studio around 10am, and would finish around supper time at about 7 or 8pm. It would depend, though – obviously, if we were on to something and didn’t want to let it go or finish a section of [a track], our session would go on later and then we all might hang out and have a beer and maybe play some board games or something.”
Although Tears For Fears had evolved musically and adopted a much more upbeat sound for the record, they continued using psychotherapy as a source for their lyrics. Having been heavily influenced by Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy for The Hurting, they continued the theme of catharsis on the second album.
Feeling that each of the eight songs (as some were over six minutes long they could only fit eight onto a vinyl album) that made the album’s final tracklisting had its own unique personality so different to the other songs, they decided to title the album Songs From The Big Chair after the 1976 film Sybil in which Sally Field played a woman with multiple personality disorders whose only place of comfort is her therapist’s big chair.
“The title was my idea,” Curt Smith told Melody Maker upon the album’s release in 1985. “It’s a bit perverse but then you’ve got to understand our sense of humour. The ‘Big Chair’ idea is from this brilliant film called Sybil about a girl with 16 different personalities.
“She’d been tortured incredibly by her mother as a child and the only place she felt safe, the only time she could really be herself, was when she was sitting in her analyst’s chair. She felt safe, comfortable and wasn’t using her different faces as a defence. It’s kind of an ‘up yours’ to the English music press who really fucked us up for a while.”
Although Orzabal flippantly remarked that he believed fans “didn’t listen” to their songs’ message, his refusal to dumb down his lyrics when the band gravitated to a sound with the unabashed goal of trying “to sell more records” ensured his songcraft maintained its integrity however it was packaged. On face value, Songs From The Big Chair contained upbeat happy material, but under analysis, themes of war, loss, power and corruption remained prevalent.
Released on 25 February 1985, after Mothers Talk and Shout had become hits (No.14 and No.4 respectively), Songs From The Big Chair was met by a string of begrudgingly positive reviews from critics who’d been sharpening their knives for the almost unheard of two-year gap between albums.
The huge success of the LP’s third single, Everybody Wants To Rule The World sent it to its peak position of No.2 and ensured its omnipresence in the Top 10, where it remained for over six months and spawned two further hits in Head Over Heels and I Believe.
The success of the album translated internationally, with massive sales following across Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the US, where it topped the Billboard album chart and gave them two US No.1 singles in Shout and Everybody Wants To Rule The World, dictating the itinerary of a world tour that lasted almost a year.
Returning home in 1986, the band picked up the Brit Award for Best British Single for Everybody Wants To Rule The World, a song which returned to the charts later that year as Everybody Wants To Run The World, a re-recording of the track which was the official single for Sport Aid, something the band agreed to do after being forced to cancel their Live Aid performance.
The pinnacle of Tears For Fears’ success, Songs From The Big Chair went on to achieve eventual sales of more than eight million copies – definitely something worth shouting about”.
If you have never heard the album or know only one or two songs from it then I would encourage you to listen to it. I think so many of its lyrics are relevant today. I will move to Albumism and their words regarding one of the best and most important albums of the 1980s. Tears for Fears would follow Songs from the Big Chair with 1989’s Sowing the Seeds of Love:
“With Hughes and Stanley ever present to contribute and bounce ideas off, Orzabal is more adventurous with his writing and arrangements. Striking a fine balance of collaboration and contribution, he plays to his strengths as well as those of Curt Smith.
This is evidenced in the ambitious departure that was “Everybody Wants To Rule The World.” With a shuffling back beat and bouncy bassline, the song was a manifestation of their desire to become more pop focused. On first listen, the twinkly guitar line, the sing-song nature of the hook, and shimmering production belie the darker content of the lyrics. Addressing greed, a lust for power, and the politics of the cold war, “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” is the cheery song you sing amidst the destruction, “holding hands while the walls come tumbling down.” In a moment of pop-meta, they even manage to reference the success of “Shout,” its truncation, and the ambition that accompanied its release with the quip “So glad we’ve almost made it / So sad they had to fade it.”
In a way to perhaps soften the content of the lyrics, Orzabal hands over the lead vocal duties to Smith who adds a sense of innocence and romanticism to the narrative; suddenly lines like “holding hands while the walls come tumbling down” have a tender element to them, a sense of surviving whatever the world throws at you, as long as you are together.
“Everybody Wants To Rule The World” would become a worldwide smash, and in a twisted act of self-fulfilling prophecy, it became the song that would indeed rule the world, helping the band realize the success they longed for.
If “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” was Tears For Fears’ shimmering pop at its apex, then “Mother’s Talk” was its antithesis. In its rerecorded form, it dials everything up. Opening with Barry Manilow sampled strings (itself a bold move) and pounding, hard-hitting industrial beats as its constant, “Mother’s Talk” captures the paranoia of the Cold War era and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Drawing from the 1982 graphic novel When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, “Mother’s Talk” is an almost romantic telling of life under threat of the mushroom cloud mixed with the usual teenage angst reflecting on the pressures of growing up. Lines originally written about the Nuclear extinction, today play as observations on pending climate change where “Some of us are horrified / Other’s never talk about it / But when the weather starts to burn / Then you’ll know that you’re in trouble.” With a swirling cacophony bleeding through the track, the pressure of the song builds and feels pleasantly unrelenting. But with each circling of the chorus, there is an underlying optimism and sense of hope as the refrain “We can work it out” sounds.
As a way of closing out Side A, “Mother’s Talk” presents all the brash ambition and experimentation of Tears For Fears, front and center. It’s a whirling exploration of the sonic landscape and is the exclamation point on their new direction.
Side B by contrast begins with the quiet confidence of “I Believe,” a soulful, sparse arrangement of climbing piano notes, soothing chords, jazz time drums and Orzabal’s searching voice. It’s a raw and honest song that nods to the stylings of singer-songwriter Robert Wyatt (alluded to in the liner notes and on the single’s B-side retelling on Wyatt’s “Sea Song). “I Believe” is a song that provided a sense of comfort and warmth and seemed tailor made for late night listening sessions with the song on endless loop.
“Broken” returns the focus to strong, pulsating tracks. Without knowing Smith and Orzabal’s affinity for Arthur Janov’s “Primal Scream” therapy references, the song was still an obvious nod to the idea of “If you show the boy I’ll show you the man” and the pangs of youth and growing up. There’s also the melodic foreshadowing taking place with the signature melody of “Head Over Heels” sprinkled throughout, and both songs share the final line “One little boy anger one little man / Funny how time flies.” Lyrically there was a kind of comfort in the admission that life isn’t perfect, that we can stop “believing everything will be alright” and that despite the best intentions of our parents—or in some cases as a direct result of their actions—we are all broken. Life isn’t perfect. It’s messy. But within are moments of realness and beauty.
This is melodically represented by the “love song” of the album, “Head Over Heels.” I place “love song” in inverted commas because as Orzabal confesses, it “goes a little perverse in the end.” As, surprisingly, the only song on the album written by the duo, “Head Over Heels” presents a yin-yang approach to the idea of love. There’s a skepticism present and an element of surprise with love as inertia, creeping up on its subject and then, bam—“Something happens and I’m Head Over Heels / I never find out ‘til I’m Head Over Heels.” Melodically beautiful and captivating, “Head Over Hills” features some of Smith’s best bass work and the lyrical trade-off between him and Orzabal give the song a greater sense of support and purpose. A gorgeous example of the duo’s songcraft, “Head Over Heels” mixes ‘80s production with “Hey Jude” inspired singalong “La Las” and is joyous pop perfection.
Bookended with “Broken” (Live), this triplet of tracks takes you on a trippy, winding musical journey. One filled with a sense of exuberance with the final retelling of “Broken” as if somewhere in the middle, love made things bearable.
When you think back to Songs From The Big Chair, most people will recall the more pop oriented hits of “Shout” or “Everybody Wants To Rule The World.” What most forget is that in the full collection of songs, there’s quite an exploratory, experimental edge to the album. “Listen” is a prime example of this, with its multilayered ambience meets world music ethos. Ethereal and almost otherworldly, “Listen” binds political unrest to personal suffering in a beautifully haunting way. If “Shout” was the song to wake the world up, “Listen” is the one that will soothe its turmoil and let it drift off to dream.
With their second album, Tears For Fears had big ambitions. They set about making an album that cemented their place in the pop landscape. In doing so, they delivered an album that transcended it. A timeless album of prog-pop that still holds its vitality and urgency today, losing none of its luster, Songs From The Big Chair remains a must-own album for anyone passionate about music”.
I am going to end with a review from Pitchfork. They reviewed the album in 2017 and wrote how Songs from the Big Chair features “personal psychology, meticulous compositions, and world-sized choruses evoked the loss of control in an overwhelming era”. It is a work that still moves and creates reactions to this day:
“On their second LP, 1985’s Songs From the Big Chair, Tears for Fears took a cue from Lennon and applied what they’d learned from Janov toward studies of single subjects: money, power, love, war, faith. But where Lennon went small, Tears for Fears went huge. They took the goth and synth-pop foundation they constructed on their debut, 1983’s The Hurting, and piled on saxophone, Fairlights, guitar solos, samplers, and live drums on top of drum machines. They wrote cresting choruses, arena-ready anthems, elegant ballads, and multi-section songs that have more in common with prog-rock than most of new wave. And they improbably created not just one of the biggest albums of the 1980s, but an album that manages to exude the 1980s in the same way that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours conveys the lonely narcissism and hedonism of the ’70s, or Love’s Forever Changes captures both the bliss and the ominousness of the Summer of Love.
When Smith and Tears for Fears co-singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Roland Orzabal went to record Songs From the Big Chair, the two possessed the kind of ambition necessary to produce an era-defining album. More than anything, Tears for Fears felt like they had something to prove to both critics and to themselves.
The Hurting went to number one on the UK album charts, sold a million copies, and yielded three top-five singles—“Mad World,” “Pale Shelter,” and “Change”—but the UK music press approached it with near hostility. In his review of the album for NME, Gavin Martin writes, “Sure, they may be popular—so was the Reverend Jim Jones when he took 5,000 followers to Guyana to commit mass suicide.” Orzabal told The Quietus, in an interview, “We weren’t particularly liked by some of the music journals. If you were on the front cover of Smash Hits, you were doomed.”
Part of the problem was that Tears for Fears came off as being too sincere—The Hurting was so explicit about its debt to Janov and The Primal Scream, and so lacking in subtlety, that the album cover depicted a child holding his head in his hands. But that sincerity belies the cosmetic gloss of the music. With its gleaming synthesizers, tight drum-machine programming, and minor-key melodies, The Hurting is a hallmark of early-80s dark wave and goth. That beauty came with a price: “It ended up taking a lot of time and costing a lot of money because we were fussy,” Smith told Hall. “The problem with it taking so long was that when we looked back at tracks we’d done months before we’d think, ‘Ooh, I don’t like that.’”
For Songs From the Big Chair, the band regrouped at their keyboardist Ian Stanley’s home studio in Somerset and rehired Chris Hughes, who also produced The Hurting. After a few false starts, Orzabal formed a brain trust of himself, Hughes, and Stanley, with Dave Bascombe providing engineering assistance and Smith signing off on ideas and making suggestions. They took inspiration from the music they were listening to, cerebral art-rock by Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, and Peter Gabriel. Smith confessed that his favorite album at the time was the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops. He could tell the Blue Nile had total artistic control—the music sounded calculated, finessed, meticulous.
In the documentary Scenes From the Big Chair, Orzabal revealed that the method Tears for Fears adopted was “fitting songs into interesting sounds.” To create the sounds, the squad in Somerset set up a formidable assembly of equipment: “a LinnDrum II box, a Drumulator drum box, a Roland Super Jupiter synthesizer, a Fairlight synthesizer, a DX7 keyboard, a rack of guitars, a Steinberger Bass, a Fender Stratocaster and a Gretsch maple drum kit,” according to Hughes. The main foursome would go in the studio from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week. They started by experimenting with individual fragments and then building them out. They took their time and loosened up their approach. Most importantly, they enjoyed themselves.
No track on Songs From the Big Chair exemplifies this free-roaming, tessellating approach more than its opener, the No. 1 single “Shout.” As Hughes told RBMA, “[Roland] set up a little drum box and a little synthesizer with a bass tone. He pressed the button on the drum box, and he programmed this little beat and it had these little chimey bells and a clapping drum beat. He pressed one of the keys and started singing, ‘Shout. Shout. Let it all out.’”
The template was an opportunity for Hughes, Orzabal, and Stanley to indulge. The structure of “Shout” is minimal, just one or two vocal melodies played over a steady drumbeat for around six-and-a-half minutes. But the thrust of the song is repetition, because as the hook grows and grows, the band keeps adding patches and instruments that compound the potency of the songwriting: a Fairlight-programmed ghostly synth-flute line, chippy guitar licks, and then a perfectly timed breakdown at 2:40, with a warped keyboard patch followed by a huge rush of Hammond organ and then a return to that earlier synth-flute, in a sequence that sounds like a brass band bursting through, then all of it blanketed by heavy-feedback guitars and backup vocals, a knifelike guitar solo running on top, and Orzabal and Smith still singing: “Shout. Shout. Let it all out/These are the things I can do without.”
“Shout” sounds tough. The drumbeat has an industrial, boxy shape and texture that resembles a march, with Orzabal and Smith’s joint vocals delivered almost as a chant. The song is just as explicit about primal therapy as virtually any other Tears for Fears track that predates it. But it’s less egregious, even though the execution is more direct. From the outset, Tears for Fears sound like they have a real purpose. The end of the verse is a declaration: I’m talking to you.
Tears for Fears named Songs From the Big Chair after the 1976 TV movie Sybil, in which Sally Field plays the title character, a woman with multiple personality disorder who could only prevent herself from using her different guises as defense mechanisms when she was sitting in her analyst’s chair. But the title also smartly references the music—because the songs all pertain to different sides of Tears for Fears’ personality—and that the band are delivering the album from an assured psychological state.
Tears for Fears could harness their self-confidence for a variety of tones and subjects, something that’s evident on “Head Over Heels,” another one of Songs From the Big Chair’s major singles. Whereas “Shout” is brooding and martial, “Head Over Heels” is dreamy and skeptical, with its glimpses of the joys of relationship chitchat (“I wanted to be with you alone /And talk about the weather”) and its swooning chorus, clouded in the band’s heavy, misty production. The music contradicts the narrative, in which the protagonist sabotages courtship because of his own self-hatred (“I made a fire, I’m watching it burn/I thought of your future”) and doubts that he can ever truly be in love (“I’m lost in admiration, could I need you this much?”). At this point, Tears for Fears could address their own insecurities without appearing wimpy or self-absorbed”.
Produced by Chris Hughes and released on 25th February, 1985, we are about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Songs from the Big Chair. Everybody Wants to Rule the World is the first song I ever heard and, as it has a special place in my heart, so too does the album it came from. Tears for Fear released their seventh studio album, The Tipping Point, in 2022. It is great that they still tour and play songs from their second studio album. Many people’s favourites. When they do deliver these epic songs, they reach new listeners. Songs from the Big Chair is a masterpiece that will endure and resonate…
DECADES from now.