FEATURE:
Ideas as Opiates
Tears for Fears’ The Hurting at Forty
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MY first experience of Tears for Fears…
would have been when their second studio album, Songs from the Big Chair, was released in 1985. My first memory of life was a song from that album, Everybody Wants to Rule the World. I love that track so much, and I have fond and personal attachments to the album. The English band, led by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, released their debut, The Hurting, on 7th March, 1983. Released a couple of months before I was born, I wanted to spend some time with a remarkable debut that is forty very soon. Featuring huge songs like Change and Mad World, the album is a classic. Even if there has been some ageing regarding some of the production and compositional touches, The Hurting still sounds essential and relevant. I have been playing it a bit recently, and I love everything about it. In 1983, when it was released, there were positive reviews. There were a lot of critics who were sniffy and wrote Tears for Fears off. Feeling they were pale imitators of other synth-led groups, maybe a lot of the music was laboured. Retrospective reviews have been a lot kinder. I guess it must have been unusual hearing an album like The Hurting 1983. Maybe some did not know what to make of it. Now, we consider it to be a classic! I will come to a couple of reviews for Tears for Fears’ debut soon. Before then, Classic Pop wrote a feature in 2021 that told the story of The Hurting. Mixing lyrics of childhood traumas and pairing them with a Synth-Pop palette is an intoxicating and potent blend:
“In 1983 Tears For Fears’ The Hurting introduced the world to a band that blended bleak musings on the long-term effects of childhood trauma with a razor-sharp synth-pop instinct. The result: an instant classic… By Wyndham Wallace
When Roland Orzabal was growing up – first in Portsmouth and later in Bath – his parents ran an entertainment agency for working men’s clubs. Among the guests auditioning at his home were singers, ventriloquists and strippers; even his mother was a stripper.
It was, you might say, inevitable that he’d end up on stage himself. But if this sounds like a boisterous childhood, behind the curtains things were less happy. Orzabal’s parents were at loggerheads: his father, a WW2 veteran, was far from healthy and given to fits of fury that drove his wife away after bursts of domestic violence.
But Roland was about to meet his future musical partner Curt Smith, who was also enduring a troubled childhood, growing up on a local council estate in a broken home where money was a significant problem.
“He was a lot more rebellious than I was,” Orzabal recalls, “which shocked me because I was a good boy at school and quite conservative as a character. We were out once in Bath, and a police car pulled up and said, ‘Come with me.’ Curt stole a couple of violins from the school for my birthday present. Not that I played the violin!”
Thankfully, Orzabal’s musical partnership with Smith would flourish in other ways and lead to the monumental 1983 album The Hurting.
That album – and, to a degree, 1985’s multi-million-selling follow-up, Songs From The Big Chair – were, as Smith puts it, therapeutic attempts to “find out why our backgrounds were so messed up”.
Orzabal found Smith’s recklessness as appealing as Smith found Orzabal’s intellect, but the two really gelled after Orzabal’s guitar teacher pressed a copy of The Primal Scream, by US psychotherapist Arthur Janov, into his hands. Orzabal was already buried in existentialist books by the likes of Sartre and Beckett, and this new addition to his library became his bible.
“Aged 17 or 18, I was an absolute convert to Janovian ‘primal theory’,” Orzabal says, though Smith adds that, “The fact that you’re screwed up because of your parents is hardly brain surgery. We were both slightly evangelical about it.”
Nowadays, Orzabal jokes that his pious proselytism turned him into “a primal bore”. But, as the two of them sought to make sense of their psyches, Janov’s tactics – to revisit childhood trauma – provided a framework for their lives to such an extent that it would eventually give them a name for their band.
Tears For Fears, however, was not their first musical endeavour together. They’d already experimented with friends, playing everything from folk to rock, and signed their first deal at 18 with a moddish band called Graduate, known in Spain for their radio hit Elvis Should Play Ska.
The band recorded one album, but the experience was most notable, Smith argues, for teaching them “what not to do: we learned that we weren’t made for travelling in two mini-vans. I don’t think we were comfortable in the live setting. And we don’t like being in five-person democracies where we constantly get outvoted by the others, even though we’re the only two that write songs.”
Inspired in part by Gary Numan, whose use of technology proved that you didn’t need a band to make music, they split from Graduate and set about recording as a duo.
Hooking up with local producer David Lord – who’d already co-produced The Korgis’ Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime, and who’d soon helm Peter Gabriel’s fourth album – they demoed their first songs, including Suffer The Children, at Bath’s Crescent Studios.
A meeting at a “vegetarian disco” (in fact, the city’s enduring Moles club) with Ian Stanley – a “rich kid”, Smith says, who had his own studio and would go on to join the band on keyboards – allowed them to experiment with their sound.
Their publishing company from their Graduate days, run by Tony Hatch, composer of the Crossroads theme, helped get them signed. Only two showed interest: A&M, and Polygram’s David Bates, who recalls how he nearly let the band slip through his fingers after being played songs by the publisher’s representative, Les Burgess.
“Les’ job was to visit A&R managers and play them songs in the hope that one would be picked and used for a recording session,” says Bates. “As usual, I had no artists looking for songs. After he’d gone, I thought about one of the cassettes I’d heard. I ran after him, stopped the lift, asked for the cassette and told him I wanted to listen to it a couple of times over the week. After another play, I was sure the songwriters would be an interesting act.”
To the duo, the only surprise was that it took so long to get a deal. “We were sure of ourselves,” Smith smiles. “I remember arguing with A&R people that turned us down. I’d say, ‘Well, you’ll be sorry one day…’”
But their confidence required stamina. The deal with Polygram was only for two singles, and neither 1981’s Suffer The Children nor 1982’s Pale Shelter (produced by ex-Gong member Mike Howlett) charted.
“Normally, you’re either a critically acclaimed band that are pretty deep,” Smith elaborates of the difficulties they faced making commercial headway, “or you’re a pop band, and never the twain shall meet. But we achieved that. We had the screaming girls, which is the pop side, and we had people analysing our lyrics. College kids who were deeper thinkers appreciated us. So it was a weird mixture and people didn’t quite understand”.
I don’t think there is a fortieth anniversary release of The Hurting. I am ending with a review that assessed the thirtieth anniversary edition. Before that, AllMusic had their say about the introduction of the magnificent Tears for Fears. Its subject matter and lyrical approach, if presented and composed differently, could have alienated listeners. The compositional skills and instincts of Roland Orzabal as a songwriter ensures that the album is as embracing and accessible as it is deep and personal:
“The Hurting would have been a daring debut for a pop-oriented band in any era, but it was an unexpected success in England in 1983, mostly by virtue of its makers' ability to package an unpleasant subject -- the psychologically wretched family histories of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith -- in an attractive and sellable musical format. Not that there weren't a few predecessors, most obviously John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album -- which was also, not coincidentally, inspired by the work of primal scream pioneer Arthur Janov. (But Lennon had the advantage of being an ex-Beatle when that meant the equivalent to having a box next to God's in the great arena of life, where Tears for Fears were just starting out.) Decades later, "Pale Shelter," "Ideas as Opiates," "Memories Fade," "Suffer the Children," "Watch Me Bleed," "Change," and "Start of the Breakdown" are powerful pieces of music, beautifully executed in an almost minimalist style. "Memories Fade" offers emotional resonances reminiscent of "Working Class Hero," while "Pale Shelter" functions on a wholly different level, an exquisite sonic painting sweeping the listener up in layers of pulsing synthesizers, acoustic guitar arpeggios, and sheets of electronic sound (and anticipating the sonic texture, if not the precise sound of their international breakthrough pop hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"). The work is sometimes uncomfortably personal, but musically compelling enough to bring it back across the decades”.
I will wrap up with The Line of Best Fit’s view on The Hurting’s thirtieth anniversary release. They make some interesting observations about a classic album that was released into the world in 1983. I hope people listen to it a lot on its anniversary on 7th March:
“Tears For Fears were a curio when this album was originally released. Keeping company with pastel-suited guys on boats like Duran Duran, the superficial sophistication of Spandau Ballet and the white smiles and tight white shorts of Wham, they kind of fitted in, but with a darker, more intelligent edge.
It was an edge which had them bridging the gap between Echo and The Bunnymen and grinning one hit idiots thankfully now forgotten, and whilst Simon Le Bon ponced around singing nonsense about girls called Rio, Tears For Fears imparted morose lines like “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”.
Fast forward six years and you find a band whose critical fall from grace was swift and drastic. Acid house was in, indulgent four year gaps between albums crammed with Beatles pastiches were most definitely out. Acid cleared out a lot of older established rock acts, and Tears For Fears were part of said clear out. It was a cruel twist of fate that could have been avoided if they didn’t spend the subsequent four years after their period of biggest success obsessing over hi-hat sounds for months on end.
With the benefit of several elapsed decades, their influence is now clear to see; Editors, Bombay Bicycle Club, Coldplay, in fact any band of kids playing eighties tinged indie, it all begins here. Although this, their debut, is nowhere near as fully formed as the colossal selling worldwide hit, 1985′s classic Songs From the Big Chair, it contains some of the catchiest songs about primal scream therapy techniques, broken relationships, childhood psychological issues and postnatal depression you’ll find, and despite this subject matter, it spawned hit after hit.
There’s no denying The Hurting has aged, course it has, its thirty, and being thirty means you get fretless bass, electronic drum pads, synths and sax solos alongside really bad videos. But as pop has proven to eat itself, The Hurting has remained relevant through the continuing slew of acts seeking to add poppy choruses their existential angst.
As a duo, Curt Smith was given the poppier songs to sing – “Mad World”, “Pale Shelter”, “Change” – but as principle songwriter, Roland Orzabal tackled the more brooding introspective material. It’s these tracks that really stand out now.
“Ideas as Opiates”, with its minimal electronic beat and yearning vocals, shows off a deep and artistic side that the singles didn’t indicate was there, while “Suffer The Children” and “Watch Me Bleed” are guitar based indie tracks, the lack of synths has these tracks still sounding contemporary, and the wailing saxophone solo on “Memories Fade” instantly dates the track, it still retains its side one, track five charm, the sad one before you had to get up to turn the album over”.
As it turns forty on 7th March, I wanted to pay tribute to the remarkable debut album from Tears for Fears. The Hurting was not a success in the U.S., but it did reach number one here in 1983. Forty years later, and the songs from the album are still played widely. Maybe more people associate Tears for Fears with Songs from the Big Chair, but their debut is remarkable. If you are new to the album or have not heard it in a while, then spend some time…
WITH it today.