Songs From the Big Chair

Welcome to your life. From the moment you enter the world, you’re traumatized, first by your very birth, then by every subsequent moment of your existence, each of which will have a profound and significant effect on your behavior; in childhood, when you experience emotional distress, that pain remains, buried underneath time and memory.

In 1970, the psychologist Arthur Janov published The Primal Scream, in which he detailed his theory that the neuroses and baggage that adults carry with them are caused by repressed traumatic events from childhood. The same year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono underwent therapy sessions with Janov for about five months. Lennon channeled his experiences into his solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He created one album out of his encounters with Janov; Tears for Fears based their entire career off of Janov’s work.

Even the band’s name is derived from The Primal Scream, on a theory of children’s nightmares. “Basically, if they are allowed to be themselves in their waking hours and are allowed to let their natural crying out, then they won’t dream up monsters at night to be scared of because they can’t face the reality of being scared of their parents,” bassist and co-singer Curt Smith told Will Hall, the author of Tears for Fears . . . Tales From the Big Chair. “Since emotional stress is the central issue here, the solution... is to encourage an emotional response so intense that the years of hidden anger and hurt are allowed to surface from the depths of the unconscious.”

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.

Songs From the Big Chair’s two ballads, “I Believe” and “Listen,” also manage to avoid preciousness or campiness, impressive because they’re the two parts of the album that most expose Tears for Fears’ love of progressive art-rock. “I Believe,” a gentle track that sounds like it was recorded in a piano bar, greatly resembles Robert Wyatt’s quirky, curling songwriting. The band is forthright about Wyatt’s influence, as corroborated by their engrossing, bare-bones cover of the singer-songwriter’s “Sea Song,” the B-side to “I Believe.” On the symphonic, largely instrumental “Listen,” pockets of blobby keyboard and electric guitar course through the song, with a world-music chorus at the end that sounds like a mash-up of Gabriel’s Security and Jon Hassell and Eno’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.

The first two verses of “Listen” also address the then-ongoing Cold War, and Songs From the Big Chair finds Tears for Fears engaging with politics more than ever before. On their first single, the propulsive “Mothers Talk,” the band juxtapose themes of motherhood with protests against nuclear war (“But when the weather starts to burn /Then you’ll know that you’re in trouble”), a canny insinuation that unresolved maternal issues lead to violence. On the simmering, nocturnal “The Working Hour,” Orzabal takes on the music business; its chorus, “This is the working hour/We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes,” straight-up calls out how record companies turn fun and creativity into manual labor and profit from it in the process.

Tears for Fears synthesize all of the threads on Songs From the Big Chair—intricacy, romance, psychology, and politics—on the album’s centerpiece, the everlasting “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Hughes says that he, Orzabal, and Stanley put the song together in a week, astonishing because the track has so many components: the twinkling synth at the beginning joined by a spider-like guitar, the snappy instrumental lead-up to the opening verse, the shuffling drum beat, the chorus, the galvanizing bridge, a moody instrumental passage, a guitar solo, a new melody for a verse afterwards, another guitar solo. And the genius of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is how it escalates, how each part increasingly amplifies the passion of the music.

More than any other Tears for Fears track, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” most successfully transposes Janov’s psychological texts into a pop song with global resonance. Though “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is obviously a meditation on power, you could project virtually every major issue of the 1980s onto the lyrics: the environment (“Turn your back on mother nature”), the fleeting nature of financial success (“Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure/Nothing ever lasts forever”), authoritarian rule (“Even while we sleep/We will find you”), and the Cold War (“Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down”).

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is a song with a near-universal appeal, and likewise Songs From the Big Chair seemed to resonate with everyone—jocks, goths, pre-teens, adults. “At our gigs, you’ll get young girls at the front, the Joy Division fans at the back and even some hippies putting in an appearance,” Smith told Hall. “Our fan mail is certainly very varied, containing letters from everyone from twelve-year-old girls to mothers with five-year-old daughters.”

It took four years for Tears for Fears to follow up Songs From the Big Chair, and what came out of it was The Seeds of Love, an overambitious, elaborate, refined, and somewhat underrated album. Orzabal supposedly alienated everyone—Smith, Hughes, and Stanley—during its production, mostly due to his perfectionism. For a while, it seemed Tears for Fears had faded away, a relic of an era too gauche to respect anymore. The only place you might find them was on “Dennis Miller Live,” which used “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as its opening theme.

Then, Tears for Fears turned up in an unlikely place: Donnie Darko, a film that subverts ’80s teen movies. “Head Over Heels” is memorably included during a slow-motion montage, but Tears for Fears were mostly rediscovered by younger audiences thanks to Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World.” By peeling away all the circuitry and flash of the original, replacing the gizmos with mostly non-electronic instruments, and slowing the tempo, Andrews and Jules exposed “Mad World” as the post-9/11 emo ballad it was perhaps destined to be. As the 2000s progressed, you’d hear Tears for Fears incrementally more often. In 2008 Kanye West sampled the chorus of The Hurting’s “Memories Fade” on “Coldest Winter,” from 808s & Heartbreak, coincidentally about an artist trying to deal with the death of his mother.

Today you’ll hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” all over the place—it’s a staple of classic-rock radio, pharmacies, bars, and parties. But at its core the song is still dealing with Janov; with how, ultimately, what human beings want is control, and the inability to control your own life is misdirected into a desire to overpower other people. It’s a constant with Songs From the Big Chair: interior drama is construed as being about collective suffering. Personal chaos is universal. Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.

Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair

$40 at Rough Trade