Tears for Fears Lived to Tell the Tale

I dream about my father a lot, but only as his body boogies beyond the vignettes of flames. There he is, in the backyard behind the house I grew up in, dancing near a fire pit under the cover of a clear, bluish Midwest evening. On our picnic table sits a portable Sylvania boombox blasting 98.9, the Mahoning Valley’s local non-stop pop station. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” tumbles out of the silver speakers, and a menagerie of Yamaha DX7 and Prophet T-8 synthesizers, a PPG Wave synth-bass and LinnDrums wraps itself around the fumes of way-too-much tiki torch fluid. The mosquitos wouldn’t dare bring their needle-mouths around on a night like this. In my memory, this is the last time my father and I are both happy, together. We are laughing and we are moving. The fireworks shouting due east explode in the context of us, not the other way around.

I have heard thousands of songs, and I have listened to thousands of albums. And I am constantly hearing a familiar song and, habitually, saying, “This is my favorite song.” Last year, my partner urged me to keep a running tally of every track I’ve given that label to. Now, there’s a playlist on my phone of all the culprits, a mix totaling more than 18 hours. And while Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes,” Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song,” WAR’s “Summer” and the Capris’ “There’s a Moon Out Tonight” are like museums to me, the greatest piece of music I have ever encountered remains Songs from the Big Chair, Tears for Fears’ gentle storm of decade-defining pop music—an album so great it topped the Billboard charts, spawned immortal hit songs and made Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal household names across generations. And my favorite song is, always, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” written by a couple of 24-year-olds, is culturally ubiquitous. The track soared to #1 on eight different charts, including the Hot 100, selling more than two million units and going platinum 16 times across Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand and the band’s native United Kingdom. MTV played its music video constantly throughout 1985, and the song went on to win a Brit Award before becoming the theme music for Dennis Miller Live. There’s a rock fable about the Clash’s Joe Strummer not only accusing Tears for Fears of lifting the song’s title from a line in “Charlie Don’t Surf,” but about Roland pulling a £5 note out of his wallet and giving it to Strummer on account of his and Curt’s “plagiarism.” The song later got a re-recorded version—re-titled “Everybody Wants to Run the World”—that features a melody turn that sounds like a horn ensemble but is, as Roland clarifies, “sampled brass,” that the band made for Sport Aid in 1986, an arrangement done as Curt and Roland were “kissing and making up” with Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof.

In July 1985, Live Aid was set to happen at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia simultaneously. Artists like Sade, Phil Collins, Queen, the Who, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Judas Priest, the Beach Boys, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and Duran Duran were scheduled to perform intercontinentally. Tears for Fears were, at the time, in the middle of a year-long tour that was, in Curt’s words, killing them, both emotionally and physically. The benefit concert was scheduled for the only week the duo had off from gigging, when they were supposed to be in Hawaii on a vacation.

And touring then was not like touring now. 40 years ago, Tears for Fears spent their afternoons doing drive-time radio shows, only to play multi-hour sets in the evening, shake hands and kiss babies afterwards and then do it all over again the next day. And Geldof never even asked the band to play Live Aid; he put them on the bill without pretense. So the band asked themselves: Is it going to make any difference if we play? “And the answer to that was, unequivocally, no,” Curt says. “It wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if we didn’t do it. There were so many big bands doing it already, so we decided to take the week-long holiday instead, because we desperately, desperately needed it.”

When talking with SPIN about their 2022 album The Tipping Point, Roland said something that’s stuck with me: “The biggest crime of all, I think, was us not really plumbing the depths of our souls, and plumbing the depths of our suffering, not writing about the human condition, which was our strength in the beginning.” Two years later, they spoke again about that, this time about how they plumb “for other people,” even when the songs are about themselves. I’ve always held a line like “There’s a room where the light won’t find you” close, and the use of “you” has always stuck out to me, because it’s not immediately clear who it’s supposed to be.

In the studio, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” began with a verse, rhythm, bridge and the chorus, which was the song’s title, Roland explains. “Initially,” he continues, “it was because I couldn’t think of anything better. ‘Everybody Wants to Go to War,’ that sounded a bit hackneyed—or maybe it doesn’t to younger people nowadays. But we were living, in our early twenties, with the constant threat of the US and Russia going into some kind of nuclear conflict.” He pauses, before snickering: “It’s really good to see how things have changed.” Songs from the Big Chair producer Chris Hughes and Mercury Records’ A&R man Dave Bates swore by “Everybody Wants to Go to War,” saying it would be a hit in America. “‘It’s a drive-time song,’ they said,” Roland adds. “That meant nothing to us at the time.” Hughes made the band play the song at the end of every session; Curt and Roland would ad-lib on it, which is how it eventually became “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

But who is the “you”? “I’m talking to the audience, of course,” Roland affirms. “But I don’t think I ever say ‘you’ when I’m referring to Dave Bates in the ‘so sad they had to fade it’ lyric.” “You’ve given it away!” Curt chimes in. “Oh, no!” Roland replies. The “so sad they had to fade it” line was written in reference to the duo not wanting to cut anything from the eight-minute single “Shout.” Mercury, under Bates’ guidance, wanted to turn the track into a three-and-a-half-minute cut primed for radio play, but Tears for Fears said no, they were going to keep it at its original length. And it got played! BBC Radio 1 aired the song in its entirety. “But what [Bates] did was he shaved five seconds off it,” Roland says. “Five seconds—absolutely ridiculous!”

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” became an ‘80s paean, even though conservatives thought Tears for Fears were pro-Thatcher, pro-instinctual domination and pro-capitalism, misconstruing the song’s intent to the same degree as a clueless American or GOP candidate might misinterpret Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” but without all the rural shouting. “The lyric goes, ‘Say that you’ll never, never, never, never need it,’” Roland says. “That’s what we really meant.” There was even an article published by Dominic Pino in The National Review, William F. Buckley’s right-wing propaganda magazine, in 2021 that called “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” an anthem for the right wing of the Republican Party and a “Federalist paper with a shuffle beat.” “It was amusing that they couldn’t have missed the point more,” Curt rebuts. “But, I guess they don’t understand sarcasm.”

Tears for Fears began in Bath in 1981, assembled through the disintegration of Curt and Roland’s first band, Graduate. They were progeny of the KROQ-FM-galvanized “Second British Invasion,” which included the likes of the Buggles, Duran Duran, the Human League, Culture Club and Eurythmics, even though the sweet anxieties in their music vibrated like those of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Yazoo. In 1983, they put out The Hurting, a quasi-concept album about child abuse and the depressive, psychological and traumatic fallout from it in the early throes of adolescence. “It’s where you are no longer dependent on your parents, so all of that bad stuff comes up big time,” Curt says. “And we made a big deal about it. We sang about it, we spoke about it in interviews.” Even so, “Mad World,” “Change” and “Pale Shelter” were all hit singles, reaching the Top 5 in the UK and charting internationally. Almost immediately, the sincerity of The Hurting meant a great deal to a lot of people.

And, despite The Hurting being, at times, a colossal thematic bummer, its discomfort is equally compelling, especially when Curt and Roland find refuge in the tones of acts like Joy Division and Gary Numan but present those findings in much softer, gothic fantasies of structural ingenuity. And they left the door cracked, only to open it all the way 39 years later during The Tipping Point, an album finished after Roland’s first wife, Caroline, passed away in 2017. “It doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still be traumatized,” Curt posits. “You can still hurt. So, The Tipping Point is very much a grown up version of The Hurting.”

Tears for Fears signed their first record deal with Precision, a subsidiary of Pye Records, in 1981, recording two demos, “Pale Shelter” and “Suffer the Children.” The label’s A&R scout, Richard Zuckerman, paid for the recording of the latter but hated the outcome, which gave the band an escape route. They left the label with the song intact, and Bates signed them to Mercury soon after, paying Precision £3,000 for “Suffer the Children.” Precision wanted, as Curt puts it, “five boys in five suits,” hoping to score the next Beatles. “We felt incredibly uncomfortable doing all those things and being molded into something that was their view and not ours,” Curt says. “We wanted to do something that had far more depth than that. It was clear we were never going to get on with that label, because they weren’t interested in depth. They were just interested in something that might be a quick sell and have an angle. No one knew what to make of us then, and no one does now. And I think that’s our strength, not our weakness.”

In a letter to Zuckerman dated May 5th, 1981, Roland, at just 19 years old, wrote the band’s biography:

“Tears for Fears” are from Bath and consist of two songwriters: Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal, plus help. They call their music “affects music”, using the relationships between people and moreover those within the family, as the main source for their themes. They regard this subject as being of far more importance than that of “politics” or “fashion” which appear to be the current trend in popular music today.

“How do you feel about that wording now?” I ask Curt and Roland. “Our best work seems to be this ridiculous scenario where, if Tears for Fears doesn’t suffer for our art, we don’t make the best music,” Roland responds. “And that’s true for the early days and it’s true for The Tipping Point.”

Tears for Fears songs are of the moment they’re written in, and that is very much the case for their new material as well, like The Tipping Point, or their recent live album, Songs for a Nervous Planet. But one of the most fascinating things about the work Curt and Roland both do is that those of-the-moment songs, for many, still hold true two, three and four decades on. Someone wise once said that you don’t know that you’re living in the moment until it’s already passed you by. But, considering how timeless Tears for Fears’ music has become, it’s taught the duo a lot about the preciousness of making art that reflects the challenges of life, rather than trying to make some grand, once-in-a-lifetime statement. “Our music, at the time, reflects our age,” Roland says. “When audiences come along and listen to it for the first time, it reflects their age also.”

Curt affirms his friend mid-sentence, before chiming in that Tears for Fears has always made music lyrically, writing songs about feelings, dealing with them and viewing them in the context of the greater world. “I think those things tend to be timeless,” he says, “to the extent that we may move on, our views may change, our attitudes may change and the world may change, but some other person who is 25—and we were 25 at the time these songs were written—may have those same emotions or be going through the same growth, confusion and trying to find their singular identity.”

That’s especially true about an album like The Hurting, with its complicated destiny of a childhood ending and an adulthood beginning. It’s generational and never-ending, such a poignant, crushing appraisal of suffering that Kanye West sampled “Memories Fade” on his 808s & Heartbreak song “Coldest Winter,” which he wrote in the wake of his own mother’s passing. The actors change, but the emotions have no grand finale. Likewise, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is just as valid in 2025 as it was in 1985; the countries are different but the occasions stay familiar; Tears for Fears aren’t twenty-somethings anymore but someone listening to them is. “It’s such a well-known saying, but the more things change, the more things stay the same,” Curt continues. “And that really is the case. I don’t think any of these things are new to us, but they are new experiences for certain people of a certain age—people who haven’t experienced as much as we’ve experienced.”

Six years passed between The Hurting and The Seeds of Love, a record that sold over two million copies worldwide, came with three Top 40 singles (“Sowing the Seeds of Love,” “Woman in Chains” and “Advice for the Young at Heart”) and roused the interpersonal tensions between Curt and Roland to a breaking point, leading to Curt’s departure at the conclusion of a world tour in 1990. Songs from the Big Chair arrived in the middle of all that fuss, bringing with it a swell of pressure from Mercury Records. “We’d had three Top 5 singles in the UK from The Hurting, and we were very much of a fashion at the time: a very young duo,” Roland says. “We were pop stars, we were in all the teen magazines. How I miss those days. We had this instinct, which was not a good instinct, probably—well, maybe partly a good instinct—that we wanted to be pure electronica. We wanted to retain that fragility that we’d had on The Hurting.” And Mercury got quite heady, hoping that lightning would strike twice for a band co-led by two guys obsessed with the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops.

So, Tears for Fears began experimenting with synthesizers in the studio. But they forgot the songwriting part, which led to “The Way You Are,” a stop-gap between the first and second record filled with sampled guitars. It was a Top 30 single in the U.K., but Curt and Ronald were displeased with its chart position. “And the record company was certainly not happy with its success,” Roland adds. “It was, in some ways, their thrust to try and come up with something again, something that wasn’t so pure.” Bates was the only person pushing “The Way You Are” as a single. He thought it was, in Curt’s words, “the best thing [Tears for Fears] had ever done.” “In retrospect, we get the blame,” he laughs. “But he was the one who pushed for it to be released, because [Mercury] wanted to follow up the success of The Hurting as quickly as they could. And that’s what we had at that point in time. If we were to look back on it and do anything different, I don’t think we would, because, obviously, you don’t end up where you are if you’ve changed one bit.”

At the time, the band’s keyboardist Ian Stanley had written an instrumental all on his own, which Roland thought was beautiful and totally unlike anything they’d done. That part became “Listen,” the final track on Songs from the Big Chair, but the album’s tone truly began when Curt and Roland got around to writing “Mother’s Talk,” a song they’d debut live late into their 1983 tour. They recorded it in the studio with Jeremy Green producing, fusing together drum patterns that sounded like the Weather Report’s “Teen Town,” but Mercury loathed the final copy. So Hughes, who’d co-produced The Hurting with Ross Cullum in ‘83, was brought back in, and it was his re-recording of “Mother’s Talk” that changed the band’s direction entirely—becoming a decisive mark in their full-on embrace of sampling, as they pulled strings from a Barry Manilow song and the B-side, “Empire Building,” lifted a drum part from Simple Minds’ “Today I Died Again.”

Funnily enough, “Mother’s Talk” is a song that Curt has always been dissatisfied with, even though it was the earliest material from Songs from the Big Chair that Tears for Fears performed live. To clarify, he doesn’t hate the song. His issue lies in the recording, because he claims they never got it right. “Each version we’ve done,” he says, before trailing off. “Just the fact that we’ve done multiple versions of it tells me there’s something inherently wrong with it. When I listen to Songs from the Big Chair, I get to ‘Mother’s Talk’ and I’m like, ‘This doesn’t sound like the rest of the album. This doesn’t quite fit in.’” “Do you think, had you been given another year to work on Songs from the Big Chair and ‘Mother’s Talk,’ that it would have felt like a more complete, cohesive thing?” I ask the duo. “No,” Roland replies, falling into a chuckle, “it’s great the way it is.” Curt says that, when he and Roland got to the end of making the album, it “seemed complete, without any question.” They were happy with it; conversations about it being a collage, or a hodgepodge, are gestures of retrospect rather than any sort of measurement the boys had while making it. “If I were to question it,” Curt continues, “I would have said, ‘I wish there was a better recording of “Mother’s Talk” on that album.’”

Tears for Fears have, in the past, said that Songs from the Big Chair was “cobbled together,” hence the variety element in the album’s title. If that’s truly the case, then it’s one of the most successful and sharpest “cobbled together” albums ever released. The sessions didn’t come without growing pains, that’s for sure, and “Shout” took an especially long time to complete, because the track “needed another middle 8.” The story goes that Hughes spent months toiling away at the song’s arrangement, and that is true—sort of. When Roland took “Shout” into the studio, it was nowhere close to being finished. All he had was the rhythm—a gentle LinnDrum sound, which he admittedly hocked from Talking Heads’ “Listening Wind”—and a spitty, up-high drone sound from a Prophet-5 bass synth. “I didn’t think it was a hit song,” he admits. “I thought all we were singing was ‘Give Peace a Chance’ by the Plastic Ono Band, where we would all sit down with our pillows on Afghan rugs, [singing] ‘Shout, shout, let it all out: these are the things I could do without.’”

Curt and Roland eventually had to to go Solsbury—the Iron Age hill fort just above the Batheaston village in Somerset that’s featured in Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”—to make a music video for “Mother’s Talk,” leaving Hughes and keyboardist Ian Stanley “to their own devices” at the Wool Hall studio in Beckington. “They were getting on very, very well,” Roland remembers, calling to mind Hughes’ bass-and-snare drum rhythm, which was a sample from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” and a flute line Stanley came up with on his Fairlight CMI. “When we came in to have a listen, we were like, ‘Whoa!’ We were shocked by how heavy, how meaty, how brash it had become,” Roland adds. “We were transitioning from this very fragile, young electronica band, and we weren’t confident about the next steps, but that song, the way [Chris and Ian] had done it, it was crying out for a rock guitar solo.”

As “Shout” was coming together, Curt and Roland wrote lyrics like “in violent times, you shouldn’t have to sell your soul” and shared a look with each other in the studio, as if to say, “Can we really do this and get away with it?” The Hurting was an insular album. The songs were incredibly personal and, as Curt puts it, “small-sounding.” “For us to have the kind of bravado to put on, effectively, heavy metal guitars and put on a big solo and get to become unafraid of being bombastic, that took a while for us to get our heads around,” he says. “But once we did, I think it was a big breaking point for us, to the extent that we realized, ‘There is nothing that is off the board. There is nothing that you can’t do in music. There are no real rules.’ We became a lot less shy about recording.”

Songs from the Big Chair is undoubtedly an album best known for its charting singles, but the song that glues the project together is “The Working Hour,” as it bridges the gap between “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” on side one. And the track was consequential enough that, at one point, the album was going to be titled after it. Curt and Roland arranged it with a live band, just as they had the part of “Broken” that comes out of “Head over Heels,” which rattles as an audience hollers for more. Stanley, whose marriage to his first wife had become turbulent, was playing a motif on a grand piano in the studio. It was slightly dissonant, according to Roland, who, at his home in Ainslie’s Belvedere, later came up with the verse for “The Working Hour” before retreating to the studio with Stanley to merge their separate concepts in adjacent keys. “The whole thing was beautiful,” he remembers. “[Ian] was reluctant, because he wanted to keep hold of his baby, but we did it.” (That motif Stanley had come up with also became the “Head over Heels” B-side “When in Love With a Blind Man.”)

Contemporarily, Songs from the Big Chair has gained new life through the sheer virality of “Head over Heels” on TikTok. I think there was a good stretch between 2022 and 2024 where I couldn’t go a day without hearing the song patched into the audio of someone’s Get Ready With Me video. I was floored by the song’s newfound popularity online, considering that Roland’s vocal performance continues to mystify me more than a thousand listens later. 40 years ago, fans had access to their favorite bands through regular channels, like national and local radio appearances and recurring MTV broadcasts. “Now, you have the internet, which was around [in 1985] but not commonly used,” Curt says. “Now, the entire world is able to see what you do and listen to what you do. Our music is available to pretty much everyone of every age group.”

Back then, there was KROQ-FM, but people in their forties and fifties never listened to it. Now, Tears for Fears are unlimited in their audience. “Your audience is everyone,” Curt continues. “There are those moving occasions where you see something take off, virally. At my wife’s behest, I sang ‘Mad World’ with my daughter. That suddenly took off and had 10 million views in a few weeks during COVID lockdown, because it talked to people, because we are all locked down at the time with our families. Even yesterday—and whether it came from Skibidi Toilet or the new Despicable Me movie, I don’t know—a friend of [Tears for Fears’ former backup vocalist] Lauren Evans has four adopted children, and she sent us a video of all of them sitting in the back of their car singing every lyric to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ with no music. They’re singing acappella, and it was fantastic. It brought a little tear to my eye. If you can affect those kinds of people, it’s wonderful.”

You can tap into any part of Songs from the Big Chair, even the ballads “I Believe” and “Listen,” and get a sense of why Tears for Fears’ music is one of pop’s great welcome mats. “There’s no turning back,” Curt Smith’s voice soothes. But his and Roland’s trail of influence lingers best in the glow of “Head over Heels,” a song built around a rhythm as simple as Talking Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” Roland wasn’t comfortable with the band writing what was, at the time, their most straightforward love song in a small canon of material. But the chorus was simple: “Something happens and I’m head over heels, I never find out until I’m head over heels.” Roland couldn’t quite figure out the verses. “I was very stuck indeed,” he assures me. “I said to Curt, ‘Please, go away. Come up with some lyrics.’ And he did, and they were very perverse and they were very strange.” But it’s that mixture, a simplicity that meets phrases like “system of touch,” “gentle persuasion” and “it’s hard to be a man when there’s a gun in your hand,” that makes the song click, even if Roland was not in love with it when he and Curt wrote it. “I felt that ‘Shout’ and ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ were perfectly brilliant symbols of my singing Curt’s singing,” he concludes.

Curt makes a good point about “Head over Heels,” mentioning that the song holds an added dimension when there’s an audience singing along to it. In concert, it’s bigger, bolder and, consequently, all the more joyous. “Could it have been bigger? Yeah, maybe,” he gestures. “I would say that it maybe could have benefited from being a little bigger than it was…” Roland picks up where his bandmate trails off, saying, “What’s really strange about that song is, when we look at songs that have aged well, ‘Head over Heels’ has aged brilliantly. Every time I hear that on the radio, every time we play it live—it’s perfectly poised live, it follows ‘Break it Down Again,’ it’s in the same key. Live, it plays itself. It sings itself, and it’s spine-chilling.”

Before “Mad World” and “Head over Heels” wound up in Donnie Darko, and before my father ever cried to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” while his mother collapsed into death on an ICU ventilator, and before Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal called it quits at the end of the decade that turned them famous, Tears for Fears infiltrated the American charts and began making their own language. They fused stadium-sized choruses and with tender, trauma-bonded lyricism and the overwhelming glitz of synthesizers. I think about what Roland said about “Shout,” how he and Curt sang the chorus like John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band sang “Give Peace a Chance.”

But Tears for Fears approached the topics of war, faith, love and power with more elegance than the ex-Beatle’s hunky-dory, rag-tag singalong had more than a decade prior. And yet, the two artists shared a familiar thread, in that they made songs I—and you—knew by name the second I heard them. They spoke the titles into our hearts, naming an album after the Sally Field-starring TV movie Sybil, a story about a woman with multiple personality disorder, but turning the words into a double entendre for their own multi-faceted musical idiom.

On the heels of pop music’s greatest year, 1985 anchored itself in refreshing consistency. It didn’t have the bombast of 1984 releases like Purple Rain or Like a Virgin, but it hatched strains of influence we’re still tracing today. Whitney Houston started her career with “How Will I Know,” a perfect song, and Kate Bush released one of the greatest albums of all time, Hounds of Love. To boot, we got career-high efforts from Hüsker Dü, the Cure, Tom Waits, the Replacements, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Dire Straits and the Pogues around then, too. There was great, valid music being made in every era, and there was, as Curt puts it, the “comical, ‘Wasn’t that funny that we danced to these songs?’” material that briefly infiltrated the charts before falling out of memory. Days before my interview with the band, I was watching the music video for “Head over Heels,” scrolling through the comment section, reading thousands of letters of praise for a song so deeply revered by four generations of listeners. One comment read, “Tears for Fears made lasting music in a time of throwaway pop.”

I’m not so sure I believe in that. The ‘80s were a challenging yet valuable decade to be a pop musician, especially in a market like the United States, where unknown performers could find success in shopping malls and on movie soundtracks, and music of value came with no expiration date. “It’s not very often that America opens its doors,” Roland says. “In ‘84, ‘85, it was looking elsewhere around the world for what seemed to be the most important music. A lot of what we were doing was right place, right time.” Not to mention, the wave of technology that was omnipresent during the era—samplers, drum machines—began to wane as the ‘90s approached; the song became more important than the instruments bands were using. But Tears for Fears found a prized middle ground, where electronica combined with rock and roll, and soon came the riches of an irreversible, lifelong success.

In the last year, there have been many dialogues happening about sudden stardom—how younger artists catching glimpses of virality are tasked with having to make larger-than-life decisions regarding boundaries, politics and self-care. Chappell Roan has become a poster-child for these conversations, but pop stars have dealt with similar scrutiny in every era. Tears for Fears are in awe of the Midwest Princess prioritizing her own mental health (“All power to you, is what I say. I think that’s fantastic, that you can be self-aware enough to do that”), because they faced a similar crash-out in the aftermath of The Hurting reaching #1 in the UK, even though it barely cracked the Top 100 on the Billboard 200 here in America. Roland says that one’s reaction to fame is an individual experience, revealing that he and Curt each dealt with the band’s surging popularity differently, because Curt sang all four of the band’s inaugural singles. By the time Songs from the Big Chair exploded globally, Roland was already used to it. “I did not have anywhere near the pressure that Curt did.”

He recalls their experience in Toronto while filming the music video for “Head over Heels”: “We would play repeated nights at the Massey Hall; we had fans staying in the hotel. Our manager called me and told me we were #1 in the States now, with ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’ I had a migraine, because I was getting up too early and working all day and going to bed too late. Curt was asleep, and I was more concerned about my migraine than being #1 in the States. I would be in a TV studio, there would be fans outside, female fans, hysterical, and I would open the door and go and talk to them, and the hysteria vanished, because they want that distance. They want to feel that you’re special and untouchable. And, to be honest with you, I have never felt that.”

“I didn’t feel as special as they thought I was,” Curt says, remembering the crowds in Canada. “There’s a weird dichotomy that goes on that’s very confusing to you, especially at a young age, where you’ve not been brought up to feel like you’re special. In fact, in my case, it was quite the opposite—[having] very absent parents that really did not make you feel special at all, to then, suddenly, people thinking you’re incredibly special, idolizing you yet they don’t know you. All they know is a song you sing. And I found that very difficult to deal with.” The lack of privacy proved difficult, too. “Be careful what you wish for,” Curt suggests, pointing to how he spent his “entire childhood trying to gain attention” from his parents. “I got none and, then, finding music was a great way to get attention. But you get nothing but attention, and you have no private life. People know every movement and everything you’re doing. You are then surrounded by people whose vested interest is in you working and you continuing to work.”

In between Songs from the Big Chair and Seeds of Love, Curt’s marriage fell apart, and, as he and Roland were searching for themselves as individuals, the band began to fracture. “It was all very understandable, in retrospect,” he admits. “I made the decision that I had to get out and move to America. I was toying with the idea of just giving it up completely, and the only person who said to me, out of everyone that I knew and worked with, ‘If you are not happy, leave and do something else,’ was my wife. And we’ve been together ever since. I’m not that person to her. I’m just me. And once you find that in a relationship, it’s incredibly precious.”

Even after Tears for Fears split up in 1990 and Ronald continued the project as a one-man show into the new millennium, the duo was blessed with being antagonists towards the industry’s status quo. “If you think the pressure was big after The Hurting for us to follow that up, just imagine what it was like after Songs from the Big Chair,” Curt laughs. “So what did we do? We said, ‘Go away, leave us alone. We’re taking time off, screw you. We’ll come back when we’re ready.’ And that was incredibly contrarian, and that’s been a saving grace for us over the years.”

The truth is, Songs from the Big Chair sent Tears for Fears to unpredictable and unprecedented places. They became a perennial arena act, selling out venues as big as Madison Garden well into the 2020s. Even now, as Curt and Roland are both about to turn 64 years old, they’re relishing their band’s second-act by aging honestly through their music, singing about ghosts, vague and distant doorways, life’s cruelties and the unforgiving but beautiful shapes of love. But it wasn’t always like that. “We didn’t have a chance to enjoy our success, because we were too busy working, or being made to work or convinced to work. Obviously, no one was making us, but we missed our formative years,” Curt admits. “I look at my kids and their college years, and what a wonderful experience it was for them to go through that period of growth and being able to do it with close friends. We didn’t have that. We had each other, which was fantastic, but everyone else we hung out with were people we worked with. We missed a lot, and I feel a great empathy for young people when they become successful.”

At the dawn of the 2000s, Curt and Roland made amends and regrouped on Everybody Loves a Happy Ending. They’d remain dormant for most of the ensuing 15 years before releasing The Tipping Point, a record that took eight years to finish but became a celebration of two men’s impossibly complicated and impressive history with each other. They had gone back to where they began, into the kindling of their own tragedy. And, just like they did with The Hurting in 1983, Curt and Roland washed their trauma in the rhapsody of survival and gratitude. But few albums capture the lexicon of pop music from any era quite like Songs from the Big Chair. It’s a library of music’s strongest vernaculars, stretching across textures of new wave, synth-pop, prog, jazz, industrial and new age. Most artists who’ve attempted to harness such a deep wealth of sounds wind up making albums that sound like disjointed collisions.

Tears for Fears found a pocket and made it profound, honoring the entanglements of living by embracing the tragedy that comes with it. If you were in Toronto in 1985 when “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” soared to #1, or if you were in my backyard 20 years ago when the song fell out of the sky and into my lap, there was no bigger band in the world than Tears for Fears. Time heals all wounds; so, too, does a record as necessary and human as Songs from the Big Chair. In November 1985, the band put out a documentary, Scenes from the Big Chair, to accompany the album, splicing together clips from music videos, live performances and interviews. There’s a scene near the film’s end, where a cameraman speaks to a photographer from Bravo, Germany’s equivalent of Tiger Beat. “Who are you photographing today?” he asks. “Tears for Fears, is that right?” the photographer replies, gesturing at a nearby Roland, who shakes his head before popping a grin. “No, we’re the Beatles.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.