Happy 35th Anniversary to Tears For Fears’ second studio album Songs From The Big Chair, originally released February 25, 1985.
Like all of us music loving people, I was shaped by the songs and albums that spun on an endless loop in my bedroom growing up. Curfew imposed isolation led to escaping into the worlds painted by the soundtrack of the day. Lyrics became reflective identifiers for emotions and the constantly shifting confusion of teenage life made sense within the liner notes of timeless albums.
Discovering Songs From The Big Chair was like a revelation to me. Tears For Fears was my older brother’s band. He was the guiding force and early influencer on a lot of my musical passions introducing me to KISS, Cheap Trick, Devo, The Police, and Depeche Mode when I was still shy of double digits. With a four-year head start on me, we bonded over these artists. But as he hit those more independent latter teen years, those moments started to fade.
Soon he was listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, Skinny Puppy and New Order, as I was discovering U2, Simple Minds, Prince and Michael Jackson and various misadventures in pop. I can remember Big Chair being played in our home, and you couldn’t escape the singles on the airwaves, but the impact of the album as a whole didn’t hit until several years later when 1989’s Sowing The Seeds Of Love album became my gateway into the back catalogue of Tears For Fears.
Where Seeds Of Love was musically dynamic and lush with production, its predecessors felt increasingly isolated and raw. Just staring at the album covers mapped the progress (or in my case, regression). From the stark, almost clinical observations of The Hurting, the moody, artsy black and white cover of Big Chair, to the technicolor dreaming of Seeds. This was a period of growth and maturity for the (predominantly) duo.
While The Hurting would give me chills for its rawness and honesty, and Seeds buoyed me with hope and excitement, Songs From The Big Chair connected with me in way that was quite unique. Every note played seemed to resonate, and every line of the lyrics seemed to overlay my life.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned that the success of The Hurting had a record company clamoring for the next album, putting increased pressure on the band for its next release. After a slew of hit singles and extensive touring, the appetite for something new from Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith was at an all-time high, forcing a misguided step-single “The Way You Are” (Anyone? Anyone?) followed by the premature release of the album’s lead single “Mother’s Talk” six months in advance of the album. Thankfully the collective decided to take the time necessary to create an album worthy of their ambitions, including a rerecorded version of “Mother’s Talk.”
Despite spawning several hit singles that dominated radio and MTV, Songs From The Big Chair, as I discovered, is best enjoyed as a complete body of work.
From the anthemic opener of “Shout” replete with quasi-primal scream therapy singalong as a call to protest, here was an evolved sounding Tears For Fears. If The Hurting was an intimate study, “Shout” was about widening the focus. With its “When The Levee Breaks” inspired beat, the track pounds with a hypnotic mix of bells and chimes and offbeat rim shots. With its chorus-cum-mantra, the song swirls from brooding bass bottom to a soaring guitar solo that gives the track its euphoric uplift. With each passing bar, the song swells, gathering more melodies and instrumentation as synth sounds are augmented with live drums and guitars.
Lyrically simple, there is a unifying power present in the way “Shout” is sung. It invites you to go from listener to active participant. And in its original album version of 6:32 run time, it is paced perfectly with the song allowed to breathe and evolve from its stark industrial beat to a level of comfort. Whereas now it might be seen as a forgone conclusion that “Shout” would be a hit, in a densely filled pop landscape, there was a brash boldness to its production.
This is equally true of the rest of the album’s collection of songs. With each passing movement, Tears For Fears reveal themselves as being more than just synth-pop darlings and elevate their offering above the mid-80s din.
Tracks like “The Working Hour,” with its late-night laments, takes square aim at the driving commercialization of the music industry, as Orzabal reflects on his hours in the studio, “This is the Working Hour / We are paid by those who learn from own mistakes” recalling the rushed release of “Mother’s Talk.” Augmenting their sound with pianos, sax, guitars, and live drums, Tears For Fears offer a broadening soundscape. The production, courtesy of Chris Hughes, is expansive and airy. With the addition of their touring musicians (drummer, Manny Elias and keyboardist, Ian Stanley), the songs take on extra depth and dimensions with little flourishes and accents throughout.
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.
LISTEN: