written by Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes

produced by Chris Hughes

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I’m making this page June 24th, 2021, the 60th birthday of Curt

Smith, half of Tears For Fears together with partner Roland Orzabal.

Happy Birthday, CS!! (And this will be the last birthday tribute I do

for today. I actually found several more members of bands I know

who were born on a June 24th, but there’s not possibly time to do birthday tributes for all of them. But hey, there’s always next year. But Curt is one of TFF’s core nucleus, and I love TFF, so that’s a given.)

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Curt and Roland are both from Bath, Somerset. They met as teens and formed a minor band called Graduate before Tears was born. They established themselves early on as a duo with powerfully emoting pop tunes, both in their dramatic sound and correspondingly stirring, soulful voices. The two founded Tears in 1981, landed a deal with PolyGram’s Mercury Records, and debuted with the 1983 album The Hurting. It shot to #1 in the UK, but stalled at #73 in the US. I would say shame on us Americans for that, but we made up for it two years later. Four singles dropped from The Hurting, then a later release of one previous, “Pale Shelter.”  Two others, “Mad World” and “Change,” rivaled one another for the album’s biggest song.

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But TFF’s debut album positively ate their sophomore album’s dust, as late winter/pre-spring 1985 brought Songs From The Big Chair. It rocketed to #1 in four countries, including Canada and the US (that’s more like it, my fellow Yanks). What turned out to be its leading single, “Mothers Talk,” from mid-’84, achieved little success. But the same couldn’t be said for its follow-up, which also pre-dated the album in fall ’84... “Shout.”

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“Shout” became a monster smash all over the world... and just a few short months later, so did the song I’ve chosen to cover on this page. “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” has always been my favorite TFF song, but that was also before the band, like a number of others, continued growing on me, and I learned more about them. I will say that “Everybody/World” probably stands as TFF’s most easily recognizable song, and the easiest one for the more casual, run-of-the-mill fan to sing along with. I also kind of think of it as sort of the more easy-going, laid-back Big Chair hit, while “Shout” and follow-up “Head Over Heels” take a more gripping, heavy-handed approach. (“Head Over Heels,” though, I think is my favorite TFF music video; I really like that it has an element of humo(u)r to it.)

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The band took four and a half years to release another album, which turned out to be The Seeds Of Love. It performed always as brilliantly as Big Chair did, birthing four singles, three of which became hits including the (almost) title track: “Sowing The Seeds Of Love.” TFF kept writing and recording through to the mid-’90s, seeing dwindling in the acclaim as the vogue in pop culture sounds changed, but now,  like countless other acts, having accumulated their loyal fanbase to keep their flame fanned.

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Roland and Curt encountered some differences after the mid-’90s and split for a while, but reunited close to a decade later, and went on performing into the late ’10s. The Tears just won’t seem to stop... but hey, can you blame them? After all, everybody really does want to rule the world.

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Have notes to add? Let me know!

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YT:

full version

music video

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Tears’ official website