takin' a walk"Tears for Fears : Shaping the Soundtrack of a Generation"
Join @thebuzzknight for this episode with Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. We take a deep dive into their rich music history and discuss their latest work, including "Tears For Fears Live-A Tipping Point Film" and their new album "Songs for a Nervous Planet"
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Taking a Walk.
Simon was talking about, you know, the era we grew up in, and he just he looked at me and he said, we never knew what to make of you, and that kind of, you know, sort of summed us up. We weren't really influenced by a scene as such, because there was none, so we were kind of outliers. No one really knew where we fit in and ordered we to be honest.
Welcome to another episode of the Taking a Walk podcast hosted by Buzz Night. Today, Buzz is thrilled to be joined by two legendary musicians, Roland Orzebelle and Kurt Smith from the iconic band Tears for Fears. These two childhood friends from Bath, England have been making music together for over forty years, crafting some of the most memorable songs of the eighties. From their early days in the new wave scene to their massive global success with hits like Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Shout, Tears for Fears has left an indelible mark on pop music. After a period apart in the nineteen nineties, Roland and Kurt reunited in two thousand and have continued to create music together, including the Tipping Point released in twenty twenty two, and they have two new projects to discuss, their new album, Songs for a Nervous Planet and their concert film called Tears for Fears Live a Tipping Point Film. Here's buzz night with Tears for Fears on Taking a Walk.
Well, Roland and Kurt, thanks for being on the Taking a Walk podcast. It's really an honor to talk to you big fans for a long time. Thank you so much, and congratulations. You got some great things going on. Songs for a Nervous Planet, which is fantastic, four new tracks which we'll talk about, and Tears for Fears Live a Tipping Point film as well, So congrats on that. What's become of you guys, You've become so ambitious.
We always were. I agree, I'm teasing. It's a blessing and a curse. And I think that you know, the ambition we showed when we were kids, when we were young, hampered us in the way that we couldn't match our idols in any way. So all the records we listened to, we were too inexperienced and too young to be able to copy that stuff. But in the meantime, in the process we came up with something individually individual, so should I say? And that initially was that it is for fierce sound.
You've had so many there's so many influences that are part of the sound. What role did the Beatles play in that influence? They had to have played some raw.
I would say early on, not that much. I mean, it wasn't really until later. No, I think our earliest influences. I mean, you know, we started myself and Rollin. When we first started playing, it's like a heavy metal band, you know, so we were listening to Blois, to Cult and Black Sabbath and people like that. Then we became a sort of power pop band that was into the sort of mod scene when the Specialism Madness came along, and then when we kind of got tired of that band. It was a time when the recordings were starting to get a lot deeper. You know, technology was coming along, so the first drum machine came along, Synthesizers were far more common, and we were listening to people like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel and David Bowie and and I think those were bigger influences on us when we started. I think it was in retrospect that we went back to the Beatles because we were just just that little bit too young when in their heyday.
I will I will say this though, I remember when I was a teenager and we had a the first band we had, and I remember trying to learn a Blue Oyster Cull song on the guitar, and our mutual friend Paul Noble used to bombard me with like albums from you know, Uriah Heap and Budgy and things like that. But he also had a vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper's and to be honest with you, I just thought it was way superior than the rest of the stuff we were listening to. So although it didn't influence me at the time, it definitely stayed with me.
I actually remember playing in my bedroom the vinyl white album Wow Yeah, there you Go. So I mean, I remember listening to them, but I don't think they were that big an influence on what we did. Though may have been subconscious, but certainly not at the time. I don't think that now.
Roland, when you first met Kurk, did you think he was a bit of a ruffian?
I did. Again, got to go back to our mutual friend Paul Noble and I was actually living outside of Bath at the time, in a town called Kansham, and I would stay with Paul Noble sometimes and one morning he said, let's well, let's go across and meet my other friend who lives in the Snowhill Flats in Bath. So it's a council blocks, but they made it out of bath stone, so they well, they still look like cancel blocks, but they're a little they're a little bit prettier. And so we went up the stairs and knocked on the door of the flat and eventually Kirk came to the door, but he wasn't allowed out because he pushed someone down the stairs. Now this sounds very violent. It may have been a small misdemeanor. We don't know. But at the time, was, you know, a very good student, and I was very concerned about getting good results and hanging out with the right people, and I honestly thought that this guy was a Worfian.
Kert, How do you feel thinking about that now?
Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't really think about it that much. I gotta say, to be honest, all those things for me when I was dead age and I used to get in trouble a lot was just attention seeking, you know, and then music came along and replaced it as a way to get attention. And then, of course, you know, you can zoom on a bunch of years and be careful what you wish for too much attention, yeah, and then you go, oh, I've got to disappear in there. So I think it was, you know, I mean, the trouble I got in wasn't exactly major. I mean I used to get in fights, yes, and steal things, but all for attention because I was I actually before I met Roland earlier in y I probably stopped by how I met Roand I also was always like kind of top of my class at school, certainly all the way through junior school in the beginning of senior school. But I didn't get me the attention I wanted, even though I was being really good. So then I went the other way and decided to be as bad as I could to see if that got me the attention. And it actually did get me attention, just not particularly the right kind of attention.
You mentioned urya Heap earlier, and you ya, a heap I think is just celebrated there. I don't know, fifty fourth year as a band, Mick Bach is still out and about and I understand they're bigger than ever in certain parts of Europe. I think Australia they're They're pretty massive. When you look back at a band like that and their legacy and the fact that they're still out cranking.
What do you guys think of that? Well, there's hope for us, Yeah, you know. I mean, well, I don't know what it's like to be a member of Youriah Heap. We can only guess. But I will say this that I find it a lot more comfortable being an older musician than I did when I started as a young with a snapper. I think that for both of us, the experience we've had, the lives that we have lived, make it far easier for us to talk about what we're doing and what we're up to, what we're feeling. And I think again, a little bit of the problem we had when we began was we had a theory about how to live, but we didn't have the experience to back it up.
I mean, we had the concept of a plane, We had the.
Concept and now, yeah, you guys can finish each other's sentences, which is pretty amazing. Did you stay in close touch during those what seventeen years that you were a part as a band.
Yeah, well we weren't apart. I mean, this is the MISSNMA or you know, the misunderstanding. We never stopped playing live to begin with. I mean we were a little bit disappointed, well to say the least, with the success of Everybody Loves Their Happy Ending. But roughly at the same time the song mad World was covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules and went to number one in England. So on one hand again it was this, you know, huge split between our past music and what we were trying to do in the presence our past music. We were becoming more and more legendary, and we found that out we were playing live. We always played live. I kept the house in la we would come across for the summer. I'd say to Kurt, why don't we go and play a few shows up on the West coast, only about eight and it was all for fun, and it was also for a little bit of pocket money. Meanwhile, we started to get a reputation for playing live, and we started to play festivals as well, and that you have a mixed range of ages and we also found that a lot of the audience knew the earlier stuff, So it was a very very different experience for us. And we were although we were we were kind of didn't look like we were doing anything. We were actually gaining momentum. There was a form, there was some kind of ground swell going on that was slowly propelling us during those times.
And when you look at the meaning of some of the songs when you first created the songs, when you first came out as a band, and you think of the meaning of those songs and how it impacts people, Now, how does that strike you that maybe, you know, when you just you know, everyone wants to rule the world as an example, you know, is in today's world feels more impactful than ever. How does that make you, guys feel? And do you agree?
Well, I think that's definitely true. I mean, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There's definitely a truth to that. So I think that if you you know, talk about the kind of well, oh you have, the kind of subject matter that we have, it tends to transcend eras and a case in point, as Roman was mentioned, we do festivals and we played a festival called bonn a rou and they primarily sort of eighteen to probably mid twenty, mid to late twenties. That's that's the audience. That's the audience range. There really are not that many older people there, and so we weren't expecting that much, you know, because we were sort of the elder statesmen that were playing on the bill. And I was looking at the audience while we were playing, and pretty much most of the front sort of ten rows were seeing every lyric but every lyric to songs from the Hurting, which was not big in America. I mean, it wasn't a big hit in America. It was sort of well received in New York and LA and maybe Boston because of certain radio stations, but not certainly not in Middle America. And then you realize they relate to that album because they are the age we were when we made that album. So those feelings are eternal, I mean in the sense that each generation goes through them. They go through their teen years, they go through their early twenties trying to discover themselves, they go through their hyper political era where they think that they know more than everyone else, and so these songs still resonate with all those age groups.
I absolutely love that. I love what you've done with this album, the hybrid nature, with the awesome live performance, which feels to me that it's all live, that nothing's been touched up to my ears. And then you've got the four new tracks. Can you talk about the new tracks and the creation and that collaboration and has anything in your guys process changed with that collaboration for those new songs.
Well, we had.
First of all, we had a lot of songs that could have been on the tipping point, so there was a backlog. It would have been very easy to make another album. The problem with that would have been, well, what's the narrative and are people ready for another Fears album, because you know, there was a seventeen year gap for us before the tipping point, and I actually think that that's one of the reasons why it got so much attention. But we we wanted to put out a live album. Inevitably, the record company wanted an extra track, two extra tracks. Possibly. What we didn't want to do was promote a live album and only talk about the past. We were also on a roll following the tipping point. We were so confident about our ability in the studio to come up with new stuff, making sound good, make the production beautiful, and so when it came it was actually right at the beginning of this year. We were going to record maybe one or two songs, but getting together with Kurt and Charton in Charlton's studio where we recorded the Tipping Point and everybody loved to have the ending. The tunes started coming quickly and we'd come in one and it wasn't quite right. We'd come in the next day and we'd have different bits and it was all very, very easy. And the other thing that had changed radically was the Tipping Point. There is a very sad album. It was done through quite a tragic time and also done with an extremely difficult process for Kerk and me. Whereas the extra tracks, the four extra tracks for songs sort of Nervous Planet were a joy to record. They're not tragic. I've been married now for yet again for more than four years, and a couple of those songs are they love you know, there's songs about my wife now, so it's a very very different atmosphere.
Yeah, they're beautiful songs. And then say goodbye to mom and Dad.
I mean, what.
A touching you know, beautiful, beautiful song and Astronaut as well, and Emily said, and just really wonderful music. How when you are performing those songs now live, how are they being received?
Well, we've just done We've only played them three times live. Now, we've just done three shows in Vegas, so it's hard to tell. Having said that, they were received incredibly well for those three shows, and pretty much most of the audience knew them. But my guess is, you know, because we're doing three shows in Vegas, these are hardcore fans. I mean they're flying in from places all over the world to come see us play because it's the only shows were playing this year, so they knew all the new songs. And but you know, you have a feeling when you go play them live how they fit in and how well they're gonna be received, because you get to the point where you realize that if you think they fit in well, you think they're good, that's going to translate to an audience. I think that we've got to the stage of our careers now where we have far more confidence in the knowledge that if we think something's good, our audience is going to think it's good. You know, we know our audience, I believe, and.
I do want to highlight you've got twenty twenty five dates that'll be out there in Vegas at the Fontom Blue.
Yes, I love saying that Funtom Blue. Yeah, I think they just say Quantum Blue.
Well, let's say Fantom blue. I do you know, it depends. That's only room service I'm talking about.
So I want to talk about Malcolm Gladwell and what he means to you chaps, obviously, because the Tipping Point is, you know, an incredibly important book, and Outliers as well. And let's go back to Outliers for a second, because I think I believe you guys are an example of Outliers. You've played I'm sure God knows more than ten thousand hours together, and that represents how your sound is so amazing, you know these days. But can you talk about what Malcolm's work means and do you guys know him?
To be honest with you, we both read a lot of books, but those are two we have not read. I was aware many moons ago of the title the tipping Point, but I think you know I used it sort of personally for me, and it was a tipping point for me, and it was a turning point and it was also a huge turning point for Kurt and I when we made that album.
Yeah, I mean, I think the tipping point had two different meanings to the extent that, you know, it had one meaning for the song, and it had one meaning for an album title, which had a far greater and a bigger, a bigger, deeper meaning. As to your point about outliers, yeah, I mean, I think that interestingly. You know, obviously you read a lot about outliers when you go through a political season, you know, because you get all these sort of polls of everything in the outliers are the ones that kind of are just a little strange, and we don't quite know if that means anything or doesn't mean anything. And I think I think that pretty much sums us up. You know, we're kind of somewhere on the outside, you know. And it was interesting that I and I mentioned this to Roland recently and I'd gone out to dinner in La My wife used to work for John Taylor from Duran, Duran's ex, John Taylor's wife, and we went out to dinner with John, his wife and Simon Lebon, and Simon was talking about, you know, the era we grew up in, and he just he looked at me and he said, we never knew what to make of you. You and that kind of you know, sort of summed us up really because we were we weren't in the scene. We weren't from Manchester, London, Birmingham, any major scene. We were from this little town Bath That's where we kind of grew where I was born, where we grew up, where we started playing music. We weren't really influenced by a scene as such, because there was none, so we were kind of outlies. No one really knew where we fit in and or did we to be honest. But I think that's in the long run a good thing because we tend to transcend those trends that tend to you know, be cyclical or move on, you know, they move on to something new. We've just to managed to continue this sort of even level of success throughout the years that has enabled us to keep playing and keep recording, and also and also helped us retain a private life, which is incredibly important. You know, Wh're not people that walk down the street and get ready ignize that much. We're just not. And we've never been those people.
We'll be right back with more of the Taken a Walk Podcast. Welcome back to the Taken a Walk Podcast.
How difficult though, was it being so young when success first came into your lives?
Yeah, very very difficult.
Well it was, yeah, it was, But to be honest with you, our first album, The Hurting, was difficult. It shouldn't have been, but for some reason it was. I mean when we went in to record, well, first of all, we had a fake start with The Hurting. We tried to record it with a producer called Mike Howlett, who was famous for producing orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and other sympthesizer duo from the time, and we had our own way of doing things. We were actually using a lot of live drums, which was not de rigueur at all because you had the success of Human League and the Dare and Dare with the lind drum Machine. So Mike tried to actually make us sound a bit more like that, and that didn't go very down very well with myself and Kurt. So the next person we used was a producer called Chris Hugh's and we had a meeting with him and it all went very very well, and we ended up in a recording studio to record a song called Mad World, and it was just great fun. And Chris's production technique was additive, so he didn't change anything other than he would use a part and he would take a simp part and put it on piano. He would take another simple part and put it on brass, you know. So it was all a wonderful experience for Kurt and me. That's why we went in to the studio with him to record the Hurting. But the problem with that is that I don't know whether it was us or whether it was the producer and engineer, but we just started to analyze virtually every aspect of that album, the high hatted part, the simple part. We would all four of us have a cute discuss things for hours.
There was far far more talking and arguing than there was doing exactly.
So what happened with that, I mean, you know, they were tough times that we were working late. Well, we were working at some point all the way through the night. That was at Air Studios, and we would see Paul McCartney walk in fresh as a daisy at about nine o'clock in the morning. It already got his kids up, done the school run, got on the train, and it was just so by the time, by the time we were on top of the pops and we had a top five hit with Mad World, we were just kind of a little bit sick of it all, you know, that's the problem. And so that the difficulty was really in the studio, and the difficulty came from us being inexperienced. And it wasn't until our mid to late twenties when we took over. We took the reins and said, okay, that's enough, we are now going to produce these albums, which resulted in the Seat of Love.
Yeah, And I don't think, you know, during the hurting it was necessarily anyone's fault. It was just the situation we were dealing with Chris and Ross, who were both Chris especially quite intellectual, and we were budding intellects at that point in time, and we're very sure of ourselves. So the arguments were really there were pissing matches, that's all they were. It was just, you know, who could outwit someone else or you know, prove their point more than someone else. And it was all about the argument and the discussion than the actual recording, and we'd have to have all of that sort of sorted out before someone won. And it was a question of winning, and it was basically myself and Roland versus Chris and Ross and then the record company Dave Baits and our guy would come in and blow everything up and so then we'd have to sort of, you know, start all over again. It was just a very difficult time emotionally, so uh, you know, especially to put people. You know, if I look back at it now and if I look, you know, and my kids are older than now than we were, then Rowland's the same, oh much older, yeah, much older, you know, and my kids, you know, I'm again thinking, well, they're not particularly mature yet, you know. I mean, they they're fantastic and wonderful, but they still got a lot to learn. And I'm like, but we and we were put in that situation, like you know, from my eldest four years five years younger than my artist is now. So it's you know, if I could think of how my children would have dealt with that at the age of twenty, I have no idea it probably would have. There were needed a lot of therapy for that one.
You were probably too impacted by the mightey python argument clinic bit. You just felt like you had to do your own version of it, you.
Know, it felt like that on certain days.
Yeah, yeah, you mentioned Mad World. I just recently discovered this version by an artist named Sierra Hall. I don't know if you've caught that version, but she's about thirty four years old. She specializes as a sort of a genre bending mandolin player. But it's such a beautiful version. If you haven't heard it, definitely check it out.
But what are some of your favorite other.
Versions of people who have covered that song or any of your songs?
Well, Kurt will will answer you know that question, but I will say, you know, the beautiful thing about Mad World in the way that Michael ander Ands and Gary Jules recorded it has allowed a lot of singers to record it in that vein and this just I mean, the most crazy artists that you would never imagine in a million years are going to do that song. Someone like that you probably didn't know, but Susan Boyle, she won one of those X Factor contests. I remember it got near the near the top in Britain and she was singing semi classically and she's wonderful, and so she recorded Mad World and I love that version, absolutely love that version. Another surprise is a a young, really young artist called Lily Allen who is the daughter of comedian and Keep their Hand, and she's she's got a little bit of a Kockney accent, just a little bit, and she sings that so beautifully.
Yeah, I think, I mean, as far as recordings go, certainly the Michael Andrews Gary Joles version is of Mad World is so a production wise far more in line with the lyrical content, and the same goes for Lord's version that she did for the Hunger Games of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. So it's always interesting for us. For us is when people change them and make them either a production wise more interesting or be more in line with the actual lyrical content that we find kind of more moving, I guess, you know. And there have been I mean, there was one, I mean the Gap from twenty one Pilot did it, but just as an online thing covered Mad World, which was interesting. You know, There's been a lot of artists have done our songs over the years. Yeah, And then you get into the samples as well, and people, you know, sampling your music and from you know, The Weekend and Kanye and Drake that have all sampled. Interestingly, all parts of The Hurting. The first album wasn't that big? Can you take us inside?
What the creation of songs from the Big Chair was like? What was that experience like?
Well that that there was a direct link and the journey, uninterrupted journey from finishing The Hurting to recording songs from the Big Chair. There was no no real break, maybe a month and it was Dave Bates, as Kurt mentioned, our A and R man was very keen to follow up Our success is that simple. Our success was his success. So we'd had three top five singles from The Hurting, and so at the time we were also trying to be incredibly arty. We were going in with all kinds of new keyboards and technologies and trying to mimic some of the music that we loved. That ended up in this sort of bizarre concoction of a song called the Way You Are, and instead of that being a B side, which maybe it should have been, that became the next single because it was like get out there, guys, put out material, keep doing it. And at that point Kurt and I, well it was a success of it, really, I mean, it didn't even break the top twenty, and we'd had three top five hits before then, so it was a question of like, well, are we doing something wrong, you know? And so we went directly from the Way You Are into Mother's Talk. We tried a different producer and we made Mother's Talk in a sense very similar to the Way You Are. That didn't work either. Lo and behold dat Bates said, all right, let's get Chris used in again. We're going to we're going to try a different way of recording, and that's what happened.
So this is by.
This time, we're working in a recording studio in someone's house in Bath called the house was called Forwards, so we were all working in there, and this was really Chris's first time, his first foray into Forwards, which is where we would go on to record songs from the Big Chair. And so what what Chris did was he started putting guitars on it because there weren't any. He started cutting up the arrangement so it was a little bit shorter, and he started to heavy it up a little bit. And I I mean, we went along with it, but I was a little bit shocked by this sudden lurch towards rock and roll, you know, and away from the purity of electronica. That's what we were doing. Following that, there was a month. I was given a month off, so okay, go and go and write some more songs for this album. We had some songs lying around again, like a song like head over Heels, which we didn't know what to do with rt people that we were, and I came up with the initial rendition of Shout, the initial rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and a song which sounded like Robert Wyatt, the beautiful sad voice, cockney voice of this ex drummer of Soft Machine who had fallen out of a window on that LSD and could no longer walk, and that.
Kind of stuff.
Very sad. So it was Kurt and I had to make a video for Mother's Talk. So we left Chris Hugh's producer and our keyboard player Ian Stanley with the song Shock. We did the video and when we came in to hear what they'd done, we were shocked. We were absolutely shocked. I mean, Chris had heavy totally heavied up the drum part he'd added the bass drum and snare drum from the samples of When the Levee Breaks by John Bonham. Ian had added on top of the bass very very simple song. These flutes fell like flute sounds, and it was not like the Hurting. It didn't have that fragility. It was bombastic. It was in your face, and I was thinking, well, it sounds brilliant. That can we get away with it? Because at that point in time, it was like it was obvious what to do. It needed heavy rock guitars, it needed a guitar solo, and it was like we felt guilty. We felt guilty for abandoning in that sort of fragility that we had that was shown on the Hurting. So that's how it started.
We felt a little dirty. But during the process, I mean, the interesting thing we look back now, Well, suddenly, if I look back now and listen to the Hurting, I think, as far as a recording goes, it doesn't stand up as well. And I say that purely because of just it seems like a very small and insular record, which it was kind of intended to be. I guess, so, you know, I maybe I just don't relate to it as much now as obviously I did then. But what this allowed us to do once we accepted, you know, the things that Chris was suggesting and maybe Ian was suggesting and you know we ended up playing the parts, was take the shackles off to a certain degree, was to just basically, you know, why not why not put heavy metal guitar on? Why not have a guitar? So why not make the drums huge? You don't have to be sit back and be so meek and mild mannered. You can go out there and just be as bombastic as you want and you know, be a rock band. And it took us a little while to accept that, but once we did, there's a certain freedom in that, you know, and that freedom, to a great accident, is continued on till today, where now we really don't kind of worry that much about what we're doing, you know, because anything kind of goes musically, anything should go. So if we haven't done something before but are doing it, you know on this track, we don't have that same you know, can we do that? It's like, yes, you can do anything you want.
So where will twenty twenty five take you? Beyond obviously playing the Vegas shows. What's in the future.
Well, I'm sure we'll continue to play live because it's such fun and our show now, I mean when we played in Vegas, we were playing to a two hour show for the first time in our life.
Oh my god.
You know, it doesn't really compare to McCartney or Bruce Springsteen, but you know, two hours for tears for pears. We need to sit down afterwards, and it didn't feel like it because it's also smooth, it's beautifully the new songs are, you know, tucked in with the old songs. It's great and even the Tipping Point has now become a classic. So we'll continue to do that. But then I also continue to look at songwriting and see where we're going with that. I mean, obviously we're getting older. I still think that there's an album in us that is probably a little bit more experimental because we don't have to prove anything anymore. We can do that live and we've already done it with the Tipping Point. But I would like to see us venture into music that we'd never touched before for the first time.
No, and we're I think we're on the same page with that. You know, it's and that's just kind of you know, which which to a certain degree sums us up. You know, that's us sort of being bored now with that, you know, it's we've done that. What's what can now inspire me to really like get excited again? Like, doing the same thing again is not going to excite us.
We won't do it as well, We won't.
Do it well. It won't mean as much, you know, because it was of the time, and it won't get us excited, you know. And and I think that, you know, the one thing we've we've always done is unless we're excited about doing something and feel passionate about it, we don't do it. Uh. And I think that's just the way we are, which again is you know, you're looking at that outlier comparison again. You know, we don't go and record music just for the sake of recording music. It's got to mean something to us. And whether that means you know, lyrically, and it normally has to be a combination of both, but lyrically thematically and or production you know, the way an album sounds, what you're using to make these songs into a recording. So yeah, you know, it'll take a while for us, probably searching and fumbling around in the dark. But but I feel that if the desire is there, we have the talent to be able to do it.
You guys, I'm just so appreciative that you took the time to be on Taking a Walk. Thank you so much, kurtin Roland, very much, thank you.
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