BEFORE SONGS FROM THE BIG CHAIR, 1983’S THE HURTING INTRODUCED THE WORLD TO A BAND THAT BLENDED BLEAK MUSINGS ON THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA WITH A RAZOR-SHARP SYNTH-POP INSTINCT AND HIGH-END PRODUCTION VALUES. THE RESULT: A CLASSIC…

WYNDHAM WALLACE

Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal: “We weren’t anything like Duran Duran – that was all excess and glamour. We weren’t about that. It was all about an interior world, not the exterior world”

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“THE REASON IT STILL HAS SUCH APPEAL IS THAT THOSE ARE THE FEELINGS THAT SURFACE. WE WERE HAPPY TO TAKE ON SEMI-INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTS AND TRY TO TURN THEM INTO HITS”

ROLAND ORZABAL

When Roland Orzabal was growing up – first in Portsmouth and later in Bath – his parents ran an entertainment agency for working men’s clubs. Among the guests auditioning at his home were singers, ventriloquists and strippers; even his mother was a stripper. It was, you might say, inevitable that he’d end up on stage himself. But if this sounds like a boisterous childhood, behind the curtains things were less happy. Orzabal’s parents were at loggerheads: his father, a WW2 veteran, was far from healthy and given to fits of fury that drove his wife away after bursts of domestic violence.

But Roland was about to meet his future musical partner Curt Smith, who was also enduring a troubled childhood, growing up on a local council estate in a broken home where money was a significant problem. “He was a lot more rebellious than I was,” Orzabal recalls, “which shocked me because I was a good boy at school and quite conservative as a character. We were out once in Bath, and a police car pulled up and said, ‘Come with me.’ Curt stole a couple of violins from the school for my birthday present. Not that I played the violin!”

Thankfully, Orzabal’s musical partnership with Smith would flourish in other ways and lead to the monumental 1983 album, The Hurting. That album – and, to a degree, 1985’s multi-million-selling follow-up, Songs From The Big Chair – were, as Smith puts it, therapeutic attempts to “find out why our backgrounds were so messed up”.

MUTUAL THERAPY

Orzabal found Smith’s recklessness as appealing as Smith found Orzabal’s intellect, but the two really gelled after Orzabal’s guitar teacher pressed a copy of The Primal Scream, by US psychotherapist Arthur Janov, into his hands. Orzabal was already buried in existentialist books by the likes of Sartre and Beckett, and this new addition to his library became his bible. “Aged 17 or 18, I was an absolute convert to Janovian ‘primal theory’,” Orzabal says, though Smith adds that, “The fact that you’re screwed up because of your parents is hardly brain surgery. We were both slightly evangelical about it.” Nowadays, Orzabal jokes that his pious proselytism turned him into “a primal bore”. But, as the two of them sought to make sense of their psyches, Janov’s tactics – to revisit childhood trauma – provided a framework for their lives to such an extent that it would eventually give them a name for their band. Tears For Fears, however, was not their first musical endeavour together. They’d already experimented with friends, playing everything from folk to rock, and signed their first deal at