Trivia / Tears for Fears

• Approval of God: Orzabal and Smith loved Gary Jules' version of "Mad World", going as far as to perform in his style live, similar to how Bob Dylan began performing "All Along the Watchtower" in Jimi Hendrix's style. Smith even performed "Mad World" as a studio duet with Jules that was recorded for video broadcast. This led to a humorous moment at the end, with Smith singing the ending lyric "Halargian world" with a gentle wink-and-nod smile at Jules, who had incorrectly recorded the lyric in his version as "enlarge your world." Jules, for his part, smiles and nods.
• Black Sheep Hit:
  • "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", believe it or not. It was a "last-minute" addition to Songs from the Big Chair that the band only worked on for around two weeks and to which Orzabal was indifferent to. Lyrically, it also distinguishes itself from their previous work by being about the then-ongoing Cold War, while all of The Hurting, "Mother's Talk", and "Shout" (the latter two being the first singles released for Songs from the Big Chair) being primarily centered around troubled childhoods and the works of Arthur Janov.
  • "Shout" also counts, being a more percussion-based song with anthemic vocals and a lengthy guitar solo, putting at odds with previous Tears for Fears songs. Notably, the band spent months working on that song alone, and it had also been written after their 1983 tour, which did have other songs from Songs From The Big Chair present, such as "The Working Hour", "Mother's Talk", and "Head Over Heels".
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • "Mad World" in the UK.
  • The original single "Pale Shelter (You Don't Give Me Love)" in Canada. ^note In a case of Germans Love David Hasselhoff, Canada was the only country where the first version of the single was a commercial success, reaching #12 on the Canadian music chart, and was thus a Top 20 hit there. Roland Orzabal mentions in a CBC interview that Canada has the highest TFF record sales per capita.
  • "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in America. ^note Unlike the rest of the world, it was released as a single before "Shout" in the USA.
• Channel Hop: After releasing four albums on Mercury Records (the third of which was put out under the Fontana Records imprint), the band switched to Epic Records just before the commercial release of Raoul and the Kings of Spain (the move was so late, in fact, that early promo CDs were still on Mercury). The deal fell through after the album undersold, leading them to return to Mercury's parent company, Universal Music Group, afterwards, jumping between various labels under their wing. Everybody Loves a Happy Ending would be released by New Door Records in the US and Gut Records in the UK, the Greatest Hits Album Rule the World would be jointly put out by Virgin EMI, Mercury, and UMe, and their next studio album, The Tipping Point, would be released through Concord Records.
  • There have been two TFF albums whose promo CDs were on different labels than the retail release. Besides Raoul..., the promos for ...Happy Ending were on Arista Records.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The band's first single "Suffer the Children" was an Old Shame for them, due to them seeing the lyrics as naïve. As a result, it wasn't included on their greatest hits compilation Tears Roll Down and is often overlooked on later ones. This seems to have died down as of late, with backing vocalist Carina Round performing the song on the promotional tour for The Tipping Poin.
  • The band really hated "The Way You Are". They only recorded it because their record company demanded a new song for a single, and they had performed it live. Orzabal wrote in the liner notes to Saturnine Martial & Lunatic that it was "the point at which we realized we had to change direction," leading to the band's first New Sound Album on Songs from the Big Chair. It must be said, however, that "The Way You Are" was recorded during the same sessions as "Mothers Talk" and "The Working Hour", and "Broken" and "Head over Heels" had already been written and performed live, so it was more of a case of releasing it as a single because they wanted to save the best tracks for the album. They later wished they hadn't put it out, but are fond of its B-Side "The Marauders".
• Cut Song: "I Love You but I'm Lost" was originally written for the first version of The Tipping Point before the album was completely rewritten; before that happened, however, it appeared on the Greatest Hits Album Rule the World, initially as a teaser for The Tipping Point before ultimately and accidentally becoming a case of this trope.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The band's early singles and their B-sides were rerecorded for The Hurting, and most of the originals have not appeared on CD (although that changed with their inclusion on the 2013 super deluxe box set, but there are still a few omissions) due to the album versions being used on compilations.
  • The first single by the Smith-less incarnation of Tears for Fears, "Laid So Low (Tears Roll Down)", is their only one not available on streaming services thanks to the band throwing it firmly into Canon Discontinuity. Since it didn't resurface again until it was included on NOW Yearbook '92 in July 2023, the only legal means of listening to it before then were by finding old copies of the CD single release or the greatest hits albums it was featured on, all of which are out of print^note the original "Tears Roll Down", meanwhile, is readily available on the 1999 and 2020 expanded reissues of The Seeds of Love and on the Saturnine Martial & Lunatic rarities collection.
  • The original releases of the first three albums have way more dynamic range than the remasters, which suffer from the Loudness War. Thus they can qualify as this for fans who don't like brickwalling.
  • The original video of the 1990 concert initially issued as Going to California has five songs on it that do not appear on the DVD/CD reissue, Live from Santa Barbara (although one of these is just a short intro). The missing songs are "Women of Ireland", "Change", "Pale Shelter", "Mad World", and "All You Need Is Love". The complete concert is, however, available as a bonus for some (but not all) DVD versions of Scenes from the Big Chair.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Thanks to the band's favorable relationship with Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition, a site dedicated to reporting on and selling special edition physical releases of music, they've managed to put out two limited edition releases of their work exclusively through the site's store:
  • The SDE editions of The Tipping Point include both a CD release with all three bonus tracks ("Secret Location", "Let It All Evolve", and "Shame (Cry Heaven)") and a separate Blu-ray edition with surround mixes in both DTS HD and Dolby Atmos. The former is the only release of the album with all three bonus tracks at once, while the latter was so popular that it was reissued to keep up with the demand.
  • In 2023, SDE released a Blu-ray edition of The Hurting, featuring surround mixes by Steven Wilson in both DTS HD and Dolby Atmos, the original stereo mix in high resolution, and a new instrumental mix by Wilson, plus the Mike Howlett mixes of "Mad World" and "Watch Me Bleed".
• No Export for You: The vinyl EP Ready Boy & Girls? was a 2014 Record Store Day exclusive which was only made available in the USA.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The death of Roland Orzabal's wife, Caroline, ended up influencing the rewrites that The Tipping Point went through from 2017 until its release in 2022.
• Recursive Import: Saturnine Martial & Lunatic was designed for the US market to satisfy demand for the Elemental-era rarities, as the singles were not released over there, and padded out with a selection of earlier non-LP material, excluding any The Hurting-era tracks (which were released when the group was not widely known in the US anyway). It was immediately a popular import into the UK and Europe due to its convenience and inclusion of the singles "The Way You Are" and "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams", which had been omitted from their earlier Tears Roll Down compilation. It was ultimately released in the UK and Europe partly because Tears for Fears had left Mercury (due to the label's decision not to release Raoul and the Kings of Spain) and thus owed the label a final album.
• Referenced by...:
  • In the "Berlin" episode of Travel Man: 48 Hours in..., Richard Ayoade joked, "Tiergarten, surely a lost title opportunity for a Tears for Fears album."
  • Episode 53 of Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl is titled "Tears for Fears!" in the English dub.
• Revival by Commercialization: Nearly 36 years after its initial release, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was #1 on Billboard's Alternative Digital Song Sales list after experiencing a surge of 704% for downloads sold in the week ending Mar. 4, 2021. This resurgence is credited to its inclusion in the 2021 Robin Wright film Land.
• Saved from Development Hell:
  • The Seeds of Love Super Deluxe Edition box set was originally slated for release in 2015 (and indeed, the remaster on the first disc notes that it was made in 2015), but it didn't come out until 2020, in part because the album's mix is so complicated that it took veteran Progressive Rock producer Steven Wilson an unusually long time to create a satisfactory surround sound remix. Wilson commented in the album liner notes that one of the songs was "quite simply the most complicated mix I've ever undertaken", but it probably wasn't the song you'd expect: it was actually "Year of the Knife".
  • Tears for Fears have had long delays between some of their albums: The Seeds of Love came out four years after Songs from the Big Chair, and Elemental four years after that; then there was a nine-year gap between Raoul and the Kings of Spain and Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, though Orzabal did release Tomcats Screaming Outside under his own name between them. However, by far the longest was the delay between Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (2004) and The Tipping Point (2022). In between, they only released a few covers of other bands' songs and two new songs, "I Love You but I'm Lost" and "Stay". According to Orzabal, part of the reason for the delay was them scrapping an entire album's worth of material due largely to frustration with Executive Meddling: their management at the time kept trying to foist younger producers on them in an apparent attempt to stay more relevant, and after Universal delayed the release of the original version of The Tipping Point in 2017, Smith and Orzabal developed misgivings about it and scrapped it (though they reworked the aforementioned "Stay" and continued working with Sacha Skarbek, one of the aforementioned younger producers). Also not helping matters were Orzabal's wife (who was also Smith's childhood friend) passing away in 2017; then he experienced health complications in the wake of her death that necessitated his withdrawal from touring for a year.
• Sequel Gap: The band saw a nine-year gap between Raoul and the Kings of Spain (1995) and Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (2004). Their next album, The Tipping Point (2022), came out eighteen years after its predecessor.
• Similarly Named Works: Their single "Suffer the Children" should not be confused with an identically named song/EP by Napalm Death. Both songs' titles are slight paraphrases of Matthew 19:14: "But Jesus said, 'Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.'" (KJV; suffer, in this context, is used in its archaic sense of permit; a more infamous usage in this sense is Exodus 22:18's "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," though the accuracy of this translation is disputed.)
• Troubled Production:
  • The "Everybody Wants to Rule World" music video was rife with problems, according to Curt Smith:
    The shoot was a disaster. I remember [director] Nigel [Dick] being in tears on the second night. He had to lug equipment around. He couldn't get anyone to clean the car, so he was there with a sponge cleaning the Austin Healey. I slept in a camper bus out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of nights, and I had to be up at 4 AM so we could get the sunrise shot. We had an accident while we were filming the dirt bikes and four-wheel off-road vehicles, and one kid flew off and smashed his head. He was out cold. The video producer, an American girl, stood there and chanted some Buddhist stuff. We're frantically trying to find an ambulance while she's chanting.
  • The band often take a long time to record albums. In the case of The Seeds of Love, this is partially because the arrangements were so complicated—the title track alone reportedly took several weeks merely to mix. Additionally, the band went through several producers for the album before finally settling on Dave Bascombe, largely because they had grown tired of using sequencers and machines. On the other hand, Orzabal is also apparently quite superstitious and does not always wish to record, which also lengthened recording sessions. The album reportedly cost around £1 million to make.
  • The Tipping Point probably takes the cake, though; see Saved from Development Hell above.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original name for Songs from the Big Chair was supposed to be The Working Hour - also the name of the album's second song, as it was one of the first written for it.
  • They were asked to perform at Live Aid, but declined, citing a last-minute contractual dispute with their backing musicians as the official reason. Roland Orzabal remarked that Bob Geldof "gave us so much gip for not turning up at Live Aid. He made us feel very guilty; all those millions of people dying, it was all our fault. I felt terrible. I tell you, I know how Hitler must have felt."
  • The band signed to Arista Records to release Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, but the deal fell through before that could happen thanks to L.A. Reid, who signed the group, leaving the label. It was instead released through New Door (an imprint of Universal Music Group) in the US and Gut Records in the UK.
  • The Tipping Point was originally intended to center predominantly around songs written in collaboration with a number of younger guest writers; this version ended up being scrapped due to a mix of the band's personal dissatisfaction with the results and the death of Roland Orzabal's wife, Caroline, which directly informed the version they released in 2022. Of the songs meant to be on the first version, only "Stay" made it to the final product; the other released song from those sessions, "I Love You but I'm Lost", ended up being exclusive to the Greatest Hits Album Rule the World (which "Stay" had also debuted on). The band did, however, continue working with producer Sacha Skarbek, one of the producers featured on the first version; Skarbek produced four of the ten tracks on the final version.

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