Fact #160471

Johnny Black interviews Tears For Fears about their first album, the Hurting. This feature first appeared in Smash Hits in 1983.

Lest you harbour any doubts as to why Tears For Fears have taken over five months to record their first album, the answer is simple. These are intelligent, sensitive young men and they have much better things to do.

Such as "Eating three fig rolls in under a minute. I made the stupid mistake of putting all three in my mouth at once and they stuck to the roof. I had to scrape them off with my fingers in the end," reveals Curt Smith, he of the micro-pigtails, who, if their Top Of The Pops video is to be believed, likes nothing better than standing all day at the window watching his partner, Roland Orzabal de la Quintana, dancing alone on the jetty.

The fig roll eating championship took place between recording sessions at a studio in rural Chalfont St Giles to which we were whisked on a frost-nipped morning. We arrived at a cobbled farmyard and were greeted by an ancient, nervous Labrador, before being shown into a small reception room with white-painted stone walls and inset oak beams.

Two semi-naked figures, one male, one female, emerged from behind a heavy door, looking sheepish after their early morning shower.

"Doesn't anybody round here have any clothes on?" inquired our record company host.

"You could have knocked," grumbled the sheepish male, suddenly aware of Virginia's cameras and my tape recorder.

"Where’s the band?" demanded our host, hoping to move on to less dubious matters but, predictably, they were still in bed, having been recording until six am.

Curt is first to surface apologising for Roland's delayed arrival. "He takes quite a while to get his toast together," Curt explains as we cross the courtyard again, accompanied by the studio cat, through a six inch thick door, past the Asteroids machine, the mixing desk and the table tennis area, eventually settling down in the lowest, softest armchairs in the world. While we wait for Roland, Curt explains why they chose to work in mist-shrouded Chalfont St Giles. "We wanted somewhere with no distractions. If you work in a big studio complex, you walk down the corridor and hear Mick Karn playing bass next door, and he's so good you wonder why you bother."

I find myself wondering how Curt manages not to be distracted by the cat, dog, asteroids, table tennis and showering couples (not to mention the fig eating contests) but my train of thought is disturbed as Roland enters the room. As they begin to waken up, and as hot coffee begins to thaw out my bones, we plunge back into the mists of time.

"I grew up in Bath, on the most hideous council estate you could ever imagine," recalls Curt, the more quietly spoken of the two. "I used to get picked on at school because I was small, and the worst thing was that my older brother was even weaker than me, so he was no use."

Meanwhile, Roland was growing up on a similar estate near Portsmouth, but he didn't get picked on because, "I used to do everyone else's homework. I was a good boy, sat at the front, went to school early and everyone else copied from my homework."

Roland seems more confident than Curt, and does most of the talking for the duo, often lapsing into vocal caricatures of cartoon characters or members of the cast of The Young Ones, his favourite TV show. "My father was a bit of a nutty philosopher, founded the Portsmouth Philosophical Society . . . and my mother was a dancer, so there were always meetings of folk singers round our council house. That was my introduction to music."

Digging further back, it transpires that Roland's mother is Basque-Spanish, his father French, and grandad an Argentinian who was instrumental in ejecting the dictator Peron from Argentina, South America. This helps explain Roland's remarkable surname, Orzabal de la Quintana. "In fact, there's place on the Argentinian pampas called Jose de la Quintana, named after my great grandfather."

Roland began playing guitar when he was nine, and was soon the axe hero of several sub-teenage heavy metal bands, recruiting Curt (after the family moved to Bath) on the strength of hearing him sing along to Blue Oyster Cult's 'Last Days Of May' in his bedroom at the tender age of thirteen.

"I grew out of it," mumbles Curt apologetically, "and before that I was hippy. Bath is full of hippies. You find them in Huckleberry's ordering thirteen portions of lentils."

And so it came to pass that they found themselves in Graduate, a shameless '60s revival pop band who had a minor hit in Spain before our heroes realised they were destined for better things. After a disastrous attempt to from another band, they decided to continue as a duo which might have been consigned forever to oblivion had they called themselves Smith And Orzabal de la Quintana.

Luckily, they settled on the much catchier Tears For Fears, which is a kind of shorthand explanation of the fact that "Dreams are a release for kids. If they're allowed to be what they want in the daytime, they won't have to invent horrible monsters in their dreams at night."

Their first single, 'Suffer The Children', made this point and their interest in this and several other "primal therapy" ideas recurs in the Mad World lyric – "the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

According to Roland, this means that if dreams release tension, then the ones in which you have an intensely emotional experience, like dreaming of death, will release the most tension. "Dreams in which you're skipping," he argues, "won't do much for you at all."

"And it wouldn't have rhymed either," says Curt, under his breath. Their interest in primal therapy and the significance of dreams has left them open to much sniping by worldly-wise, if not jaded, journalists.

In their own defence, Roland points out. "Primal therapy isn't a religion, a cult, a sect, a mythology. It isn't anything weird at all, just a theory about the importance of relationships between children and their parents. We're not into primal therapy. We're just into living life to the full."

Unfortunately, Roland can be quick to criticise the beliefs of others. "Anybody my age who goes to church is an idiot. I used to go every Sunday with my girlfriend, not because I believed, but because it was an acceptable family thing to do. People's ideas and beliefs are just there to protest them, like opium for the masses. Religion is one form of it, and television's another."

Unlike most groups, who struggle for years before attracting any attention from record companies, Roland and Curt had only two songs written when they were signed to Phonogram. "We had gone into a demo-studio in Bath with just 'Suffer The Children', and we knew nothing about synthesizers. It was our producer, David Lord, who showed us how to use them and he played all the difficult bits at first."

'Suffer The Children' and 'Pale Shelter', which became their second single, impressed Phonogram sufficiently to sign them and, in typical fashion, last July they found themselves due to start recording an album without enough songs to last the course.
"We said when we started that we couldn't see beyond the first album," says Roland, "but now it depends on how well it all goes. I wouldn't care if we never had another hit."

"As soon as you enjoy doing something else more, you should give up what you're doing," confirms Curt.

Something Tears For Fears don't enjoy doing is having their pictures taken. Roland doesn't consider himself particularly photogenic and, according to Curt, "I've got a lazy eye . . . it looked awful in the close-ups on Top Of The Pops. They tried to get me to wear an eye patch, because I can't read with the lazy eye, I only use the other one."
Despite their protests we drag them out onto the frosty lawn by the pond and, while Virginia snaps away, they reveal that Curt is soon to marry his long-time girlfriend Lynn, and Roland recently married his girlfriend Caroline. "I have two different personalities, " admits Roland. "One when I'm with other people . . . doing interviews makes me aggressive . . . and one when I'm relaxed, at home with Caroline."