Tears For Fears’ Curt Smith says if you’re in a band and you stay around long enough, eventually you'll come back into fashion. Smith should know. Tears For Fears were one of the biggest bands in the 80s, although their yearning new wave pop anthems never really got the critical acclaim they deserved at the time. But lately, the duo who formed in Bath in 1981 have been able to savour the best of both worlds. They play arenas around the world and, more pertinently, the sound of their first two records, 1983’s The Hurting and their 1985 follow-up Songs From The Big Chair, can be heard everywhere in modern music. Whether it’s their layered, propulsive grooves, gripping melodicism, the linear guitar lines, the strobing synth hooks, the sense of pop grandeur or the lyricism that painted contemplative reflections onto a grand scale, the duo crafted a sound that has become a go-to for artists right across the musical spectrum. It's hard to think for another band who came after the initial burst of 60s rock’n’roll trailblazers who have influenced such a dazzlingly wide array of acts.
There are some flipsides to being a band in their position, though. Speaking to this writer a few years ago, Smith explained the awkward moment when his children's nanny assumed the band were doing a Kanye cover when they were actually playing the original song that Kanye sampled. “She came to see us play because she was looking after the kids,” he said. “We played Memories Fade and it was one of the first times we’d introduced it back into the set and she came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You did that version of the Kanye song, that’s fantastic!’. I was like, ‘Well, actually…’.”
But these are minor downsides. Ahead of Songs From The Big Chair’s 40th anniversary this month, here are some of the ways that an unassuming twosome from the West Country reshaped the landscape of modern music…
1/ they helped Lorde embrace the darkness
Considering covers of his band’s songs, Smith thought it interesting that artists usually made versions more in tune with the lyrics than their own takes. “Normally what happens with us is we have dark lyrics with quite bright pop songs,” he said. He used Lorde’s version of Everybody Wants To Rule The World as a case in point – the Kiwi pop superstar turned it into a soaring goth-pop anthem when she covered it on the soundtrack to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
2/ no Songs From The Big Chair, no 1975...
Like them or not, there is no doubting The 1975 are one of the game-changing guitar bands of the past decade. A huge part of that is the expansive range of influences that filter into a sound that can shapeshift from ambient techno soundscapes to alt-pop grooves to punky thrashes to soulful R&B to indie singalongs. One constant is that their biggest songs pull from Tears For Fears’ soundboard, the punchy stomp and pulsing synths of Love It If We Made It a perfect example. Beyond The 1975, a number of indie-rock bands have taken a cue or two from TFF, including The Killers, Arcade Fire, Weezer, Foals and more.
3/ Donnie Darko wouldn’t have worked without them
Richard Kelly’s eerily psychedelic cult classic made a star of Jake Gyllenhaal but it’s hard to imagine the 2001 film having the same impact without its soundtrack. Tears For Fears were a pillar of Donnie Darko’s sonic world: it was a maudlin cover of The Hurting’s Mad World by Gary Jules that it became most well-known for, becoming the UK Christmas Number One in 2003, but just as crucial was the use of the jubilant Head Over Heels/Broken in a scene to pull us into the film’s suburban superficiality.
4/ hip-hop trailblazers keep sampling them
As mentioned in the intro, before Kanye West was, you know, Kanye West, he used to be one of the most forward-thinking hip-hop artists and producers of his time. On the immaculate Coldest Winter, he sampled The Hurting’s Memories Fade. He wasn’t alone in recognising how many strands there were to pull at in TFF’s world: Nas re-purposed the guitar hook from Everybody Wants To Rule The World for the Stillmatic cut Rule and Drake reworked the beat from Ideas As Opiates for 2009’s Lust For Life.
5/ pop's top tier got stuck in too
The Weeknd is a proper contemporary pop phenomenon, the Canadian superstar often wrapping his songs in conceptual drama and ominous theatricality. He took that approach back to its roots on his track Secrets, interpolating a sample from The Hurting’s Pale Shelter into the song.
6/ they helped pop-punk groups get their emo on
When Florida punk rock crew New Found Glory made 2007’s From The Screen To Your Stereo, their crunching take on …Big Chair’s Head Over Heels was the perfect song to see out the set, NFG frontman Jordan Pundik turning it into the sort of song to be sung along to by the masses as the sun goes down at Reading Festival.
7/ songs such as Shout can go heavy can be covered by Disturbed…
For a band whose career has pretty much been built on the maxim “shout, shout, let it all out,” it made total sense that Chicago metal crew Disturbed would cover Tears For Fears’ 1985 hit Shout, originally released as the second single in the run-up to …Big Chair. Disturbed’s version, which featured on their 2000 debut The Sickness, amps up the aggro, barbed guitars closing in around David Draiman’s snarling delivery.
8/ and it can also be turned into dross like this 2010 football anthem
It’s the sign of a good song that the …Big Chair standout can be tortured like it is on this 2010 official England song Shout For England and emerge untarnished. Fronted by Dizzee Rascal and James Corden, this is a low point for all concerned, but also perfectly fitting considering the level of England’s performances at the 2010 World Cup.
9/ Don Henley did a tribute to their tribute
The band used Don Henley’s irrepressible The Boys Of Summer as an influence when writing Everybody Wants To Rule The World. After their record company had suggested they write something that would appeal to American audiences, that was the song they went to for inspiration. The Eagles man has been returning the favour for the past two decades, with Everybody… regularly featuring in his set, sometimes played back-to-back with The Boys Of Summer.
10/ and then there's the EDM strand of Tears For Fears fandom
In a recent interview, dance don Deadmau5 picked out early Tears For Fears records as a formative influence. "There was so much accompaniment to it that just wasn't somebody beating on a drum or playing a guitar or a keyboard or something like that. There's always just some underlying machine behind it,” he said. He’s not the only one – David Guetta has sampled them, as have CamelPhat in their early incarnation as The Chosen Ones. Tears For Fears’ early output can be taken any which way, their influence traversing numerous genres and stylings. Their songs make up one of the most dexterous catalogues in music. I don't really want to put a David Guetta song here so let's put a TFF instead...
