The story of Tears for Fears

Two boys from Bath

Roland Orzabal was born in Portsmouth on the twenty second of August 1961, and Curt Smith was born on the twenty fourth of June the same year. Both ended up in the city of Bath in Somerset. Roland's family moved there when he was a boy, and Curt grew up on the Snow Hill council estate. Neither had an easy childhood. Roland later said his father, a veteran of the Second World War, had been given electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to his mother. Curt's father worked away and died when Curt was seventeen, and by then Curt said he hated him. Both boys were the middle of three sons, raised in effect by single mothers. They met as teenagers and bonded over Thin Lizzy and Blue Oyster Cult.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their first real band was Graduate, a mod revival group formed in Bath in 1978, with Roland singing and playing lead guitar and Curt on bass. In 1979 they signed a publishing deal with the songwriter Tony Hatch, who took them to Pye Records. In 1980 they released an album called Acting My Age and a single called Elvis Should Play Ska, a nod to Elvis Costello rather than Presley. It stalled at number eighty two in Britain, though it reached the top ten in Spain. After a gruelling tour, the band fell apart in 1981. Roland and Curt also worked as session players for a Bath band called Neon, where they met a drummer named Manny Elias. Neon's two leaders went on to become the duo Naked Eyes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

What pulled them away from ska was a jolt from the radio. Roland remembered being in Curt's flat when Gary Numan's Tubeway Army went to number one with Are Friends Electric, and said it felt like a punch in the face. Numan was topping the charts in black eyeliner while Graduate were still doing knees ups to Madness. So they changed everything. Roland got an asymmetrical haircut, Curt grew plaits, and they dived into synthesizer music, from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Depeche Mode to the Human League, alongside Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and Joy Division. Roland also confessed a teenage love of early Genesis and King Crimson. Their new duo first went by a gloomy name, History of Headaches.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The name that stuck came from a book. A guitar teacher introduced them to the American psychologist Arthur Janov, whose primal therapy held that adult pain grows out of buried childhood trauma. John Lennon had famously been Janov's patient in 1970. Roland read The Primal Scream at seventeen and passed it on to Curt, and the duo renamed themselves Tears for Fears after an idea in Janov's writing. Then came a lucky break. A local musician named Ian Stanley offered them free use of the eight track studio in his big house. He became their keyboard player, and on the strength of two demos, Suffer the Children and Pale Shelter, Mercury Records signed them in 1981. Suffer the Children came out that November and went nowhere.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Mad World and The Hurting

Roland wrote Mad World at nineteen, while he was on the dole in Bath, living in a flat above a pizza restaurant that looked out over the city centre. He said he heard Duran Duran's Girls on Film on a tinny radio and decided to have a go at something like it. On acoustic guitar with his own voice, it sounded awful to him, and even the first demo felt dead. So he turned to Curt and told him to sing it, and suddenly it came alive. That became a Tears for Fears formula, Roland's words in Curt's voice. Mad World was meant to be a B side, but the record company said it was too good to waste. Released as their third single, it reached number three in Britain in November 1982.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song carried Janov's ideas inside a pop tune. Its best known line, about dreams of dying, came from Janov's theory that nightmares can be good for you because they release tension. Roland said it captured what he called the teenage menopause, the moment when childhood ends and you feel you are clinging to the edge of a cliff. The video was shot cheaply in the grounds of Knebworth House. Curt stared out of a window while Roland, with nothing else to do, performed a strange dance on a lakeside jetty that he later called his flying wombat impersonation. The band bussed friends and family up from Bath, and the woman celebrating a birthday in the video is Curt's mother. Mad World was the twelfth best selling single of 1982 in Britain.[1] [2]

The debut album, The Hurting, came out on the seventh of March 1983. It was produced by Chris Hughes, a former drummer with Adam and the Ants, and Ross Cullum. It was a loose concept album about child abuse, trauma and depression, and every song was written by Roland. It went to number one in Britain in its second week and spent sixty five weeks on the chart. Three singles, Mad World, Change and a new recording of Pale Shelter, all made the British top five. Roland's teenage sweetheart Caroline Johnston, whom he had married in 1982, sang the child's voice on Suffer the Children. The band spent eight months on the record, which Roland later called ridiculous when bands their age were finishing albums in a month.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Not everyone was charmed. Much of the British music press was hostile, and an NME review dismissed The Hurting as useless art that turned self pity into a product. Curt himself said in 1985 that the album was hard to listen to, full of feelings from when they were between ten and fifteen. In America it barely registered, and Change stalled at number seventy three. But the record aged remarkably well. Later critics called it a landmark, and later artists dug into it. Kanye West reworked Memories Fade into Coldest Winter, Drake sampled Ideas as Opiates, and the Weeknd built his song Secrets around Pale Shelter. In 2023 the album was given new surround mixes by Steven Wilson for its fortieth anniversary.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Songs from the Big Chair

At the end of 1983 the band put out a stopgap single, The Way You Are, and later admitted it was the moment they realised they had to change direction. Early 1984 sessions with a new producer, Jeremy Green, were thrown out, and Chris Hughes was called back. Recording began in earnest in April 1984 at the Wool Hall, the band's own studio in Bath, and the album took eight months. The inner circle was Roland, Ian Stanley and Hughes, with engineer Dave Bascombe, while Curt signed off on ideas and made suggestions. The first taste was Mothers Talk, which mixed the old warning about pulling faces when the wind changes with the nuclear dread of Raymond Briggs's book When the Wind Blows.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came Shout. Roland wrote it in his front room on a small synthesizer and a drum machine, starting with little more than a chorus that repeated like a mantra. He saw it as a good album track. Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes were convinced it would be a hit around the world, and Stanley helped him finish it, earning a co writing credit. Many listeners assumed it was about primal screaming, but Roland has said it is really about political protest. The video was shot partly at Durdle Door on the Dorset coast, and partly in a studio with the full band surrounded by family and friends. Shout came out in November 1984 and reached number four in Britain in January 1985.[1]

Everybody Wants to Rule the World almost did not happen. Near the end of the sessions Roland played Hughes two simple chords on an acoustic guitar. He was not keen to develop them, and the working chorus was about everybody wanting to go to war. Hughes pushed him on, partly as a calculated shot at American radio. The shuffle beat felt alien to them, too jolly, and Roland later said it drew on Simple Minds' Waterfront and on a 1981 hit by Linx. Written by Roland, Stanley and Hughes, it was finished in about a week and became the last track recorded for the album. Curt sang it, and Hughes later joked that, as a piece of recording history, it was about as bland as it gets.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Songs from the Big Chair was released on the twenty fifth of February 1985. The title came from Sybil, a 1976 television film in which Sally Field plays a woman with multiple personalities who feels safe only in her analyst's big chair. The band said each song had its own personality, and Curt said the title also reflected how hounded they felt by the British press. It had been due to be called The Working Hour. The cover showed only Roland and Curt, even though Stanley and Elias were members. Early vinyl copies even had the left and right stereo channels swapped by mistake. In Britain it peaked at number two, and it stayed on the album chart for seventy nine weeks in a row.[1] [2] [3]

Ruling the world in 1985

In America, Everybody Wants to Rule the World came out in March 1985 as the first single, and MTV embraced its video. Directed by Nigel Dick, it showed Curt driving a vintage Austin Healey through the Californian desert and stopping at the Wheel Inn diner in Cabazon. Curt later called the shoot a disaster. He said the director was in tears on the second night, and a child was knocked unconscious when he was thrown from an off road vehicle. On the eighth of June 1985 the song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks. In Britain it was held at number two by USA for Africa's We Are the World. Shout followed it to the top in America in August, for three weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Songs from the Big Chair spent five weeks at number one in America that summer and went on to sell five million copies there. A Los Angeles Times profile in July 1985 said that a few months earlier they had been known only in the hippest circles, and now they were the hottest band in pop. Curt did most of the talking, explaining that Roland was the more introverted one. Both were married, and Curt told the paper their young fans were kept to a strict rule of screaming but not touching. Head over Heels, with a playful video shot in a Toronto college library featuring a chimpanzee in a Red Sox shirt, reached number three in America. In September they played Shout at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One show they missed became notorious. On the thirteenth of July 1985, Tears for Fears were billed to play Live Aid at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, but on the morning of the concert it was announced they had pulled out. George Thorogood and the Destroyers took their place. The official explanation was that two backing musicians, guitarist Andrew Sanders and saxophonist Will Gregory, had left when their contracts ran out. Instead, the band pledged the proceeds of concerts in Tokyo, Sydney, London and New York. In 1986 they recorded a rewritten version of their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Run the World, for the Sport Aid famine appeal, and it reached number five in Britain. A slowed sample of their song The Hurting had already opened Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas.[1]

The tour was long and draining, but it produced a discovery. On a two night stop in Kansas City in June 1985, Ian Stanley heard a singer and pianist named Oleta Adams performing in the bar of the Hyatt hotel. The next night he came back with Roland and Curt, and they agreed they wanted her on their next record. In February 1986 the band won Best British Single at the Brit Awards for Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Performing it that night was the last public show for drummer Manny Elias, who left soon afterwards. Roland was named songwriter of the year at the Ivor Novello Awards, though he complained that the Ivor for international hit went to Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen, which he called a dialogue collage rather than a song.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The million pound Seeds of Love

The follow up became one of the most expensive albums of its era. Its first song, Badman's Song, was written on the 1985 tour after Roland overheard two members of the touring crew running him down in a hotel room, and he wrote it with keyboard player Nicky Holland. Sessions began in late 1986 with the producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, but the results were scrapped. Chris Hughes returned, yet Roland was tired of machines and sequencers and wanted real players. In 1987 Hughes and Ian Stanley both left, citing creative differences. Stanley later said Roland was accelerating away from the rest of the band. Roland admitted they had hired and fired Hughes more than once. In the end the band produced it themselves with engineer Dave Bascombe.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roland was going through his own changes. He moved to London, finally went into primal therapy himself, and walked to sessions two or three times a week, saying the songs emerged on those walks. Politics arrived too. He wrote Sowing the Seeds of Love in June 1987, the week Margaret Thatcher won a third term, and said he simply could not bear her. The title came from a radio programme about the folk song collector Cecil Sharp, who first heard a song called The Seeds of Love from a gardener named John England. The song also took a swipe at Paul Weller, and its sunflower came from graffiti on a fence opposite Roland's London home. Its sound owed a lot to the Beatles, especially I Am the Walrus.[1] [2] [3]

In 1987 Roland and Curt flew to America to track down Oleta Adams again, and invited her to work with them. She sang on three tracks, and their label offered her a solo contract. Recording ran from early 1988 into the summer of 1989, much of it as long jam sessions edited down later, with players like Manu Katche, Pino Palladino and Simon Phillips. Badman's Song was tried in styles ranging from Barry White to Steely Dan. Phil Collins drummed on part of Woman in Chains, turning up at lunchtime and going home in time for tea. Most listeners heard Woman in Chains as a feminist song. Roland later said it was really about his mother, and about his father's jealous violence towards her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album reportedly cost around a million pounds, compared with about seventy thousand for Songs from the Big Chair. It was released on the twenty fifth of September 1989, entered the British chart at number one, and reached number eight in America. Sowing the Seeds of Love climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, and its animated video won two MTV awards. Roland said missing number one gave the American record company an excuse to take its foot off the gas. In 1990 the band toured the world with Adams as both support act and band member, partly to pay down the recording debts. Adams then had a big hit of her own with Get Here, from an album Roland co produced.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The split and Roland alone

By the end of that tour the partnership was broken. Roland had become an intricate perfectionist. Curt was drawn to a jet set lifestyle and wanted to slow the pace, and his first marriage, to Lynne Altman, had ended in divorce in 1988. There was money trouble too. Their manager Paul King ran the Outlaw Agency, whose acts included Tears for Fears and Level 42. When the band's album was delayed, the NatWest bank called in the receivers, and the agency owed its creditors nearly a million pounds. According to The Observer, Roland grew increasingly unhappy that Curt would not drop King as manager. In 1991 Curt left the band and moved to New York. Roland kept the name Tears for Fears.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The bitterness went public. In 1993 Roland told interviewers that his relationship with Curt had been more like a producer with an artist, and that he had even written Curt's songs for him. His next album included Fish Out of Water, which he himself compared to How Do You Sleep, John Lennon's attack on Paul McCartney. The song took aim at Curt's high living and his fancy new friends. Curt answered years later with a song of his own called Sun King. The two did not speak for the best part of a decade. Time softened it. In 2022 Curt said he got a real kick out of Fish Out of Water, and found it highly amusing.[1] [2]

Roland's first move was a new single, Laid So Low, to launch the 1992 greatest hits collection Tears Roll Down, which reached number two in Britain. He then converted an old photographer's studio at home into a recording space called Neptune's Kitchen, done out in sea greens and blues with a whale on the weathervane. With Alan Griffiths, a musician from the Bristol band the Escape, and producer Tim Palmer, he made Elemental, released on the seventh of June 1993. It reached number five in Britain, and Break It Down Again became an international hit, top twenty in Britain and number twenty five in America. Roland said it partly described his split from Curt, which he called a divorce. He also said he had spent about six years in psychotherapy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Curt's first solo album, Soul on Board, came out in August 1993 and flopped. He later said he made it mainly to fulfil his contract. In New York he formed a band called Mayfield with guitarist and producer Charlton Pettus, the name a pun on the soul singer Curtis Mayfield, and in 1996 he married the marketing executive Frances Pennington. Roland dug into his roots with Raoul and the Kings of Spain in 1995. Raoul was the name his parents first had in mind for him, and the name he later gave his own first son. The album explored his Spanish heritage and reunited him with Oleta Adams on one duet, but it only reached number forty one in Britain. His solo album Tomcats Screaming Outside followed in 2001.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reunion and a second life

The thaw came through paperwork. Around 2000, some routine legal business forced Roland and Curt to talk for the first time in nearly a decade. On the phone they realised the animosity had gone. Curt flew to England, they had dinner, and they decided to make an album. With Charlton Pettus they wrote and recorded fourteen songs in less than six months. The record was signed to Arista by L.A. Reid, but when Reid left the label the band walked away, which they could do because they owned the recordings. Everybody Loves a Happy Ending finally came out in September 2004 in America and in March 2005 in Britain, where the single Closest Thing to Heaven became their first British top forty hit in a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meanwhile an old song was finding a new generation. For the 2001 film Donnie Darko, the composer Michael Andrews recorded a stripped back Mad World with his friend Gary Jules, little more than piano, a cello sound and a quiet voice, reportedly in about ninety minutes. The film became a cult hit on DVD, and in December 2003 the cover came out as a single. Bookmakers favoured the Darkness, but on the twenty first of December Mad World was announced as the British Christmas number one. It stayed at the top for three weeks and won Roland another Ivor Novello Award. He called it probably the proudest moment of his career, and gave thanks that his nineteen year old self had been depressed enough to write it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Gary Jules said that when Roland first phoned him, he told Jules the new version was closer to how the band had first imagined the song. The success sent the Tears Roll Down hits album back into the British top ten. Other covers kept the catalogue alive. Lorde recorded a brooding Everybody Wants to Rule the World for a Hunger Games film in 2013, and artists like Kanye West, the Weeknd and the 1975 cited Tears for Fears as an influence. The band kept working the stage. They released a live album recorded in Paris, played Belgium's Night of the Proms, and in 2010 toured Australia with Spandau Ballet. They turned down eighties revival packages, with Curt saying they did not consider themselves from a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Curt built a second life in Los Angeles. He became an American citizen in 2007, scored films with Pettus, and turned up several times as a comic version of himself on the detective series Psych, whose hero is an obsessive Tears for Fears fan. He also spent years as a stay at home dad. His young daughter once told her preschool class that her mother went to the office and her father went to the gym. Roland, meanwhile, auditioned for the television show Popstar to Operastar, singing an Italian aria at the Savoy hotel, and lost out to Midge Ure. He turned the experience into a comic novel, Sex, Drugs and Opera, published in 2014. In 2013 the band started recording again with a cover of Arcade Fire.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Grief, recovery and The Tipping Point

Work on a seventh album began in 2013 and went badly. Their management paired them with younger hit writers in what the band called speed dating sessions. One result, I Love You but I'm Lost, was written with Dan Smith of Bastille and appeared on a 2017 hits collection. Roland later said the finished record had no artistry and no personality. At the same time the band's live reputation was rising. In 2017 they co headlined North America with Hall and Oates and played Hyde Park in London. But at home, Roland's life was coming apart. His wife Caroline, his partner since their teens, had slid into depression around 2007, and she kept drinking while on medication that should never be mixed with alcohol.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Caroline developed alcohol related dementia and cirrhosis of the liver. Roland said he spent five years as her carer in their big country house as their circle of friends shrank, and admitted that he was a drinker too and that she used to match him. She died in July 2017, while the band was on tour, and the remaining dates were cancelled. Tears for Fears went back on the road about two months later, but Roland was not well. He described panic attacks, blackouts and seizures, and said he took drugs, alcohol and sleeping pills to cope. He was in intensive care more than once, then checked himself into rehab. A British arena tour was pushed back to 2019. Curt kept his distance, saying he simply did not want his friend to die.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Recovery brought the partnership back. Roland credited therapy, grief counselling and the writer and photographer Emily Rath, whom he married in 2020. With Caroline and his old collaborator Alan Griffiths both gone, he said his mind turned straight to Curt. In early 2020 they had lunch in Los Angeles, and Roland went round to Curt's house with an acoustic guitar. Curt came up with the riff for No Small Thing, and they felt like eighteen year olds again. They changed management and label, kept a few earlier songs, including Please Be Happy, which Curt sang because Roland found it too painful, and wrote new ones. When they won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection in 2021, Roland thanked the two people who made it possible, themselves.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Tipping Point came out on the twenty fifth of February 2022 on Concord Records, their first album in almost eighteen years. The title track grew from sitting in Caroline's hospital room. Curt wrote and sang Break the Man, about ending patriarchy, the first Tears for Fears single not written by Roland. The album entered the British chart at number two, their highest placing in thirty years, and reached number eight in America. Critics were warm, and Pitchfork called it perhaps the most fully realised record they had ever made. That July the British tour was cut short when Curt fractured a rib. The band returned in 2023, and a show in Franklin, Tennessee, became the 2024 live album Songs for a Nervous Planet, which reached the British top ten.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

The songs have kept travelling. Everybody Wants to Rule the World has kept returning to the British singles chart in the 2020s, and in 2021 Rolling Stone ranked it among the five hundred greatest songs of all time. In November 2025 Songs from the Big Chair was reissued for its fortieth anniversary, using the cover the band had originally planned, and it charted again in Britain and across Europe. Their music runs through hip hop and pop, and even the Lumineers covered Shout as a television theme in 2025. It all started with two boys from difficult homes reading a psychology book in Bath. As of 2026, the man who wrote most of the songs and the man who sang so many of them are still working side by side.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Tears for Fears

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. They met as teenagers in Bath, both middle sons of absent or troubled fathers. Roland wrote most of the songs while Curt sang many of the biggest ones, including Mad World and Everybody Wants to Rule the World. They split bitterly in 1991, traded barbed songs, and barely spoke for about nine years. Since reuniting around 2000 they describe their bond as a helix of closeness and head butting, and Roland has called it a blood bond.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roland Orzabal and Caroline Orzabal. Caroline Johnston was Roland's girlfriend from his teens and they married in 1982. She sang the child's voice on Suffer the Children and drew the hands on a Pale Shelter cover. They had two sons. After years of depression and drinking she developed alcohol related dementia, and Roland became her carer. She died in July 2017, and her illness shaped much of The Tipping Point.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roland Orzabal and Emily Rath. Roland met the writer and photographer Emily Rath after Caroline's death and married her in Aspen, Colorado, in 2020. He credits her, along with therapy and grief counselling, with his recovery, and says she encouraged him to reconcile with Curt. He has joked that she taught him to be kind and polite rather than hostile all the time.[1] [2] [3]

Tears for Fears and Chris Hughes. The former Adam and the Ants drummer produced The Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair, and co wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World, pushing a reluctant Roland to finish it. He returned for The Seeds of Love but left in 1987 over creative differences. Roland later admitted the band hired and fired him more than once, but the partnership produced their biggest records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tears for Fears and Ian Stanley. Ian Stanley gave the duo free use of his home studio in Bath and became their keyboard player, co writing Shout and Everybody Wants to Rule the World. He left during The Seeds of Love, saying Roland was accelerating away from the band, and later criticised parts of that album. He went on to produce a ha, the Pretenders, the Human League and Tori Amos.[1] [2] [3]

Tears for Fears and Oleta Adams. The band heard Oleta Adams singing in a Kansas City hotel bar in 1985 and tracked her down two years later. She duetted on Woman in Chains, toured with them in 1990, and Roland co produced her album Circle of One, which topped the British chart and gave her the hit Get Here. In 2004 she walked on unrehearsed at their Kansas City show to sing Woman in Chains again.[1] [2] [3]

Roland Orzabal and Nicky Holland. Nicky Holland played keyboards in the Escape, who supported Tears for Fears in 1983, then toured with the band in 1985. She became Roland's main writing partner on The Seeds of Love, co writing most of the album including Badman's Song and Advice for the Young at Heart. She later moved to New York and made solo records for Epic.[1] [2] [3]

Roland Orzabal and Alan Griffiths. Alan Griffiths, another former member of the Escape, toured with the band in 1985 and became Roland's closest collaborator after Curt left. Together they wrote Elemental and Raoul and the Kings of Spain, and Roland said they came up with a song almost every day. Griffiths died in 2017, and Roland said losing him and Caroline turned his thoughts back to Curt.[1] [2] [3]

Curt Smith and Charlton Pettus. Charlton Pettus became Curt's musical partner in New York in the mid nineties, co founding the band Mayfield. When Curt and Roland reunited, Pettus joined the writing for Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, and he has been co producer, guitarist and keyboard player for the band ever since. He co wrote Break the Man with Curt.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tears for Fears and Arthur Janov. The American psychologist behind primal therapy gave the band its name and the ideas behind The Hurting and Shout. When Roland and Curt finally met him in the mid eighties, they were disillusioned. They found he had gone rather Hollywood, and he wanted them to write a musical for him. Roland only undertook primal therapy himself later, around The Seeds of Love.[1] [2] [3]

Tears for Fears and Paul King. Paul King's Outlaw Agency managed Tears for Fears and Level 42 in the eighties. When The Seeds of Love was delayed, the company collapsed owing nearly a million pounds, and The Observer reported that Roland's frustration that Curt would not drop King fed the split. King was later declared bankrupt, and investors in a later venture won a High Court fraud case against him.[1] [2]

Tears for Fears and Gary Jules. The American singer grew up loving The Hurting after hearing Mad World on San Diego radio as a young teenager. His hushed cover with Michael Andrews for Donnie Darko became the 2003 British Christmas number one. When Roland phoned him, he told Jules the version was closer to how the band had first imagined the song, a moment Jules said moved him deeply.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Tears for Fears

• Before Tears for Fears, Roland and Curt's duo was briefly called History of Headaches. After Graduate broke up in 1981, the pair first named their new project History of Headaches. They switched to Tears for Fears after reading Arthur Janov.[1] [2]
• Graduate's single Elvis Should Play Ska was about Elvis Costello, not Elvis Presley. The 1980 single by Roland and Curt's mod band reached only number eighty two in Britain. It did much better abroad, reaching the top ten in Spain.[1] [2]
• Roland's wife Caroline sang the child's voice on Suffer the Children. Caroline Orzabal also drew the hands artwork for the 1983 reissue of Pale Shelter. She had been Roland's girlfriend since his teenage years.[1] [2]
• Roland wrote Mad World living above a pizza restaurant in Bath. He joked that Bath was not very mad at all, and that the song should really have been called Bourgeois World.[1]
• The drum pattern that opens Mad World was recorded at double speed and then slowed down. Curt Smith said the intro was played on a Roland CR78 drum machine. They first recorded it at twice the speed but found it sounded great slowed down.[1]
• Curt's mother appears in the Mad World video as the woman having a birthday party. The band made the video cheaply at Knebworth House and bussed friends and family up from Bath. Curt's then wife Lynne is in the party scene too.[1] [2]
• Pale Shelter takes its title from a 1941 drawing by the sculptor Henry Moore. Moore's wartime drawing was called Pale Shelter Scene. Roland described the song as a kind of love song aimed more at his parents than at a girl.[1]
• The Pale Shelter video includes a live alligator in a swimming pool. Directed by Steve Barron in Los Angeles in 1983, it also shows the pair walking into a storm of paper aeroplanes, one of which hits Roland in the eye.[1]
• Songs from the Big Chair was nearly called The Working Hour. Roland changed the title to one inspired by the 1976 film Sybil. The Working Hour survived as one of the album's songs.[1]
• Original vinyl copies of Songs from the Big Chair had the left and right stereo channels swapped. The mixing error was fixed on most CD editions. A 1998 audiophile reissue kept the original vinyl stereo image anyway.[1]
• The strings at the start of Mothers Talk were sampled from a Barry Manilow record. Its B side, Empire Building, was built on a drum sample taken from Simple Minds. Both were early examples of the band's creative use of sampling.[1]
• The B side Pharaohs samples a BBC Radio 4 announcer reading the Shipping Forecast. The title sounds like the Faroes, one of the sea areas named in the forecast. The voice belongs to the announcer Brian Perkins.[1]
• The working chorus of Everybody Wants to Rule the World was about everybody wanting to go to war. Roland said that original line made him indifferent to the song. Changing it helped turn it into their biggest hit.[1] [2]
• The BBC kept Everybody Wants to Rule the World off air during the first Gulf War. The ban ran from August 1990 to February 1991 because of the song's political themes.[1]
• Roland argued Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen was not a real song when it beat his hit to an Ivor Novello Award. He felt Everybody Wants to Rule the World deserved the international hit award in 1986. He called Nineteen a dialogue collage rather than a song.[1]
• Everybody Wants to Rule the World was used for years on Dennis Miller's HBO talk show. It also soundtracks the end of the 1985 comedy Real Genius.[1] [2]
• The Head over Heels video was filmed in a Toronto college library and stars a chimpanzee in a Red Sox shirt. Roland plays a man trying to win over a librarian, and the other band members play assorted oddballs. It ends with the couple as an old married pair.[1]
• Roland and Ian Stanley released a single as Mancrab for The Karate Kid Part Two. The 1986 song, Fish for Life, featured a singer who had danced in the Everybody Wants to Rule the World video.[1] [2]
• A slowed sample of their song The Hurting opens Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas. The band were not on the record itself, but their music is heard in its introduction.[1]
• Swords and Knives was written for the film Sid and Nancy but rejected for not being punk enough. The song ended up on The Seeds of Love instead.[1]
• Phil Collins promised to arrive at lunchtime and be home for tea, and he kept his word. Curt asked him to drum on Woman in Chains. Roland said Collins was reluctant to do his famous big drum fill, so they stitched one together.[1] [2]
• The Seeds of Love reportedly cost about a million pounds; Songs from the Big Chair cost roughly seventy thousand. The gap came from scrapped sessions with two sets of producers and a long list of star session players.[1]
• The sunflower in Sowing the Seeds of Love came from graffiti opposite Roland's London home. Roland said he saw a line about loving a sunflower written on a fence across the road, and it became a symbol of the album.[1] [2]
• The Sowing the Seeds of Love video won two MTV Video Music Awards. Directed by Jim Blashfield, it won Best Breakthrough Video and Best Special Effects.[1]
• Oleta Adams sang the Star Spangled Banner before a 1984 American League playoff game. That was a year before Tears for Fears discovered her singing in a Kansas City hotel bar.[1]
• Roland's home studio Neptune's Kitchen had a whale on its weathervane. It was a converted photographer's studio decorated with acid treated copper to look as if it had been underwater.[1]
• Before making Elemental, Roland drew up a combined star chart for himself and producer Tim Palmer. Palmer said Roland read it and predicted they would get on well, which they did.[1]
• A former Graduate bandmate sang backing vocals on Break It Down Again. John Baker, from Roland and Curt's old mod band, appears on the 1993 hit.[1]
• Tears for Fears played Radiohead's Creep live for more than twenty five years. They started covering it on the 1993 Elemental tour and it stayed in their shows until 2019.[1]
• Curt Smith gave his Steinberger bass to a roadie at the end of the 1985 tour. He had played it on stage from 1982 through 1985.[1]
• At a karaoke bar, Curt sang Everybody Wants to Rule the World and nobody recognised him. He was in Vancouver with the cast of Psych and thought it would be funny. He said no one paid the slightest attention.[1] [2]
• Roland lost a spot on Popstar to Operastar to Midge Ure. He practised seriously and sang an Italian aria at the Savoy. He later turned the experience into a novel, Sex, Drugs and Opera.[1] [2]
• Roland says strangers ask for his autograph thinking he is in Lord of the Rings. He told GQ they are disappointed when he tells them he is Edgar Winter.[1]
• Break the Man was the first Tears for Fears single not written by Roland Orzabal. Curt Smith wrote it with Charlton Pettus. An early chorus used a harsher verb before it became break.[1] [2]
• The cover of Songs for a Nervous Planet was partly made with artificial intelligence, and fans objected. The band defended it as a digital collage by an artist they admired, with AI as one tool among many.[1]
• Original drummer Manny Elias was born in Calcutta. Born to British parents in 1953, he later played percussion for Peter Gabriel and Julian Lennon.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.