Mad World

by Lori Majewski

The Smiths have only grown in popularity since Marr’s sudden departure in 1987, a move that led to the dissolution of the group and may have taken decades for Morrissey to get over (if he’s indeed over it). He has since released nine albums as a solo artist and continues to draw arena-size crowds; he keeps the legend of the Smiths alive by including “How Soon Is Now?” and other classics in his concert set list. So does Marr, who—following a long and fruitful post-Smiths career playing with Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse, the Healers, and others—saw a brief reunion with Rourke during a 2013 tour stop while promoting his solo debut. To date, Morrissey (whose autobiography, Autobiography, was published in the U.K. in 2013) and Marr have never performed together again.

  MORRISSEY: I’ve never felt fully present in my own life. I’ve always felt like a ghost drifting through. I’m not actually flesh. So autobiography is a therapeutic act of self-loyalty, even if, like me, you end up with chapters of self-disgust rather than reams of narcissism.

  ROURKE: Last time Johnny was here [in New York City], he came around my house for a cup of tea, and he was on the sofa for seven hours. We were just reminiscing like a couple of old guys. There’s never any animosity or anything like that. I still speak with Mike too. I think he still drums occasionally. It’s a shame that I don’t speak to Morrissey anymore, but I don’t think anybody really does. That’s his choice.

  MORRISSEY: A lot of people are homesick for the Smiths, and not because everyone else is abysmal, but because the songs of the Smiths are so good. With most bands, if they have two decent songs, they end up with five-star reviews. There are so many easy victories these days for other bands, but the Smiths were never promoted and almost never received radio play, and this mystery has protected them in the long run. But a re-formation will never take place because re-formations can only work if the same spirit that made the band form in the first place still exists. But it doesn’t.

  “MAD WORLD”

  he eighties was the decade of the duo: Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Yaz(oo), Erasure, Naked Eyes, and Blancmange, 2 Name a Few (which would be an awesome name for an eighties duo. Still available). Then there was Tears for Fears. Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal fancied themselves a far more serious proposition than those other twosomes. Not for them all the excesses emblematic of the era. They took their name from psychotherapist Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, which suggests that emotionally scarred adults can heal by giving voice to their repressed adolescent pain. Tears for Fears’ debut album, 1983’s The Hurting, was a monochromatic expression of resentment and anxiety, most notably the seminal single “Mad World.” The multiplatinum follow-up, Songs from the Big Chair, was a brilliant litany of complaints led by “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Shout.” For a time, these two damaged individuals had such a sure hit-making touch that they turned the world into one big psychiatrist’s couch.

  JB: Neil Tennant once described the Pet Shop Boys as “the Smiths you can dance to.” Tears for Fears were the Smiths with all traces of irony, humor, and self-awareness stripped out. TFF were unhappy, sullen, alone, and neglected. Devotees of primal therapy they may have been, but Tears for Fears did not express their inner agony in an endless, ragged whine. Rather, they made their misery as seductively melodic as possible. Morrissey and Tennant were capable of writing a lyric like “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” but they would have brought a degree of mockery to the delivery of such a line. Tears for Fears found nothing to laugh at. But at the same time, they took care to ensure that such sentiments were delivered in as sumptuous a setting as technologically possible. The Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair are incredibly accomplished records that manage to be both instantly memorable and endlessly replayable. Their best songs seeped into the culture and have lasted a lifetime. And that’s any unhappy adolescent’s best revenge.

  LM: Overexposure to Tears for Fears during their Big Chair period—”Shout” was easily the most played-out song of my teen years—caused me to unfairly dismiss their entire discography for at least a decade. It wasn’t until the stripped-down Gary Jules version of “Mad World” in the early 2000s that I was finally able to see TFF for what they really are: timeless songwriters. “Mad World” is a classic, dark, brooding slice of self-pity, the kind of song I cried over as an insecure, open wound of a teen, and the kind of song I cry over now when, amazingly, I’m still an insecure open wound of a teen.

  CURT SMITH: I was born in the southwest of England: Bath, Somerset. There wasn’t really a Bath scene. There was one place to play; it was called Moles. We relied less on fashion, unlike Manchester, Liverpool, or London. There was no competition between bands in Bath. We were kind of it. To this day, I think I’m the most famous person born there. Roland was born in Portsmouth, but he moved to Bath with his mother when he was about 11, after his parents split up. He lived where I lived, in a council estate called Snow Hill.

  ROLAND ORZABAL: What did I think of Curt right at the beginning? Well, he was dark-skinned. I thought he was from Eastern Europe or something. He was a friend of a friend who I was staying with, so we went along to see if Curt would come out. But he wasn’t allowed out because he’d done something bad or wrong. So my first impression wasn’t particularly good. I mean, we got on very well, but I think Curt was a bit of a petty criminal.

  The guy I was staying with, I had a band with him. I was the guitarist, he was the bass player, we had a drummer. We were no good. But I heard Curt singing along to a record in his bedroom, which was “Last Days of May” by Blue Öyster Cult, and I thought, We should try him as a singer. And we did.

  SMITH: When we were 18, mod music was happening—Madness, the Specials. We had this band, a five-piece called Graduate. We wore the eyeliner and the suits. We signed our first record deal when we were 18, with no success other than in Spain, where Graduate had a number-one hit: “Elvis Should Play Ska.” We toured Europe in two vans—we were humping the gear and everything. But Roland and I, we were interested in honing our recording skills, making good records. When we left Graduate, we were 19, and there were three pivotal records that really influenced the way we were going to move forward: Peter Gabriel’s third album, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, and Scary Monsters by David Bowie. And Gary Numan was a big influence in the sense that you could actually make records without a band.

  We did a demo of a couple of songs, “Suffer the Children” and “Pale Shelter,” and started doing the rounds of record companies. Only one wanted us: a guy called Dave Bates, who signed us to Phonogram for a two-single deal. We released both songs as singles. Neither was a hit. The industry in those days—it’s not like it is now, where if both flop, you’re finished. Dave had heard all the other songs we’d written and convinced the record company to let us make an album. We did the majority of The Hurting at Abbey Road, but it took us a year to make, with many fights with the record company about their money we were spending.

  Once we’d finished, we got to “Mad World.” No one thinks it’s quirky now, because it’s part of history, but it was very quirky then. There was a plan on the part of the record company: We had to build up our credibility and become hip, and “Mad World” was picked to do that, to get us some press. No one ever expected it to become a hit. They believed there were other songs on the album that would be bigger, like “Pale Shelter” and “Change.”

  ORZABAL: “Mad World” was a shock. It was supposed to be the B-side of “Pale Shelter.” But when I played it to Dave Bates, he said, “That’s a single.” Thank God.

  I never particularly liked “Mad World” very much. But that’s why I mucked about with it so much in the studio—programmed it up, spent a long time getting it into the state that it ended up in on The Hurting. I couldn’t sing it. I still can’t sing it—it just doesn’t work. I did a quick double track and hated it. I said to Curt, “You sing it.” And it was much, much better. He’s got a soft resonance to his voice. “Mad World” is, I think, the best vocal he’s ever
done. It was recorded brilliantly, and it’s just incredibly haunting.

  In the early days, I’d just write the songs, and if I couldn’t think of some lyrics, I’d ask Curt to do them. When we started off, it was very much Curt as frontman and me as studio boffin. It was like that until “Shout.” Because it was such a big hit, when we got to America, people saw us more as co-frontmen. Certainly, in the early days in England, Curt was the pop star, and I was in the background.

  SMITH: The recording of “Mad World” took a while, but writing it took an afternoon. We were sitting on the second floor of the Bath flat that Roland used to live in, looking down on people dressed in suits going to work, coming back from work, thinking, What a mundane life these people must live. Although since then, I’ve longed for that.

  ORZABAL: That’s what kicked the lyric off. I wrote “Mad World” on an acoustic guitar, and I think one of the songs on the radio was “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran. I was thinking, How did I get from the celebratory glam sound of Duran Duran to this really sort of introspective song? Although we were trying to look like pop stars, our lyrics were far more melancholic and, some might say, depressing. The line “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” that comes from Janov and his primal scream theory. I remember reading once that your most powerful dreams—in essence, the ones that are life-threatening dreams—are the ones that release the most tension. And I found that myself, when I was 18, 19. Certainly I had some pretty vivid dreams, and I always woke up feeling rather refreshed.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Sad, Sniveling Slices of Self-Pity 1. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” The Smiths 2. “10:15 Saturday Night,” The Cure 3. “Heaven (I Want You),” Camouflage 4. “Victims,” Culture Club 5. “Voices Carry,” ’Til Tuesday

  Janov’s theories go along with the tabula rasa theory—that we’re born, then life etches our character through experiences, good and bad. So that’s what Curt and I believed at the time. We both felt that the child was sacred, especially the child that was suffering, hence the curled-up little child on the front of The Hurting.

  I think that we couldn’t really help but be a little deeper than what was going on [in music at the time]. Journalists didn’t like it; we were called “po-faced.” We had people like Gary Kemp saying, “They’re too young to be writing about what they’re writing.” But [Kemp’s and Spandau Ballet’s] London scene, with all the glamour and glitz, was not something that allowed for that kind of introspection.

  SMITH: After the [1983] release of The Hurting, we toured the world for a year. That widens your musical horizons and changes you. The only place I’d been outside England prior to us having a band was Spain: a holiday in Torremolinos, full of bad English people. We were 20 when that song came out, so we had a lot of screaming girls, but we also had a lot of shoegazers. Half the audience wouldn’t make eye contact; the other half were trying to rip our shirts off.

  “We were 20 when that song came out, so we had a lot of screaming girls, but we also had a lot of shoegazers. Half the audience wouldn’t make eye contact; the other half were trying to rip our shirts off.”

  The Hurting was big everywhere apart from America. When we came back to England, we felt like we wanted to make something bigger. We’d grown up a lot and weren’t just concentrating on primal theory. The last thing we wanted to do was The Hurting, Part 2. We started listening to different stuff, thanks to our producer, Chris Hughes. We were introduced to people like Steely Dan and Lynyrd Skynyrd. We listened to a lot more Frank Zappa. But it wasn’t a conscious decision to sound American. The only conscious part was that we never wanted to make the same album twice.

  ORZABAL: Everything changed between The Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair. It was an incredibly difficult album to make. We were working every day, seven days a week, mainly at Abbey Road’s Penthouse studio. We would be working until two in the morning. We would be doing vocals over and over and over again. These are the days before Auto-Tune. I remember Curt being in tears in the toilet. There was this new kind of ambition around the band. It was like, “No, you’re not going to be introspective anymore.” And there was a push for, as Dave calls it, the drive-time single.*

  SMITH: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was the last song we did. We needed one more track for the album. We said, “What would go really well with this album is a song that’s lighter and has more of a shuffle beat that moves away from the intensity of the rest of the album.”

  ORZABAL: I had a song, which was originally called “Everybody Wants to Go to War”—not quite so catchy. It didn’t fit with the fragile, insular music that we’d done before, so I was a little bit suspicious. But when we came to record it, we did a bit of improvising—myself, Chris [Hughes], and Curt—and it became so simple.

  At the time, there were songs coming out—“Two Tribes,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood; I think they did a cover of [Edwin Starr’s] “War.” It was the era of the Cold War, when it was pretty much at its peak, and everyone was worried about the nuclear threat and the possible nuclear exchange between Russia and America. At the same time, the band was starting to become more global in our outlook.

  * DAVE BATES: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was not originally on Songs from the Big Chair. We had “Mother’s Talk,” “Shout,” “Head Over Heels,” “I Believe.” We were getting close to finishing the album, and it was already great, but we missed what I called the American drive-time single. I explained to them what the American drive-time single was—sun roof off, driving through the desert or driving home during rush hour with a tune coming out the radio and your arm stuck out the window—and Roland replied, “I know the kind of thing you need,” and he played this riff. I went, “That’s it! That’s the one!” And he said, “Well, I ain’t doing it.” What Roland didn’t realize was Dave Bascombe, the engineer, recorded him playing that riff. When Roland went home, [producer] Chris Hughes, [keyboard player] Ian Stanley, and Bascombe put a loop together using that riff; they put the drumbeat together and keyboards over it. When Roland came back, we said, “Check this out.” We pressed the button, and there was the basis of a song. Roland could see the possibilities of it. In the end, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” went on the album.

  “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was about me putting pressure on them to be the biggest group in the world, and the whole idea of world domination and them becoming huge. I believe “Shout” is also about me, because I used to shout a lot. I don’t care. It’s fine. I just wanted them to be incredibly successful.

  The lyrics were written the day before. We were in Germany mixing the record, and I had to stay in the hotel room and quickly come up with the lyrics for Curt to sing the next day. The only line of any significance is “So glad they had to fade it.” That was a reference to a conversation with Dave Bates in his A&R office. It was about the “Shout” edit for radio, that they didn’t like playing anything eight minutes long, because they had to pay more money for it. We were arguing with him, and Dave decided to reduce the song by five seconds.

  SMITH: Five seconds. You’re really telling me it won’t be a hit unless we take five seconds off? It was that stupid. We said, “Why can’t the radio stations just fade it earlier?” It was a whole power play. That’s what A&R men do: They feel like they have to stick their two cents in, otherwise they’re not doing their jobs.

  We became insular after Songs from the Big Chair. It was so huge everywhere, and when we were on the road, we were getting a bit cocky. We realized, in retrospect, the downside of having that much success, which is you’re then surrounded by yes men who are making a living off you and coaxing you into doing it again without consideration for the music, just purely to capitalize on the money they’ve already made.

  ORZABAL: Our manager went bankrupt during the Seeds of Love tour. We were no longer a unit. Also, the relationship with Bates became strained. And then there was a change of personalities at the U.S. record company [Mercury Records]. Our
success in America has an awful lot to do with Dave Bates and his relationship with the U.S. company, and with a change of personnel, it was no longer there for Seeds of Love.

  We spent too long touring Songs from the Big Chair. In hindsight, we should have done a short tour and pretty much gone straight back in the studio. I think we would’ve been happier. I think it would have been far more successful. There was such a loathing of going out into the world and doing the same songs over and over again. We never changed a set on the Big Chair tour.

  Personally, I wanted to reinvent Tears for Fears after Big Chair, hence coming back with a completely different sound—Seeds of Love sounding like the Beatles. I had absolutely no sense—no commercial sense and no business sense—and no one was really arguing with me. So we drifted for four years making Seeds of Love. I think everyone expected Seeds of Love to be as big as Big Chair.

  SMITH: During the making of Seeds of Love, I was going through a divorce from my first wife, who I’d been with for seven years. We were separated, and I was left with the realization that I got no support from anyone around me. It became very obvious their prime concern was to get me back in the studio to finish this album as opposed to my personal sanity. I had no normal life, and I got no support from anyone. Including Roland. The downside of a duo is you’ve only got each other to argue with, and we butted heads quite often.

  ORZABAL: I’m not sure if I would agree. Moody silences were more the case than butting heads.

  SMITH: We’d been in bands together since we were 13; now we were 27. The chemistry between Roland and myself had changed over the years. We were definitely kindred spirits, but bar our humor and our musical taste, we’re now very different people. We needed a break from each other. I realized life is too damn short: I can’t do this anymore. I had to leave the band.

  ORZABAL: When you get to the age of 28, 29, lots of things change, especially as you start thinking about kids. I had a very close relationship with Curt, and it was almost as if that had to go before I had kids.