Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  SMITH: I told Roland before we went on tour that I was leaving at the end, which in retrospect was a mistake. It didn’t make for a particularly enjoyable tour, and we had nine months of it. Our relationship was horrible. We were hardly even talking. Front of the bus was Roland, back of the bus was me and the rest of the band. I did say goodbye when it was over, but it was an awkward one. The last show we did was Knebworth in 1990: big show in front of 120,000 people. We flew in a helicopter back to London, and literally the next day, me and my now-wife went to Antigua on holiday and never looked back.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Tears for Fears are survived by their back catalog, particularly “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”—now a go-to track on classic rock and adult-contemporary radio as well as all-eighties stations—and “Mad World.” The latter was rejuvenated by Gary Jules’s mournful voice-and-piano rendition, which was recorded for Richard Kelly’s 2001 Donnie Darko. The movie’s leisurely gestating cult status helped the song become a hit in 2003, when it saw the year out as the U.K.’s most depressing Christmas number one of all time. “Mad World” continues to be covered, most memorably by Adam Lambert on American Idol and most recently by Susan Boyle. The Jules version has become a definitive soundtrack staple; whenever a crime show needs a bleak song to accompany the aftermath of a killing spree, “Mad World” is never far away. In 2004, Smith and Orzabal reunited for an album of new material, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, which has led to semi-regular Tears for Fears world tours and, according to Orzabal, another album of new material coming soon.

  SMITH: We didn’t talk to each other for 10 years. I moved to L.A. Eventually his manager called me out of the blue and asked if I’d be interested in doing another record with Roland. My initial reaction was “No way! Life’s too good!” But then I talked to my wife, and I thought, That’s kind of unfair. It’s been 10 years. I don’t even know what he’s like anymore. It’s unfair to judge someone on the person you left 10 years before. I’m not the person I was 10 years before.

  ORZABAL: Well, we didn’t have a manager at the time. It was a case of Curt had sent me a fax—I had to do something for him that involved a notary in Bath, some sort of business thing—and he thanked me and said, “Now you have my number; call me at some point.” So I called him. Once we spoke and I heard his mid-Atlantic accent, I realized that things had completely changed. We were a lot more grown up. But we’ve been back together for longer than we’ve been apart.

  “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.”

  SMITH: We met up in Bath. It wasn’t weird at all. I mean, it was weird for the first 10 minutes, but after that, it was fine. I was just about to have my first kid, and it became obvious that he’d mellowed considerably. In the first three albums there was definitely ego involved: You’re vying for your position and making sure you have 50 percent of the say. But it’s the balance of the two of us that brings out the sound that is Tears for Fears.

  ORZABAL: When we started playing together [again], we played one show, and Curt said, “Right, let’s switch positions on stage.” I had always been on the left, and he always on the right, and we switched over. It was like him saying, “This isn’t going to be like it was.”

  Does the title Everybody Loves a Happy Ending refer to our reunion? Yes, because it was a happy ending. Of all of the albums we’ve made together, I’d say Happy Ending is the only one that we really enjoyed [making]. We just had a blast. We’d grown up, no pressure from a manager, no pressure from a record company, no expectations, and just getting back together purely for the sake of seeing what we can do and to enhance your history.

  SMITH: “Mad World” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” have lasted because of the emotion. You see that in Gary Jules’s version of “Mad World” and in Adam Lambert’s. He sold it, and Gary did as well. It’s one of those lyrics you can get your teeth into. Although sometimes those songs are hard for us to do live because we’re not miserable adolescents anymore. We’re cranky old men.

  ORZABAL: In some ways, “Mad World” has been more successful as a cover version, especially the Michael Andrews–Gary Jules rerecord, which was never how I saw the song. I always saw it as an upbeat song. When they slowed it right down and made it heart-wrenching, the lyrics all of a sudden popped out at me, and I realized for the first time that they were pretty good lyrics. The first time I heard it, my friend had brought a copy of the Donnie Darko soundtrack from America and played it in the kitchen. My son at the time was six years old, and he started singing along to the lyrics: “Children waiting for the day they feel good / Happy birthday, happy birthday.” And it was like, Oh my God! Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a father instead of a child. When Curt and I first started, we had embraced Arthur Janov and primal scream therapy; our idea was to get rich, get famous, and get therapy. Having both come from difficult childhoods, it was very easy for us to sing from what I now call the woe-is-me area. Parents were to blame, the establishment was to blame, children were innocent. Of course, I don’t believe that now.

  I went through primal therapy in my mid-to late 20s, and when my first child was born, he came out, and it was like everything that I had believed was clearly not true. Because here was someone with a soul, with a character, already, at day one. So I don’t believe those things anymore. I don’t believe the child is a victim. I think the character of the child is predetermined.

  SMITH: We toured South America last year, two weeks in Brazil. Our audience was from 18 years old up to 45. The younger demographic, it’s all people discovering The Hurting now and relating to it because it’s what they’re going through. It means the same to those 18-year-olds as it did to us when we wrote it. I hear people saying, “Music’s not what it used to be,” and I’m like, “Yeah, it is. Don’t you remember back then?” The majority of the stuff we listened to sucked. What you take with you is the really good stuff. But there was a ton of shit in the eighties. For every one of us, there was a Flock of Seagulls.*

  * MIKE SCORE, A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS: The one word that springs to mind is jealousy. Maybe they didn’t see a band like us coming up beside them? Tears for Fears I don’t think wrote great songs; they were helped along by a brilliant producer, Chris Hughes. He took the little things that they had and turned them into absolute works of art, little bits of genius. Kind of like the Beatles wrote incredible songs, but I don’t think the Beatles would’ve been anything like they were if it hadn’t been for George Martin. I’m not going to slag Tears for Fears. Songs from the Big Chair was one of the best albums I’d ever heard. The Hurting was good too, but it just showed you where they could be. The thing is, where did they go after that, you know? I think they went kind of downhill. Like I said, I don’t want to slag them, because I really did enjoy their stuff, but Curt Smith may be living in a little fantasyland that Tears for Fears was something spectacular.

  “IF YOU LEAVE”

  Were they the coolest band in Liverpool? Perhaps not. Did audiences adopt their dress sense? No. Did they surpass their peers in terms of pretension, artiness, and absurdity? Again, no. But Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—who began life making chilly, remote, yearning music—ultimately racked up more hits than anyone else in their competitive city. Long before Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys found American success soundtracking Pretty in Pink’s climactic prom scene, they were European chart fixtures with songs about telegraphs, telescopes, and typewriters that sounded like songs about girls. Even when the duo caved and penned an actual love song, the blushing recipient was Joan of Arc.

  JB: I don’t believe there are Beatles people and Stones people and that the two are mutually exclusive. I do, however, think that there are OMD Phase 1 people and OMD Phase 2 people, and that those two parties have no truck with each other. OMD Phase 1 people came on board when they heard “Electricity” o
n John Peel. This was a song about electricity, but it was not bloodless or mock-robotic like so many records by bands who overidentified with the android lifestyle. OMD Phase 1 people were further rewarded with signature hits of the caliber of “Messages,” “Red Frame White Light” and “Enola Gay.” The Phase 1 constituency got a little uncomfortable when the rest of the U.K. muscled in on their territory and helped to make Architecture and Morality a blockbuster album. At least it was a weird blockbuster album. All the same, it was a relief for Phase 1 people when OMD released the difficult Dazzle Ships album and scared off all the dilettantes. Unfortunately, it scared off so many people that it ignited OMD Phase 2. Which is where I made my excuses and left. OMD Phase 2 wrote solid commercial songs, but I could get solid commercial songs anywhere. Still, even though I was a Phase 1 person, I was also an eighties teen-movie person—an eighties teen-movie person who wrote an eighties teen-movie guidebook called Pretty in Pink. So, in the case of “If You Leave,” which still packs an enormous amount of emotional impact (“I believed in you, I just didn’t believe in me. I love you … Always”), I’m an honorary OMD Phase 2 person.

  LM: By virtue of my being American, I’m a born OMD Phase 2 person. However, as much as I love “If You Leave”—I, too, am an eighties teen-movie person (“If you don’t go to him now, I’m never going to take you to another prom again, you hear me?”)—that song was merely the entry point for my OMD obsession. After seeing them open for Power Station, Thompson Twins, Psychedelic Furs, and Depeche Mode, not even McCluskey’s onstage jerky jig could prevent me from delving deeper into their back catalog. That’s when I became an honorary OMD Phase 1 person. Architecture and Morality is so original, so special, so sublime, that if there were no other new wave bands to speak of, the entire genre could still hang its hat solely on that record.

  ANDY McCLUSKEY: We’d had “Tesla Girls” in a John Hughes movie [Weird Science]. He was a huge Anglophile music lover. He’d had The Breakfast Club and “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, then he approached us and said, “I would like you to write a song for my new film [Pretty in Pink].” Our management and record company were over the moon. We went down to Paramount Studios and met him, Molly Ringwald, and Jon Cryer on set. They were kids, and they both said, “I love you.” Because even though we hadn’t had any hits in America, we had alternative and college radio station play. You could still be alternative in America and sell 100,000 records and be off everyone else’s radar. In L.A., KROQ were playing us, but we weren’t in the charts. Then John Hughes said, “Here’s the script. Write me a song for my big prom-scene ending.”

  So we did. We came back armed with our two-inch tape of this song we’d written, “Goddess of Love.” And John Hughes said, “There’s a bit of a problem. Since I last saw you, we finished the movie and did some test screenings, and the teenage girls didn’t like the ending.” The original ending had Andie and Duckie dancing together. “Goddess of Love” lyrically bore no relationship to the new ending of the movie. He said, “Can you write me another one?” We were about to start a tour with Thompson Twins in two days, but we went into Larrabee Studios in Hollywood. We had nothing—we just knew how the movie ended. We knew that the tempo had to be 120 beats per minute, because they’d filmed the new ending with a song that was 120. Although, when I saw the final version, I thought, Who the fuck edited this?, because nobody’s dancing to the beat.

  We worked till four in the morning, and we banged onto a cassette the rough demo, then called a motorcycle to take it to Paramount. We got a phone call at half-past eight the next morning from our manager saying, “John’s already in the office—he’s heard the cassette and he loves it. Can you finish it off?” We’d just gone to sleep. It was our day off. But we went back to the studio and finished it; then, after three weeks on tour with the Thompson Twins, we came back and mixed it. That’s how “If You Leave” was created—completely off the top of our heads in one day in Hollywood. It was bizarre that we managed to pull something like that out of the bag. If I knew how we did it, we would have done it more often.

  And there we were flying in on a Pan Am jet from London to come to the premiere of Pretty in Pink, and who’s on the plane with us? New Order! The guys from Joy Division who we supported during our first-ever gig eight years earlier in [Liverpool club] Eric’s! We’re all getting out of limos, off our faces, living the Hollywood lifestyle down the red carpet, all the famous people off the telly telling us how much they love our music. In eight years, the crazy journey we’d been on …

  At the same time I got my first bass guitar, I had my Eureka! moment: I heard “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk on the radio in the summer of ’75. That was when I went, Now this is interesting. And it’s different. I’m inspired! I might be able to do something like this! Then I got their Radio Activity album. I bought the vinyl import, and Paul had a stereo because he’d built one. I only had my mother’s mono Dansette. Radio Activity became our bible. I was 16, he was 15, and we were listening to this record, going, “They’ve used a Geiger counter, and chopped-up recordings of people speaking, interfering radio noises. We can do that!”

  Paul knew a bit about electronics. He used to make things that made noises that didn’t even have keyboards attached so we couldn’t play melodies. It was just noises and ambient weirdness. Finally we got a cheap Vox Jaguar keyboard and a Selmer Pianotron—I’ve only ever seen one—from a combination of part-time jobs and a lot of dole money. We wrote songs for almost three years in Paul’s mother’s back room on Saturday afternoons when she was at work. Our friends thought they were shit. It was just a little art project of weirdness inspired by German music. We had to invent our own way of doing things that wasn’t necessarily conventional. In hindsight, that is what led to people having to invent a way of songwriting that ended up being much more creative than just sitting at a computer trying to copy someone else.

  Paul and I had thought we were the only people in England listening to Kraftwerk, Neu!, some other German bands—all the stuff we’d been listening to since 1975. It turns out we weren’t. We were in Eric’s in 1978, and the DJ played “Warm Leatherette,” and we went, “Holy shit! Somebody’s been listening to what we’ve been listening to, and they’ve made a record, and it sounds great!” We went to have a chat with Roger [Eagle] and Pete [Fulwell], who ran the place. We said, “Hi, we’re Andy and Paul. For years we’ve been writing these songs…. Could we play your club with just us and a tape recorder?” And they said, “Sure. We’ll book you in for a Thursday night in October.” If Eric’s hadn’t existed, we would never have thought of starting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

  There was a conscious thing going on. Young people of an artistic nature who gravitated toward the idea of making music as their chosen art form wanted to establish the fact that they were doing something different. Whether you were influenced by punk or art or electronic music, there was this absolute determination you were going to do something different. The name of your band was part of that. We consciously chose a preposterous name. We were only going to do one concert, and because it was a mad idea—a new wave club, two guys, one playing upside-down bass, keyboards, tape recorder—we thought, We’ll give ourselves a weird name so that people will know we’re not rock or punk. My bedroom wall was my notebook, much to my mother’s chagrin. There were song titles and poems and all sorts of stuff on there. So we consulted the wall and came up with the most preposterous title we could think of. It was my idea. “Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark” was the title of a song we never wrote. There were a lot of other things on that wall, and it certainly could have been very different, because right underneath “Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark” was “Margaret Thatcher’s Afterbirth.”

  We were not cool. Paul and I were very much the outsiders. Our hair was longer than most people’s in Liverpool. We were from the other side of the river and still lived with our parents; we didn’t live in bedsits. We didn’t know all the cool people. The Bunnymen and
the Teardrops signed to Zoo Records, and they didn’t want to sign us. [Zoo Records boss] Dave Balfe to this day says it was the worst mistake he ever made.

  “We were not cool. Paul and I were very much the outsiders. Our hair was longer than most people’s in Liverpool. We were from the other side of the river and still lived with our parents.”

  So we did our one gig at Eric’s supporting another band. There were 30 people there, and most of them were our friends and family, and even then the response was [slow hand clap]. Afterwards, Roger and Pete said, “That was interesting. Would you like to do another gig, because the guys that you supported tonight have come over from our friend’s place in Manchester.” We’d just supported Joy Division. So even though we’d only planned on doing the one gig, we decided to make it two. We went to Manchester and played at the Russell Club, which was called the Factory that night. We supported Cabaret Voltaire and met Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, and Peter Saville. We cheekily sent Tony a cassette with two tracks, “Electricity” and “Almost,” the next week because he used to present Granada Reports and sometimes they had bands on. We said, “Hey, we met you last week. Could we get on the telly?” Cheeky bastards. He was like, “We’ve come to the end of the season, but we’re starting a record label called Factory. Do you want to make a record?” So we went from one gig to a second gig to “Do you want to make a record?”

  I didn’t know this at the time, but I later found out he left our cassette in his car, and it was his then-wife Lindsay who wanted to know what was on it. He said, “Some fellows from Liverpool. Two Scouse scallywags pretending to be Kraftwerk.” She thought it was great and told him to listen to it again. By the time he finally called us, his wife and Peter Saville had talked to him, and he’d gone from not liking it to saying, “You guys are the future of pop music.” To which we replied, “Fuck off, we’re experimental. Don’t call us pop.”